The top 5 most listened to podcasts in the US are The Joe Rogan Experience, Crime Junkie, The Daily, Call Her Daddy and SmartLess, in that order, on Edison's Q3 2026 ranking. The same five have held those spots in all three quarters of 2026 so far, so this is a steady answer in a business that loves a chart.
The top 10 most listened to podcasts in the US, on the newest Edison ranking, count people who listened or watched in the past week. Very little moved at the top from the quarter before, and The Joe Rogan Experience has led this survey in every quarter since tracking began in 2019.
| Rank | Show | Q2 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Joe Rogan Experience | 1 |
| 2 | Crime Junkie | 2 |
| 3 | The Daily | 3 |
| 4 | Call Her Daddy | 4 |
| 5 | SmartLess | 5 |
| 6 | New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce | 7 |
| 7 | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von | 8 |
| 8 | Dateline NBC | 6 |
| 9 | Rotten Mango | 13 |
| 10 | The Breakfast Club | 11 |
True crime takes three of those 10 spots, through Crime Junkie, Dateline NBC and Rotten Mango, and the biggest climb of the quarter was Rotten Mango, up from 13 to 9. Stuff You Should Know went the other way, from 6 in Q1 to 15. So if you came here for the top 10 podcasts to listen to, this list is a fair map of what most people are playing, even if it says nothing about what is good.
The top podcasts are ranked by survey, because no one can see every platform's numbers at once. Edison interviewed 5,223 weekly podcast consumers aged 13 and up, in English and Spanish, and says "This ranker measures reach as a percentage of the weekly podcast audience." It publishes rank order only, so any reach figure you see quoted for a show didn't come from this list. Nobody publishes a ranking by total hours listened, so reach is the closest honest stand-in for most listened to.
A second survey backs it up. Triton Digital's ranker for Q2 2026, with 3,000 monthly listeners a quarter, has the same first four shows in the same order. Its fifth is This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von, with SmartLess at 7.
Huberman Lab and Theo Von turn up on a lot of older top 5 lists, and both now sit lower. Huberman Lab is 13 on Edison and 49 on Triton, though it reached 22 to 13 in a single quarter on Edison. Theo Von is 7 on Edison and 5 on Triton, and ranked second in the US on Spotify's 2025 list. So a list naming them isn't silly. It is measuring one platform, or an earlier year.
Top podcasts on Spotify, Apple and YouTube each get a year-end list, and each one only sees its own platform. Joe Rogan leads all three for 2025, which is why his place at the top of the surveys is hard to argue with. YouTube's list runs on watch time, so long and frequent shows do well there.
| Rank | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Joe Rogan Experience | The Joe Rogan Experience | The Joe Rogan Experience |
| 2 | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von | The Daily | KILL TONY |
| 3 | The Mel Robbins Podcast | The Mel Robbins Podcast | Good Mythical Morning |
| 4 | Call Her Daddy | Crime Junkie | Rotten Mango |
| 5 | Crime Junkie | Dateline NBC | The MeidasTouch Podcast |
The top 5 podcasts right now depend on which chart you open, and the live charts answer a different question from the surveys. On November 1, 2026, Call Her Daddy was 22 on Spotify and outside the Apple and YouTube top 100s, while SmartLess was 6 on Apple and 41 on Spotify. Crime Junkie and The Daily were outside YouTube's top 100 too. A show can reach millions of people and still miss a platform's chart, which is why the survey is the better answer here. Today's leaders are on the page for the #1 podcast right now.
Download rankings look different because only shows that opt in get counted. Podtrac's September 2026 ranking has Crime Junkie first and The Daily second, with no Joe Rogan, since his show doesn't take part. Triton's weekly downloads ranking for the same month has Stuff You Should Know first, and Rogan, Crime Junkie and The Daily are missing from its top 10. Estimates from Podscribe fill in some gaps, but they are models, and they disagree with every survey about Rogan's size.
The top 50 podcasts in the US are published each quarter by Edison Research at SSRS, and the full chart is free to read. Further down the Q3 2026 list you will find Stuff You Should Know at 15, The Diary of a CEO at 16 and Good Hang at 18. The next list should land around late January 2027, going by last year's timing, so check the date on any ranking you repeat.
None of these shows covers SEO. For that, there is the best podcast on SEO, and the full SEO podcast shelf filed by topic.
Sources for this answer were checked on Nov 1, 2026.
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