Countries With the Most Nobel Prizes, and How They’re Counted

Counted by the countries the Nobel Foundation links to each winner, the United States has the most Nobel Prize laureates, 425, followed by the United Kingdom with 144 and Germany with 116, according to Wikipedia's list of Nobel laureates by country as updated for the 2025 prizes. France (78), Sweden (34), Japan (33), Russia and the Soviet Union (30), Canada (29), Switzerland (27) and Austria (25) complete the top ten. The American lead is enormous, but it rests on a counting rule that credits a laureate to every country connected with them, so the same person can appear under two or three flags.

What the Nobel count by country actually measures

There is no official medal table for the Nobel Prizes. The Nobel Foundation awards prizes to people and, for the Peace Prize, to organisations, not to nations. Any ranking of countries is therefore built by someone deciding how to attach each laureate to a place, and there are at least three ways to do it: by country of birth, by citizenship at the time of the award, or by the university or institute where the prize-winning work was done. Each produces a different table.

The list used here takes the broadest approach. It files every laureate under each country that the Nobel Foundation's own website mentions in connection with them, whether as birthplace, nationality or affiliation, and marks with an asterisk the entries where a country appears only as the place of birth. It also counts people rather than prizes, and it does not distinguish between a laureate who won a prize outright and one of three sharing it. That is why the headline figure for the United States is written as 425 laureates holding 428 prizes: John Bardeen won physics twice, K. Barry Sharpless won chemistry twice and Linus Pauling won chemistry and then peace. Britain's 144 laureates hold 145 prizes because Frederick Sanger won the chemistry prize in 1958 and again in 1980.

The effect of this method is clearest with emigrants. Albert Einstein, who won the 1921 physics prize, appears under both Germany and Switzerland. Geoffrey Hinton, who shared the 2024 physics prize, is listed under both the United Kingdom and Canada. Svante Pääbo, the 2022 laureate in physiology or medicine, is counted for Sweden, where he was born, and for Germany, where he did his work. In 2016 the four US-based laureates in physics, chemistry and economics, Oliver Hart, Duncan Haldane, Fraser Stoddart and Michael Kosterlitz, were all British-born, so each of them adds one to both the American and the British totals.

Two more choices shape the numbers. The Prize in Economic Sciences was not in Alfred Nobel's will; Sveriges Riksbank, Sweden's central bank, created it in 1968 and it was first awarded in 1969, but almost every ranking includes it, and it adds 76 entries to the American total alone. And the date matters, because the list grows every October. Nobel signed his will in Paris on 27 November 1895, the first prizes were awarded in 1901, and the figures in this article include the 2025 laureates but not those to be announced in October 2026. A table built strictly on birthplace would shrink the American lead considerably, since 118 of the 425 American entries are laureates born in another country.

The 2025 ranking: from the United States to Austria

With the method understood, here is the top ten as it stands after the 2025 prizes.

Because laureates are shared between countries, the column cannot be added up to a world total. The Nobel Foundation's own count is that, between 1901 and the most recent awards, the six prizes have gone to more than 1,000 people and organisations, with five individuals and two organisations honoured more than once.

Why the United States pulled so far ahead after 1945

For the first four decades of the prizes, the United States was not the leader. Counting the list's entries by year of award, roughly 28 American laureates were honoured before 1945, fewer than Britain's 31 and well behind Germany's 47, which dominated physics and chemistry in the era of Wilhelm Röntgen, the first physics laureate in 1901. The balance flipped after the Second World War. About 397 of the 425 American entries date from 1945 onwards, and around 170 from 2000 onwards.

Part of the shift was migration. Scientists who left Nazi Germany and occupied Europe in the 1930s strengthened British and American universities, and the list shows the trail: Rainer Weiss (physics, 2017), Arno Penzias (physics, 1978), Jack Steinberger (physics, 1988) and Henry Kissinger (peace, 1973) were all born in Germany and are counted there by birthplace as well as under the United States. Part of it was money and scale. American research universities and federal science funding grew enormously after 1945, and the US total now leads every category: 117 entries in physiology or medicine, 106 in physics, 89 in chemistry and 76 in economics, though only 14 in literature, the same number as Britain.

Britain's second place owes a great deal to a handful of institutions. The Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, opened in 1874 with James Clerk Maxwell as its first professor, had produced 30 Nobel laureates by 2019, and its researchers discovered the electron and the neutron and worked out the structure of DNA. Recent British winners include Demis Hassabis (chemistry, 2024) and, in 2025, John Clarke in physics and Richard Robson in chemistry.

Germany and France, third and fourth, tell a different story. Germany's pre-war lead in the sciences never fully recovered after the 1930s, and about 70 of its 116 laureates date from 1945 onwards, a steady rather than spectacular pace that includes Reinhard Genzel (physics, 2020), Klaus Hasselmann and Benjamin List (physics and chemistry, 2021) and the Hungarian-born Ferenc Krausz (physics, 2023). France is the leading country whose strength lies most in literature: 17 of its 78 laureates are writers, one fewer than in physics (18) and more literature laureates than any other country on the list, running from Frédéric Mistral in 1904 through Anatole France, André Gide, Albert Camus (born in French Algeria) and Jean-Paul Sartre, who declined the 1964 prize, to Patrick Modiano in 2014 and Annie Ernaux in 2022. France also shares its most celebrated laureate. Marie Curie, born in Warsaw when it was part of the Russian Empire, won the physics prize in 1903 with her husband Pierre and the chemistry prize alone in 1911, and she is counted under both France and Poland; her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie and son-in-law Frédéric Joliot-Curie added a chemistry prize for France in 1935.

Sweden, Japan and Switzerland: the rest of the top ten

Sweden's fifth place, with 34 laureates, looks like home advantage, and the prizes are indeed Swedish institutions: the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences chooses physics, chemistry and economics, the Karolinska Institutet chooses physiology or medicine, and the Swedish Academy chooses literature, while the Peace Prize is chosen in Norway by a five-member committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament. Yet the Swedish tally is spread across every field, from Svante Arrhenius (chemistry, 1903) and Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win the literature prize (1909), to Dag Hammarskjöld (peace, 1961, awarded posthumously) and Tomas Tranströmer (literature, 2011). For a country of just over 10 million people, that is a high rate. The Swedish link runs through several of our pages, including the famous people from Sweden.

Japan is the fastest riser. It had no laureates at all until Hideki Yukawa won the 1949 physics prize for predicting the meson, and 24 of its 33 laureates have been honoured since 2000, among them Shinya Yamanaka (medicine, 2012), the three blue LED physicists of 2014 and, in 2025, Susumu Kitagawa in chemistry and Shimon Sakaguchi in medicine.

Russia and the Soviet Union share a combined 30, including Boris Pasternak, who was forced to decline the 1958 literature prize, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (literature, 1970). Canada's 29 include Donna Strickland (physics, 2018) and the economists David Card (2021) and Peter Howitt (2025). Switzerland and Austria, with 27 and 25, show how the counting rule favours small, highly connected countries: Einstein counts for Switzerland, and Austria's entries run from Bertha von Suttner (peace, 1905) and Erwin Schrödinger (physics, 1933) to Anton Zeilinger (physics, 2022). Just outside the top ten, the Netherlands has 22 and Italy 21.

Measured per head, the ranking changes shape entirely. Saint Lucia, an island of about 184,000 people, has two laureates, the economist W. Arthur Lewis (1979) and the poet Derek Walcott (1992), and the Faroe Islands have one. The broader German story, from Röntgen to the physicists who emigrated in the 1930s, is told through its people in famous people from Germany, and the city where most of the prizes are handed over each December is profiled in our guide to Stockholm, Sweden’s capital.