Nvidia ranks No. 1 on TIME’s 2026 World’s Best Companies list for the second year running

Nvidia has held onto the top spot on TIME and Statista’s annual World’s Best Companies ranking, earning a score of 97.51 out of 100 in the 2026 edition. That makes back-to-back years at No. 1 for the Santa Clara chipmaker, which scored 97.62 in the 2025 ranking.

The list, now in its fourth year, evaluates 1,000 companies across three equally weighted pillars: employee satisfaction, three-year revenue growth, and sustainability transparency. Data comes from surveys of more than 200,000 employees worldwide.

Who else made the cut

The top five reads like a cross-section of industries doing something right at scale. Cigna came in second with a score of 94.37, Apple returned to the upper tier at No. 3 with 93.16, Meta Platforms claimed fourth, and AstraZeneca rounded out the top five.

Apple’s rebound is worth noting. The company slipped in the 2025 rankings, and its sustainability transparency rank sits at 24 this year. Yet its scores across the other two pillars were strong enough to bring it back to third place overall.

Microsoft landed at No. 6, and AMD secured the tenth spot.

What the methodology actually measures

Employee satisfaction captures how workers feel about their company. Revenue growth over three years captures financial trajectory. Sustainability transparency captures how openly a company communicates about its environmental and governance practices, not necessarily how sustainable it actually is.

A company can score well on sustainability transparency by publishing detailed disclosures without those disclosures revealing particularly green operations. Apple’s ranking of 24th on that specific pillar, despite finishing third overall, illustrates how the composite score can smooth over individual category weaknesses.

Nvidia’s near-perfect composite score of 97.51 suggests it performed consistently across all three pillars rather than dominating one while stumbling in another.

The top of the list skews heavily toward US-based firms. Cigna is a US health insurer, Apple and Meta are Silicon Valley fixtures, Microsoft is in Redmond, and Nvidia is in Santa Clara. AstraZeneca, the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical giant, is the notable exception in the top five.

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