The University of Navarra is the fourth-ranked university in Spain according to the latest Times Higher Education (THE) global ranking. For this ranking of the world university system, the University is also second in the country in international outreach (where it has risen by 2.1 percent), as well as third in income from research from private sources. It is also fourth in Spain for its research environment, out of the 60 universities in the country included in the latest edition of THE's ranking. 

The University maintains its first place as a non-state university in Spain, given that the top three Spanish universities are public centers: the University of Barcelona, Pompeu Fabra University and the Autonomous University of Barcelona. More than 1,904 universities from 108 countries are ranked in this edition -out of more than 2,670 analyzed-, among which the University of Navarra is in the 300-350th position.  

This year the ranking had a new methodology, expanding the issue of indicators used from 15 to 18, which are grouped into 5 areas: teaching, environment of research, quality of research, international outreach and industry revenues. To carry out the ranking of universities, THE has employee information from more than 62,000 interviews with academics, as well as data bibliometrics from the academic database Elsevier, reaching 16.5 million articles and more than 134 million citations from the last five years. In this edition, THE World University Rankings also included a large number of data provided by academic centers, some 411,000 different data .