Who is eligible to nominate candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize and how many nominations are submitted each year?
Executive summary
The right to nominate candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize is restricted to a defined group of “qualified nominators” — a mix of elected officials, academic leaders, heads of peace and foreign‑policy institutes, judges of international courts, past laureates and certain former advisers and committee members — as set out by the Nobel Foundation and explained by the Norwegian Nobel Institute [1][2][3]. Each year that pool submits what the Nobel organizations describe as “several hundred” nominations; announced tallies in recent years have ranged from the high 200s to the mid‑300s (for example, 286 nominations in 2024 and 338 candidates in 2025) while the committee keeps the full nomination records sealed for 50 years [4][5][6].
1. Who can nominate: a closed list with an international reach
The statutes and official guidance specify categories of eligible nominators rather than an open public process: members of national assemblies and governments, members of international courts, university rectors and professors in specified disciplines (history, social sciences, law, philosophy, theology), leaders of peace research and foreign‑policy institutes, past Nobel Peace Prize laureates and board members of organizations that have received the prize, current and former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee and former advisers to the Nobel Institute are explicitly listed as eligible nominators [1][2][3].
2. How nominations are submitted and validated
Nominations are submitted via an online form during a limited window that opens in mid‑October and closes on 31 January; the Nobel Institute and Committee then sort and check submissions for validity before handing validated nominations to the Norwegian Nobel Committee for consideration [7][4]. Self‑nominations are not accepted and the Committee may itself add names at its first meeting after the deadline, but nominations must come from the qualified categories to be considered valid [1][7].
3. How many nominations arrive each year: several hundred, not thousands
Official statements and press releases describe the annual volume as “several hundred” nominations [4], and public tallies published after the deadline give concrete yearly snapshots: 286 nominations in 2024 (197 individuals and 89 organisations) and 338 candidates for 2025 (244 individuals and 94 organisations) are examples cited by news outlets and the Nobel organization [5][6]. Historical reporting also noted 318 candidates for 2020, illustrating typical year‑to‑year fluctuation within a few hundred submissions [8].
4. What nomination numbers do — and don’t — mean
Being nominated is not an endorsement by the Nobel Committee; any single eligible nominator may propose a name, and the Committee’s task is to choose among all valid submissions [4][2]. The committee’s secrecy rules — nominations and deliberations are sealed for 50 years under the statutes of the Nobel Foundation — mean that publicized nominee lists often rely on self‑reporting or leaks, and the public totals the Institute releases after the deadline represent aggregates rather than full, detailed disclosure [1][4].
5. Politics, publicity and the incentives to reveal or inflate nominations
Because nominators and parliamentarians sometimes announce whom they proposed to generate publicity for a cause or individual, media reports can amplify selective disclosures and create the impression of broad institutional backing even when a nomination came from a single eligible source [8][9]. The Nobel organizations acknowledge the wide and international pool of nominators is intended to surface diverse candidates, but observers and journalists note that public proclamations about nominations are often strategic and not a substitute for the Committee’s confidential vetting [2][8].
6. Limits of available reporting
The sources used explain who is eligible, the closed submission window and the usual annual volume, and provide recent totals for specific years; however, because of the 50‑year secrecy rule the full historical details of who nominated whom in given years are not available to the public and cannot be independently verified today from the official archives [1][4].