About this chart race
Germany and France traded the lead for the first quarter-century of the Nobel Prize, swapping places eight times between 1901 and 1925. Germany then held the top spot alone for more than twenty years - the era of Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg and Hahn - before the United States passed it in 1949 and never looked back. By 2025 the United States has 300 prizes, more than the United Kingdom (112), Germany (84) and France (64) combined.
No Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1940, 1941 or 1942 because of the Second World War, which is why every line runs flat through those three years.
How this is counted: each prize is credited to the laureate's country of BIRTH, using present-day borders - so a laureate born in Breslau in 1900 counts for Poland rather than Germany. This is deliberately different from the usual 'Nobel laureates by country' lists, which credit the country a laureate was living or working in when they won. Counting by birth country shows where talent comes from rather than where it ends up, and it is why the figure for the United States here (300) is well below the roughly 420 that is often quoted. A prize shared by two or three people counts once for each laureate's birth country. The 28 prizes awarded to organisations, such as the Red Cross and the UN refugee agency, are excluded, because an organisation has no country of birth. Three laureates have no birthplace recorded at nobelprize.org - Abdulrazak Gurnah, James A. Robinson and John M. Martinis - and were assigned from documented biography to Tanzania, the United Kingdom and the United States respectively.
This animated ranking shows how cumulative nobel prizes, by laureate's country of birth changed across 15 series between 1901 and 2025. The bars re-order themselves as the years advance, so overtakes are visible as they happen rather than hidden inside a table. Use the list on the left to choose exactly who competes, drag the slider to jump to any year, or open the table view to read the underlying numbers.
As of 2025, United States leads with 300.
Included in this race
United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden, Japan, Russia, Poland, Canada, Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, Denmark.
Source
Data from Nobel Prize Outreach AB. Every figure shown comes from this source — nothing is estimated or generated.
You can browse every chart race, embed this one on your own site, or download it as a video to share.