The University of Pardubice ranks among the TOP 1,000 higher education institutes in the world and one of the TOP 10 in the Czech Republic, as shown by QS World University Rankings 2021, one of the world's most prestigious rankings. According to its authors, the comparison serves not only for future students and their parents as a school selection guide, but also for current students, academics, employers, government and everyone else as an indicator of the university's quality.

The methodology of evaluation of individual universities in the QS Rankings is based on six dimensions. A total of 50 percent of ratings are reputations among academics and graduate employers, 20 percent are citations in the Scopus database, 20 percent are the number of students per academic staff member, 5 percent are the percentage of foreign academics, and 5 percent are the percentage of international students.

The QS World University Rankings are among the most prestigious in the world, next to the Shanghai Ranking and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. It is designed to provide a multidimensional view of the relative strengths of the world's leading universities. The QS Rankings began to be published under the original name THE-QS World University Rankings only a year later than ARWU, i.e. in 2004. This second oldest international ranking of universities is compiled by the research company Quacquarelli Symonds Limited (QS).