Cambridge is one of only three universities, and the only UK university, to rank in the top ten for every subject in the latest Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings by Subject, released earlier this week.

The University was also ranked best in the world for psychology, overtaking Stanford, which took the top spot in 2025.

Only Cambridge, Harvard, and Stanford ranked in the top ten for all 11 subject areas, with Cambridge making improvements on the previous year in several subjects. Cambridge also achieved this title last year.

The THE subject rankings are published at the beginning of every year. A university’s performance in each subject area is assessed based on 18 different performance indicators, including student to staff ratio, the university’s research productivity, and its institutional income. The weighting of each factor varies according to subject – less weight is given to paper citations in arts and humanities, for example, compared to engineering.

The criteria cover five “core pillars”: teaching, research environment, research quality, industry, and international outlook. The previous five years of a university’s research output is considered: for the 2026 rankings, the years 2020-2024 were accounted for.

Cambridge ranked in the top seven for every subject, seeing improvements in law, medicine, physical sciences, and most notably psychology, where it is now ranked first in the world. It placed second for medicine, and third for law. Despite dropping one place compared to last year in arts and humanities, business and economics, engineering, and social sciences, the University was able to remain in the top ten in all areas.

First place in every subject area remains entirely dominated by UK and US universities, with Cambridge and Oxford ranking first in three subjects between them. Oxford placed first in computer science and medicine.

UK universities’ share of the top ten spots declined from last year, from 31 top ten rankings across all subject areas to 29, while the US improved slightly from 67 to 68. This was accompanied by significant improvements for Asian universities, in particular Peking and Tsinghua universities in China, and the National University of Singapore.

This comes as part of a broader shift in higher education that has seen overseas universities make marked improvements in world rankings year-on-year. Philip Altbach, professor emeritus at Boston College’s Centre for International Higher Education, said of the change: “Global higher education is becoming more multipolar with the domination of Western Europe and North America to some extent weakening, and this is a good thing for higher education.”

THE also publishes an annual World University Ranking, which uses broadly the same methodology as its subject ranking. This year, Cambridge placed joint third with Princeton, with a score of 97.2 out of 100, behind the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in second place and Oxford in first place for the tenth year running.