Vehicles conduct mandatory lane changes to merge into the open lanes in temporary highway work zones, and the merging characteristics have been widely studied over the past decades. Unlike research on other traffic facilities, the data and scenarios of highway work zones are often lacking and monotonous. This study presented a vehicle trajectory dataset in highway work zones. The dataset contains ten work zone sites and three different layouts. After transforming raw videos into high-resolution trajectories, we selected eight areas and divided them into three scenarios to investigate the merging characteristics in highway work zones with different traffic states and layouts. In work zones with varying traffic conditions, we found opposite merging locations and lane speed distribution trends. In work zones with varying layouts, we found different merging location distributions, lane speed distributions, and impacts on the following vehicle’s speed. The relationship between the gap and merge speed was consistent with previous studies.