Thawing of permanently frozen ground (permafrost) has increased in recent decades with negative implications for human and non-human adaptation to climate change. Impacts include reduced ground stability, increased transportation risk, and changes in water availability. Direct measurements of permafrost active layer thickness (the depth of thawed ground overlying permafrost) are sparse. Measurements currently exist for a few hundred sites located primarily in the Northern Hemisphere supported by the Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring (CALM) Program. The sparsity of direct active layer thickness measurements limits broad-scale understanding of changes in permafrost thaw and confidence in future projections. To address the sparsity of direct active layer thickness measurements, we developed a method to estimate active layer thickness change from streamflow measurements, which integrate processes over broad spatial areas and are more common than point-scale active layer thickness measurements. The method uses classical principles of hydraulic groundwater theory and nonlinear baseflow recession analysis, which sets it apart from prior methods based on linear recession analysis. The method is applied to catchments in the continuous and discontinuous permafrost zone of the North American Arctic containing co-located streamflow and CALM active layer thickness measurements. We find good agreement in the magnitude and direction of measured and predicted active layer thickness trends. This suggests that regional-scale estimates of active layer thickness change can be obtained from streamflow measurements, which may open the door to retrospective estimation of active layer thickness change in data sparse Arctic regions with short, sporadic, or even nonexistent ground-based active layer measurements.