Ranking for KTH
KTH performs consistently well in all various international university rankings that span different areas from research, education and sustainability.
What are university rankings?
They are lists that aim to assess the performance of universities in specific areas. Several organizations produce these rankings based on various methods and criteria such as student experience, internationalization, research output, or academic reputation. They are intended to provide an indication of the overall quality of universities, but several fields and specific subjects are additionally ranked.
None of these ranking tables can give the full picture of a university and the results can greatly vary between them, especially in regard to parameter choices. Anyway, they have been shown to influence student choices and institutional selection. This page presents the international rankings considered the most reliable and important internationally.
QS World University and Sustainability Rankings
Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) is a for-profit provider with headquarters in London that has been publishing the QS World University Rankings since 2004.
KTH was ranked 78th among more than 1,500 universities worldwide in the 2026 QS World University Rankings released in June 2025. Nearly unchanged from the previous year, QS places KTH 12th among universities in the European Union and the second best in Sweden. KTH’s highest scores were awarded for sustainability, proportion of international faculty, international research network, and citation rate.
KTH is also ranked as the 53rd best university in the world for addressing environmental, social and governance issues, according to the third edition of the QS Sustainability Rankings. This is the best result for KTH in this ranking, which ranges 2022 universities in 2025.
THE World University Rankings and THE Impact Rankings
They are annually published by the Times Higher Education (THE) magazine. Till 2009, the publisher collaborated with QS to publish joint rankings. Successively, they introduced a new ranking system with, initially, Thomson Reuters and Elsevier from 2014.
KTH is 98th in the world out of 2191 listed universities in the Times Higher Education World University Ranking 2026. The global position is slightly worse than the previous edition: 95th out of 2092 institutions. KTH is ranked as the third university in Sweden, after Karolinska Institutet and Lunds universitet. Among the many indicators, KTH has a perfect score in patents with a better value than last year and slightly better international co-authorship (which is generated by dividing the total subject-weighted number of publications with at least one international co-author by the total subject-weighted number of publications). Much better proportion of international staff.
Other rankings
Several other rankings are published annually. Among these is the Shanghai ranking – Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) – which is published annually and was the first international ranking ever published. Universities are ranked there based on several academic and/or research performance indicators, including alumni and staff who have won Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, highly cited researchers, articles published in Nature and Science, articles indexed in major citation indexes and an institution's academic performance per capita. In the global ranking of academic subjects published in parallel with the ARWU ranking, KTH performs very well: 29 subjects were listed, and 10 among the top 100 and four among the top 50. Mechanical engineering is in 27th place, automation and control in 29th place, robotics in 37th place and mathematics in 44th place.
Another relatively new ranking is the CWTS Leiden Ranking Open Edition , which was launched in 20204 and provides bibliometric indicators based on the OpenAlex database. The 2025 version includes over 2800 universities worldwide. Indicators are grouped into three categories (scientific impact, collaboration and open access) and can be selected to compare different institutions. For example, KTH published 11 232 open access publications during the period 2020–2023, which represents 80.1% of the total number of publications, compared to 76.5% in the previous edition.
Read more about KTH's vision and overall , and why you should choose KTH as your place of study or as your job place .