Precipitation is a fundamental characteristic of the Earth’s hydrological cycle, and the impact of precipitation depends on its intensity and frequency distribution characteristics. This study presents a framework for quantifying precipitation distributions at regional scales. We employ the IPCC AR6 climate reference regions over land and propose refinements to the oceanic regions based on the homogeneity of precipitation distribution characteristics. The homogeneous regions are identified as heavy, moderate, and light precipitating areas by k-means clustering of IMERG precipitation frequency and amount distributions. With the global domain partitioned into 62 regions, including 46 land and 16 ocean regions, we apply 10 established precipitation distribution metrics mainly based on precipitation amount, frequency, and cumulative distributions. The collection includes metrics focused on the maximum peak, lower 10^th percentile, and upper 90^th percentile in amount and frequency distributions, the similarity between observed and modeled frequency distributions, a distribution unevenness measure, daily precipitating intensity, and annual precipitating days. We apply our framework to 25 CMIP5, 41 CMIP6 models, and 6 observation-based products of daily precipitation. Our results indicate that many CMIP 5 and 6 models substantially overestimate the observed light precipitation amount and frequency as well as annual precipitating days, especially over mid-latitude regions outside of some land regions including North America. Unevenness is more severely underestimated in most models and regions globally. Improvement from CMIP 5 to 6 is shown in some regions, especially in mid-latitude regions, but it is not evident globally, and over the tropics precipitation distribution quality exhibits overall degradation.