Super Bowl Ratings History (1967-present)

Super Bowl ratings dating back to the very first game in 1967.

The Super Bowl ratings record remains a 49.1 for 49ers-Bengals in 1982, but the viewership record was set just this year (2024) — 123.7 million for Chiefs-49ers. While Chiefs-49ers owns the largest official Super Bowl audience on record, that is only because Nielsen did not begin including out-of-home viewing in its viewership estimates until mid-2020.

From 2017-20, Nielsen measured out-of-home viewing separately. Adding in the out-of-home audience during those years, Patriots-Falcons in 2017 is the most-watched Super Bowl on record with 123.94 million, followed by this year’s game and Eagles-Patriots in 2018 (117.33M).

Nielsen did not track out-of-home viewing at all until 2016, meaning that any number of games in prior years may well have averaged a larger audience all things being equal. In particular, Patriots-Seahawks in 2015 — which averaged 114.44 million — would likely rank at or near the top had out-of-home viewing been measured then.

It should be noted that simply removing out-of-home viewing from the equation does not give you an apples-to-apples comparison to the pre-out-of-home era. Nielsen reclassified guest viewing as out-of-home starting in 2020, meaning that a solid chunk of the out-of-home audience consists of viewership that was already being tracked in prior years. Thus removing out-of-home viewing from the equation puts this year’s games at a disadvantage compared to those of the past.

Super Bowl ratings and viewership, all-time

As of 2021, out-of-home viewing is now included in traditional Nielsen-reported audience.
* NBC’s 2022 streaming audience was 11.2 million viewers across 6.0 million devices.

Similar data in text form:

* From 2021 and onward, all out-of-home viewing is included in the official Nielsen estimates. From 2017-20, only part of the out-of-home audience — guest viewership in panelists homes — is included.