Only St Gallen Finishes Above Nova SBE: Five Portuguese Management Masters Now Sit Inside the Financial Times Top 100

The Financial Times published its 2026 ranking of masters in management on Sunday night. One school finished above a Portuguese one, and it is the same school that has finished first for fifteen years.

The University of St Gallen holds the top place again. Second is the Nova School of Business and Economics, up two positions from fourth, on a weighted alumni salary of 131,640 dollars against St Gallen's 150,490. Nova SBE now sits ahead of Shanghai Jiao Tong's Antai college, INSEAD, HEC Paris, ESCP, Vlerick, IESE, the Stockholm School of Economics and London Business School. It is the highest placing a Portuguese programme has taken in this table.

Four other Portuguese schools are inside the hundred. Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics climbs five places to 25th. ISEG, the Lisbon School of Economics and Management, enters the table for the first time at 59th. Iscte Business School is 62nd, a rise of 25. Católica Porto is 66th, up 29 places, which is the largest Portuguese movement in this edition.

What lifted Nova SBE

The ranking scores a hundred programmes on nineteen criteria, most of them drawn from alumni three years after graduation. Nova SBE's strongest single indicator was aims achieved, the measure of whether graduates got what they enrolled for, at 92.2 percent. The school, whose dean is Pedro Oliveira, said in a note to newsrooms on Monday that it also placed 11th worldwide on the employer-network indicator, which covers recruitment access, career opportunities and professional events, and improved fifteen places on the effectiveness of its careers service. It puts the employment rate for the programme at 100 percent.

The trajectory is recent. Nova SBE was 23rd in 2021. It reached fourth last year, which was itself a Portuguese first, and has now passed the two French schools that stood between it and the podium.

Católica Lisbon attributes its own climb to placement within three months of graduation and to a faculty that is 41 percent international and a student body that is 95 percent international, with gender parity among both. ISEG highlighted an eighth place worldwide on career progress, the indicator that compares the seniority and size of the organisation a graduate works in now against where they were when they finished.

A different picture from the university tables

Business-school rankings measure something narrower than the general university tables, and Portugal reads better in them. Three weeks ago the Shanghai ranking moved Lisbon and Porto down a tier, leaving six Portuguese universities in the world's top thousand. In June, the QS tables had Lisbon falling seven places and Porto eighteen.

The contrast is partly structural. The Financial Times weights salary, salary increase, career progression and international mobility, all of which reward schools that place graduates into multinational employers abroad. It is also a reminder that the strength is concentrated: five schools, two of them Católica, and all five in Lisbon or Porto.

What this means for expats

• A Portuguese masters now carries an international price tag: the weighted salary behind Nova SBE's second place is 131,640 dollars three years out, which is the figure recruiters and lenders will look at.
• The intake is largely foreign already: Católica Lisbon reports 95 percent international students on its programme, so an incoming family is not entering a Portuguese-language classroom.
• Fees are not in the ranking: the table measures outcomes, not cost, and Portuguese private business-school tuition sits well above the public university fee you may have budgeted for.
• Public and private both appear: ISEG belongs to the Universidade de Lisboa and Iscte is a public institute, while the two Católica schools are private, so the choice is not simply a fee-paying one.
• Foreign enrolment is rising fast across the sector: Portugal's foreign student body has quadrupled to about 80,000 in fifteen years, and postgraduate programmes are where most of that growth sits.