Time magazine ranks University of Auckland in top 100 in world

Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland has ranked 86th in the world in Time magazine’s inaugural World's Top Universities of 2026.

The result aligns closely with the University’s performance in other major global rankings, including its 65th placing in the 2026 QS World University Rankings, reinforcing its position among the world’s leading universities.

Time used quantitative data through a company called Statista R to analyse academic capacity and performance (60 percent of the weighting), innovation and economic impact (30 percent), and global engagement (10 percent). It also integrated measures of societal and economic impact and the international reach of institutions. The methodology also emphasised the degree to which students achieve extraordinary success, for example in patenting new inventions or rising to leadership roles in business.

Whether a university had real-world innovation was important and for this the University of Auckland scored well, at 67.63 percent. It scored 62.84 percent for academic capacity and performance and 57.4 for global engagement, leading to a total score of 63.73.

Professor Rod McNaughton (Academic Director of the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship) notes that the innovation score is significant.

“The real significance of this ranking lies not in the headline position, but in what it reveals about New Zealand’s innovation capability.

“With the TIME-Statista framework separating academic capacity from innovation and economic impact, it shifts the focus away from research volume alone and towards a more demanding question: how effectively does a university translate knowledge into value beyond the campus?

“On this measure, and with an innovation and economic impact score of 67.6, the University of Auckland would rank about 20 places higher if universities were ranked solely on innovation. It sits in a similar innovation-impact band to institutions such as the University of Sydney, Boston University, and the University of Manchester.”

Clarivate’s list of highly cited researchers was used to determine the share of a university’s faculty that was represented among the top researchers, and citation data was also incorporated to make the academic and capacity score.

The University of Auckland’s 86th position made it the only New Zealand University in the top 100, with Otago at 155, Canterbury at 258 and Victoria at 260.

Vice-Chancellor Professor Dawn Freshwater says the ranking highlights the University’s global impact.

“This result reflects the University of Auckland’s growing international recognition for the strength of its academic and research activity, and its ability to translate that strength into innovation and economic impact.”

The top ten universities in order were Oxford, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Harvard, Cambridge, Imperial College London, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Read more at Time.