Abstract The runoff monitoring and flood frequency studies are paramount in semi-natural catchments, which provide valuable information on the water resource availability and the possibility of extreme hydrological events. This study attempts to address the trends of runoff and future flood frequency estimates of the Jhelum River, India for the three runoff gauging stations. The non-parametric Mann–Kendall trend test and Theil–Sen estimator were employed to evaluate the trends and corresponding slopes of monthly and annual runoff. The river runoff and rainfall were subjected to breakpoint analysis. The average rainfall displays two break points from low to high and high to low during 1982 to 1985 and 1998 to 2001 respectively. However, the average runoff shows only one structural break from high to low from 1995 to 2001. Moreover, the river runoff has been categorized into wet and dry flows based on the Stream-flow Drought Index (SDI). The wet flows were analyzed for severity, duration, and return period by employing a trivariate copula. In addition, the flood frequency has been carried out and the future flood estimates were projected based on three probability distribution approaches: Gumbel’s distribution, Log-Pearson type III distribution, and extreme value distribution. The annual peak discharge series of the selected stations have been employed to carry out the flood frequency analysis. Based on the goodness-of-fit test, all three approaches were able to project future flood discharge. However, the Log-Pearson distribution was found to be a more significant approach based on the test statistics.
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