The university is one of the original red brick universities and a founding member of the prestigious Russell Group. It is also part of the Worldwide Universities Network, the N8 Group of the eight most research intensive universities in Northern England and the White Rose University Consortium. Sheffield has been ranked as a top 100 university in the world by QS for the last fifteen years. In 2019, Time Higher Education ranked the University 22nd in Europe for teaching excellence. According to the latest Research Excellence Framework 2021, Sheffield is ranked 11th in the UK for research power calculated by multiplying the institution's GPA by the total number of full-time equivalent staff submitted.

There are eight Nobel laureates affiliated with Sheffield and six of them are the alumni or former long-term staff of the university. They are contributors to the development of penicillin, the discovery of the citric acid cycle, the investigation of high-speed chemical reactions, the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA, the discovery of fullerene, and the development of molecular machines. Alumni also include several Heads of state, Home Secretaries, Court of Appeal judges, Booker Prize winners, astronaut and Olympic gold medallists.