Nobel Announcement Week: What to Watch Starting Monday

Some of the most important phone calls in science go out next week. The announcement week opens on Monday, October 5, 2026, when the medicine prize kicks off six announcements spread over eight days. Here is your complete guide to Nobel Announcement Week, with the full schedule, the bigger cash award, and who the prediction markets are watching.

This year's round lands in a milestone year: the first prizes were awarded in 1901, and the Foundation is marking the anniversary with a larger payout. Every announcement streams live on the Nobel Prize's own channels, so you can watch the names being read out in real time from anywhere in the world.

When each prize is announced

The six announcements arrive one a day, with a weekend pause in the middle. Every time except the peace prize carries the Foundation's standard "at the earliest" qualifier, meaning committees can run late. The schedule below follows a countdown that re-verified the dates against NobelPrize.org in late September.

• Monday, October 5, 2026 — Medicine, 11:30 CEST (5:30 a.m. ET): the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Solna starts the week.
• Tuesday, October 6, 2026 — Physics, 11:45 CEST (5:45 a.m. ET): the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
• Wednesday, October 7, 2026 — Chemistry, 11:45 CEST (5:45 a.m. ET): the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences again.
• Thursday, October 8, 2026 — Literature, 13:00 CEST (7:00 a.m. ET): the Swedish Academy, the most civilized hour for American viewers.
• Friday, October 9, 2026 — Peace, 11:00 CEST (5:00 a.m. ET): the Norwegian Nobel Committee at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, the only one with a fixed time.
• Monday, October 12, 2026 — Economic Sciences, 11:45 CEST (5:45 a.m. ET): the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences closes the week.

The winners take home a bigger award

This year's laureates collect 12 million Swedish kronor per prize, which converts to about one point two million dollars. The Foundation announced the raise in September 2026, as reported by informat.ro, and it works out to a 9% increase over last year's 11 million. When a prize is shared, the amount is divided among the laureates.

Hanna Stjärne, the Foundation's executive director, tied the raise to the 125th anniversary and said the goal is to keep the prize's financial value from eroding over time. In other words, the increase protects what the award is actually worth, not just its headline number.

That headline number has come a long way. At the very first awards, each prize was worth 150,782 kronor — a fortune at the time, but a fraction of today's amount. The sum has swung with the Foundation's finances: in 2012 it cut the award from 10 million kronor to 8 million to steady the books, then raised it three times on the way back up, according to reporting by NordiskPost.

Who might win — and who is doing the guessing

Nobody outside the committees knows the winners; nominations stay sealed for half a century. That secrecy has not stopped the forecasting. On September 17, 2026, Clarivate named 22 researchers to its Clarivate Citation Laureates list, a data-led prediction based on how heavily their papers are cited. Since the program began, 89 of its honorees have gone on to win a Nobel, according to the company's announcement. This year's predictive shortlist spotlights GLP-1 biology and obesity treatment, optical imaging, energy-efficient computing materials, and precision gene editing — and Physics World noted that all three of its physics picks sit in condensed matter.

The peace prize draws the loudest speculation, and prediction markets are tracking it closely. A September 24, 2026, reading of Kalshi contracts by scoresandstats put Doctors Without Borders at about a 13% implied chance and Sudan's Emergency Response Rooms at roughly 11%. Traders are risking real money on these contracts, but with nominations sealed, even the favorites are long shots — the leader at 13% still means the field holds 87%.

One of the six is not like the others. Alfred Nobel's 1895 will created five categories — physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace — while the economics prize is formally the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, established by Sweden's central bank in 1968 and first awarded in 1969. Last year's class set a high bar: Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai took literature, and Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado took the peace prize.

How to watch the announcements live

Every announcement streams free on the Nobel Prize's official channels, including YouTube, where the prize's own page tells viewers to keep watching starting October 5, 2026. If you only set one alarm, make it Thursday: the literature announcement is the friendliest hour for the Americas, while the medicine and peace reveals land before dawn on the US East Coast.

Nobel announcement week is one of the rare moments when basic research breaks into the mainstream — and it is a reminder of how fast science moves from obscure to prizeworthy. For more on the research that could land on this radar in years to come, browse our science topic page, including the first radio signals ever traced directly to an exoplanet, caught from a gas giant 63 light-years away.

Once Nobel announcement week wraps on Monday, October 12, 2026, the new laureates take their place in Nobel history — and the road to December's award ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo begins.