Worm gears have a wide range of applications. Monitoring the gears is highly essential to maintain sustainable operation. Vibration, wear and sound signal analysis have been implemented in several research studies. However, it is many a times difficult to implement these techniques in practical working environments. This research aims to address the analysis on worm gears under different loading and oil level conditions using temperature signals acquired during the experimental studies. An experimental setup was developed which consists of a worm gearbox coupled with a DC motor using flange coupling and rigidly mounted on test bed. Multiple experiments were conducted for varying speeds, loads and oil levels. Temperature signals were collected for the healthy and faulty gearbox setup using J-type thermocouple. The temperature variation observed has been presented for all experimental studies. The technique can further be applied for online fault detection of worm gearbox where incorporation of other techniques solely proves unbeneficial. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019.