NASA's archive lists 6,464 confirmed exoplanets: the count by discovery year from 1992 to 2026

As of November 5, 2026, the NASA Exoplanet Archive lists 6,464 confirmed planets beyond the solar system. The archive, operated by the California Institute of Technology under contract with NASA and online since December 2011, dates the oldest of them to 1992, when two planets were found by pulsar timing. Its tables, queried for this page, show how slowly the count grew at first, how, by our count, two years of results from NASA's Kepler mission added more than 2,000 planets, and how the TESS survey now supplies most new ones.

The count, year by year

By our count of the archive's data, it dates 30 of today's confirmed planets to the 1990s and 288 more to the years from 2000 to 2008, most of them found by radial velocity. Transits overtook radial velocity as the leading discovery method in 2010, with 46 planets against 37, and have stayed ahead in every year since. The 374 planets dated to 2026 so far already exceed the totals for 2024 (260) and 2025 (246).

Kepler's two big years

Two years stand out. Planets found with the Kepler spacecraft make up 784 of the 872 planets dated to 2014 and 1,276 of the 1,504 dated to 2016, by our count of the archive's discovery-facility field. The archive describes Kepler as "NASA's first mission to search for Earth-like planets"; its continuation, K2, found 550 more. Together they account for 3,337 of today's confirmed planets, or 52% by our arithmetic. The archive credits Kepler with discoveries well after those peaks, too: 311 of the 564 planets dated to 2021, while K2 had its biggest year in 2018, with 191, by our count. Their candidate lists are not exhausted either: 1,977 Kepler candidates and 975 K2 candidates have yet to be confirmed.

TESS takes over

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, launched in April 2018 to look for transiting planets around the brightest stars near Earth, has found most new planets since 2024: 178 of 260 that year, 129 of 246 in 2025 and 285 of 374 so far in 2026, by our count. TESS passed 1,000 confirmed planets in the archive's weekly update of October 8, 2026, when 70 planets were added and the overall total reached 6,445. By November 5, the TESS tally stood at 1,024.

Many more signals are still being checked. The archive holds 8,151 TESS Project Candidates, as of November 2, 2026, a figure that counts every transit-like event that appears to be astrophysical, including those the TESS project has identified as false positives. Of those, 4,815 have not yet been classed as either a confirmed planet or a false positive; when it marked the 1,000th TESS planet on October 8, the archive put the number waiting at 4,823.

Which methods found them

Transits account for three-quarters of all confirmed planets (74%, our arithmetic). Radial velocity comes second, and microlensing and imaging follow. Many planets have been detected by more than one method; the archive credits each to the technique of its discovery. The other methods have had their own peaks: by our count, radial velocity had its best year in 2022, with 115 planets, microlensing peaked the same year with 51, and the 11 imaging discoveries dated to 2024 are the most for any single year.

What the archive counts as confirmed

The archive's criteria explain why its total can differ from other catalogs. Its team follows the literature for planet papers based on NASA and non-NASA observing resources, and takes in data from both ground-based and space-based observations. An object counts as a planet if its mass, or minimum mass, is 30 Jupiter masses or less; if it is not free floating; if follow-up observations and validation have made a false positive unlikely; if that information and further orbital or physical properties are available in peer-reviewed publications; and if the results have been peer reviewed and accepted for publication in the astrophysical literature. The archive keeps no separate category for validated planets: all are listed as confirmed. A planet later refuted in the literature is reclassified as a false positive and removed from the main planet tables, and the archive generally updates its tables weekly as new papers are added, so every figure on this page is a snapshot.