Understanding the relationship between tropical cyclone (TC) precipitation and sea surface temperature (SST) is essential for both TC hazard forecasting and projecting how these hazards will change in the future due to climate change. This work untangles how TC precipitation is impacted by present-day SST variability (known as the apparent scaling) and by long-term changes in SST caused by climate change (known as the climate scaling). A variety of datasets are used including precipitation observations from the IMERG satellite product, SST observations from the NOAA OISST dataset, climate model simulations forced with observed SSTs and projections of future SSTs, and idealized radiative convective equilibrium model simulations. After confirming that the SST environments and intensities of the TCs across the datasets are similar, we compare the precipitation responses to SST change for each dataset. The radial mean structure of TC precipitation is similar, but the response of TC precipitation to warming is not radially-uniform and varies across the datasets. The apparent scaling rates depend on precipitation metric and range between 6.1 and 9.5% per K for the 99th percentile TC precipitation within r8 (a measure of the outer size of the storm) and 5.9 and 9.8% per K for the mean precipitation within 1° from the TC center. The climate scaling is estimated at about 5% per K, which is slightly less than the expected scaling based on thermodynamic principles of about 7% per K. Results are discussed in the context of other studies on future projections of TC precipitation.