The Planck Catalogue of Compact Sources (PCCS) is the catalogue of sources detected in the first 15 months of Planck operations, the nominal mission. It consists of nine single-frequency catalogues of compact sources, both Galactic and extragalactic, detected over the entire sky. The PCCS covers the frequency range 30--857,GHz with higher sensitivity (it is 90% complete at 180 mJy in the best channel) and better angular resolution (from ~33 to ~5) than previous all-sky surveys in this frequency band. By construction its reliability is >80% and more than 65% of the sources have been detected at least in two contiguous Planck channels. In this paper we present the construction and validation of the PCCS, its contents and its statistical characterization.