Commonwealth Games 2026 Medal Tally: How the Table Is Ranked

Updated July 2026.

The Commonwealth Games medal tally is ranked gold-first. Nations are sorted by number of gold medals; silvers only break a tie on golds, and bronzes only break a tie on silvers. A country with more total medals can therefore sit below a country with fewer — and that single rule explains most of the arguments you will see online tonight.

This 6 Club explainer covers how the table is built, why unofficial boards disagree with each other, where the official live tally is published, which sports India is contesting at Glasgow 2026, and how to convert the schedule into Indian Standard Time. We do not publish medal counts or placings here — those change hour by hour and a stale number is worse than no number. We show you how to read the live board instead.

The Commonwealth Games, like the Olympics, uses what statisticians call a lexicographic ordering. In plain English, the sorting works down a ladder:

1. Gold medals — the primary sort. More golds always ranks higher, full stop.
2. Silver medals — consulted only when two nations are level on golds.
3. Bronze medals — consulted only when two nations are level on both golds and silvers.
4. Alphabetical order — when nations are level on all three, they normally share a rank and are listed alphabetically or by country code.

Nothing else enters the calculation. Population does not. Number of athletes sent does not. The "weight" of the sport does not — a gold in the 100 metres and a gold in a bowls pairs event are worth exactly the same on the board.

The practical consequence is worth sitting with, because it is the source of nearly every "but the table is wrong" complaint: one gold outranks any number of silvers. A nation with one gold and nothing else finishes above a nation with zero golds and a dozen silvers and bronzes. That is not a glitch. That is the rule.

Some publishers — historically, mostly American outlets — sort by total medals instead. Both orderings are defensible; they simply answer different questions. Gold-first asks "who won the most events?" Total-medals asks "who reached the podium most often?"

Here is an illustration using invented nations and invented numbers, purely to show the mechanism. These are not real standings from any Games.

Nation A tops the gold-first table and sits third on the total-medals table. Nation B leads on totals and sits second on golds. Neither table is lying. If you screenshot one and someone screenshots the other, you will both be right and you will both be annoyed.

The fix: before you argue about a position, look at the column headers and check which sort the board is using. Most boards say so; the ones that do not are usually the ones worth trusting least.

The authoritative board is the one run by the Games organisers and the Commonwealth Sport federation, fed directly from the results system at each venue. It is the version that updates when a result is confirmed, not when a commentator says a race is over. You can reach it through the Commonwealth Sport federation site, and the general history and structure of the event is well summarised on Wikipedia's Commonwealth Games page.

Everything else — news apps, aggregator sites, sports portals, social accounts — is a copy. Copies are useful for speed and dreadful for accuracy. Our companion guide on following live results and medal tallies goes into the refresh habits that keep you from repeating a wrong number.

• Ceremony delay. A medal is often only added to the board after the result is ratified, which can be minutes after the event visibly finishes.
• Cache layers. Aggregators cache their pages, sometimes for several minutes, to survive traffic. Your refresh may re-serve the same cached copy.
• Manual entry. Smaller sites type the numbers in by hand. Humans mistype.
• Protests and reviews. A disqualification, a judging review or a weight-in-and-lift review can move a medal after the fact. The official board reflects it; a screenshot from twenty minutes ago does not.

A common confusion: in a team event — a relay, a pairs bowls match, a 3x3 basketball final — the table records one medal for the nation, even though several athletes receive a physical medal. So the number of medals hanging round necks in a country's delegation is always larger than the number on the tally.

Two further points that surprise people:

• Para events sit in the same table. The Commonwealth Games integrates para sport into the main programme, and para medals are counted in the same national tally rather than a separate one. That is genuinely unusual among major multi-sport events, and it is a deliberate feature of the Games.
• Shared medals happen. A tie for a position, or a bronze awarded to both losing semi-finalists in some combat sports, can produce more than one medal at the same colour in a single event. The board simply counts them.

Glasgow 2026 runs a deliberately compact programme, considerably smaller than the Birmingham 2022 edition, with events concentrated in a handful of venues across the city. The sports announced for the Games include athletics and para athletics, swimming and para swimming, artistic gymnastics, track cycling and para track cycling, netball, weightlifting and para powerlifting, boxing, judo, bowls and para bowls, and 3x3 basketball including 3x3 wheelchair basketball.

Several sports that Indian audiences strongly associate with the Commonwealth Games — hockey, squash, badminton, table tennis, wrestling and shooting among them — are not on the Glasgow 2026 sport list as announced. If you are searching for an India hockey or squash fixture at these Games and finding nothing, that is why. Programme decisions can be revised, so confirm the final list of sports and events on the official Games site rather than on a preview article written a year ago.

We break the programme down sport by sport, with what each one involves and how the finals are structured, in our guide to India's Glasgow 2026 sports and schedule. Weightlifting gets its own deep dive through Mirabai Chanu's background and the 49kg category.

Glasgow in late July and early August runs on British Summer Time, which is UTC+1. India is UTC+5:30. The gap is therefore 4 hours 30 minutes, and IST is ahead.

Two traps worth naming. First, the date rolls over: an evening final in Glasgow is a next-day early morning in India, so a "Tuesday final" may appear under Wednesday in an Indian listings app. Second, published start times are the start of a session, not of a specific event — a final inside that session can run considerably later if earlier events overrun.

India first competed at the Games in 1934 and has been a fixture of the event for most of its modern history, missing editions only for political reasons. India hosted the Games in Delhi in 2010, which remains the only edition staged in the country. Across the decades India's strongest returns have historically come in shooting, wrestling, weightlifting, boxing, badminton and table tennis — which is precisely why a reduced Glasgow programme changes the shape of the Indian campaign so much.

Everything in that paragraph is historical and checkable. Nothing about the current Games is predicted here, and you should be sceptical of any page that tells you how many medals India "will" win. Nobody knows. Sport is the thing that happens instead of the forecast.

1. Confirm the board's sort order — gold-first or total-medals — before comparing positions.
2. Check the timestamp on the page. "Live" is a design word; the timestamp is the fact.
3. Prefer the organisers' board over any aggregator, and treat social posts as rumour until the board agrees.
4. Remember that team events add one row-line to the tally, not one per athlete.
5. Expect movement after reviews and protests; the last number of the night is the reliable one.
6. Never quote a tally figure without saying when you read it.

6 Club is an online gaming platform. We are not affiliated with the Commonwealth Games, Commonwealth Sport, or any national federation, and we do not run betting markets, odds or predictions on any sporting event. We write these guides because the same audience that follows a live medal board also plays quick, chance-based games in the gaps between sessions, and we would rather be the site that explains how the board works than one more scraped table.

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The questions people actually type when the medal table is moving.

Gold-first. Nations are sorted by number of gold medals; silver is used only to separate nations level on gold, and bronze only to separate nations level on gold and silver. Remaining ties are usually shared and listed alphabetically. Total medals do not affect the official ordering.

Almost always because the two boards use different sorts. The official ordering is gold-first; some publishers rank by total medals instead, which moves nations with many silvers and bronzes up and nations with few but golden results down. Check the column headers before comparing.

On the Games organisers’ own results board, reachable through the Commonwealth Sport federation site. It is fed by the venue results system and updates when a result is confirmed. Every other tally you see is a copy of that one, and copies can lag or contain typing errors.

One, on the national tally. Every member of the team receives a physical medal, but the medal table records a single gold for the country. That is why a delegation can come home with more medals than the tally shows against its name.

Yes. The Commonwealth Games integrates para sport into the main programme, and para medals go into the same national tally rather than a separate one. It is one of the genuinely distinctive features of the Games.

They are not on the sport list announced for Glasgow 2026, which runs a smaller programme than Birmingham 2022. Several sports Indian audiences follow closely — including hockey, squash, badminton, table tennis, wrestling and shooting — are absent from the announced list. Confirm the final programme on the official Games site.

Add 4 hours 30 minutes. Glasgow is on British Summer Time (UTC+1) during the Games and India is UTC+5:30. Remember that evening finals in Glasgow land after midnight in India, so they appear on the following calendar date in Indian listings.

No, and you should distrust anyone who does. We do not publish medal predictions, and we do not publish live counts either, because a stale number is worse than none. Read the official board for the current position and treat every forecast as entertainment.

The medal tally is simpler than the arguments about it: golds first, silvers as a tie-break, bronzes as a tie-break on the tie-break. Learn that, check which sort your board is using, read the timestamp, and you will be right more often than the person quoting a screenshot. For the tracking habits behind it, read our live results guide; for the wider India picture, see India's Glasgow 2026 sports and schedule. And if you fill the gaps between sessions with a quick game, keep it small and keep it fun. 18+, play responsibly.