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CURRENT RANKINGS & ACHIEVEMENTS
UK league table rankings
- 17th in The Times The Sunday Times Good University Guide 2026
- 17th in The Complete University Guide 2025
- 20th in The Guardian University Guide 2026
- 4th in The Times University Guide 2026 for Electrical and Electronic Engineering
- 2nd in The Complete University Guide 2026 for Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering
- 8th in The Times University Guide 2026 for Mechanical Engineering
- 14th in The Complete University Guide 2026 for Computer Science
- These rankings make us the Top UK University in Malaysia.
International league table rankings
- 87th in the QS World University Rankings (2026)
- 129th in the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings 2026 and 11th among UK universities listed. Explore the full World University Rankings and UK Best Universities
- 11th in Times Higher Education's (THE) 'Golden Age' universities 2020 - the top 200 institutions founded as universities between 1945 and 1967. Southampton is second among the UK universities featured. Learn more at timeshighereducation.com
Student satisfaction
The National Student Survey (NSS) gathers feedback from mainly final-year undergraduates about their time in UK universities. Highlights from the NSS 2020 results include:
- 84.7% of our students were satisfied with the overall quality of their course
- 84.5% of our students were satisfied with the teaching on their course
- 85.8% of our students were satisfied with the learning resources provided by the University
- 89.3% of our students agreed that staff were good at explaining things
- 87.7% of our students agreed that their course was intellectually stimulating
Research and innovation excellence
We are a research-intensive university, with continued substantial growth in research funding and seventh in the UK for the total value of The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grants. We are also a founding partner of SETsquared, the university business incubator ranked number one in the world by UBI Global.
According to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021:
- 92 per cent of our research is world leading or internationally excellent, which assessed the quality of research in UK higher education institutions
- we are in the top 10 per cent of UK universities and fourth in the Russell Group for impact demonstrating the real-world benefit of our research
- over 97 per cent of our research environment is world-leading or internationally excellent