The Power Index

The 10 Countries With the Most Nobel Laureates per Capita

Since 1901, 990 individuals have won a Nobel Prize. The United States dominates the absolute count with more than 400 laureates. Adjust for population and the list flips. A Caribbean island of 180,000 people sits alone at the top.

Source: NobelPrize.org laureate database, as of October 2025. Population from UN DESA World Population Prospects 2024. Per million = laureates ÷ population in millions.

Saint Lucia has 180,000 people. It is smaller than Tallahassee, Florida. It has two Nobel laureates: Sir Arthur Lewis, who won the Prize in Economics in 1979, and Sir Derek Walcott, who won in Literature in 1992. That gives the island a rate of 11.11 per million — more than three times the rate of second-place Sweden.

The gap between #1 and #2 is the chart's real story. Saint Lucia's bar fills the entire width. Sweden, home of the Nobel Prize itself, barely reaches a third. The United States, which holds the largest absolute count with more than 400 laureates, doesn't even make the top 10 per capita. It sits at 1.26 per million, behind Germany.

Three of the top seven are Nordic countries. Sweden, Iceland, and Norway occupy ranks two, six, and seven (with Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Austria between them). The Nordics have a combined population of about 27 million — smaller than Texas — and more laureates than Japan, China, and India combined.

Small, wealthy, stable countries with old research universities dominate this list. Switzerland has ETH Zurich. Sweden has the Karolinska Institute and Uppsala. Austria has the University of Vienna, associated with more than a dozen laureates. Hungary's scientific golden age — the generation of Wigner, Teller, and von Neumann — still carries its numbers.

The bottom of the comparison row is telling. India has 10 laureates for 1.4 billion people: one per every 140 million. China has twelve. The Nobel Prize has always had a European center of gravity, and the per-capita lens makes that tilt undeniable. Nine of the top ten are European.

Israel, just outside the top ten, reflects decades of investment in research institutions like the Weizmann Institute and the Technion. Fourteen laureates from a country of 9.5 million is disproportionate — but entirely consistent with the share of GDP the country spends on R&D, which is among the highest in the world.

2

Nobel laureates from Saint Lucia — enough to make a country of 180,000 the world leader per capita.

8.8×

Saint Lucia's per-capita rate compared with the United States, which leads the world in total laureates.

3 of 7

Top-seven slots held by Nordic countries — Sweden, Iceland, and Norway — with a combined population under 17 million.

140 million

People per Nobel laureate in India. In Saint Lucia, the ratio is one laureate for every 90,000 people.

990

Individual Nobel laureates awarded between 1901 and 2025 — across physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, peace, and economics.

The 2026 Nobel Prizes will be announced in October, three months from now. One new laureate from a small country could reshape this list overnight. If a second Icelander wins, the island jumps to 5.13 per million and leaps past Sweden into second place. Hungary gained a spot in 2025 when László Krasznahorkai won the Literature Prize. The per-capita lens makes every small-country laureate a seismic event. We'll be watching.

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