Which countries operate the most satellites?

United States leads with 12,174 active satellites, ahead of China (1,299) and United Kingdom (758).

Catalog as of 2026-08-15 12:30 UTC · page generated 2026-08-22

The catalog has not refreshed in over 48 hours, so this figure is older than it should be.

The breakdown

Active satellites

Showing the top 20 of 93 countries and organisations. The full list is on the countries page.

What this number is not

This is the country of the operator, not where the satellite was launched from, nor where it was built.
A satellite operated by a multinational organisation is attributed to that organisation, not split between member states.
The United States dominates this ranking almost entirely because of Starlink.

How it is computed, and how it is checked

Active payloads grouped by the country of the operator, resolved from the launch catalog’s own state codes into country names. Codes that resolve to the same country, such as the two the catalog uses for Sweden, are added together rather than ranked separately.

The leading country is counted again by Postgres, from its own query filtered to that country’s state codes, and compared against the tally made here from the rows read in. The two are genuinely different routes to the same figure, so a lost row or a mis-grouped code shows up as a disagreement and the number is withheld.

Cross-check today: 12,174 · deviation 0.000% · agreed

Where the underlying data comes from is on the methodology page, field by field on sources.

Cite this

OrbitalWiki (2026). Which countries operate the most satellites? Retrieved 2026-08-22 from https://www.orbitalwiki.com/statistics/satellites-by-country

The retrieval date matters: this number changes every six hours.