With millions of podcasts available today, choosing where to start can be overwhelming. One way to narrow the search is to begin with the shows that have consistently earned praise, built loyal audiences, and remained relevant over time. This list highlights ten of the best podcasts to listen to in 2026 so far.
1. Crime Junkie
Crime Junkie covers one case a week, with Ashley Flowers narrating and Brit Prawat hearing most of it for the first time. The two have been best friends since birth. Flowers started the show in December 2017, after volunteering with Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana and hosting a local radio segment called Murder Monday. She named the production company she built for it, Audiochuck, after her dog, Charlie (nicknamed Chuck).
Newer true crime listeners have an easy entry point here, and it's probably the least demanding of the best podcasts 2026 has in this genre. Episodes stay tight and you don't need to work through the backlog to enjoy the latest episodes. The show also puts its reach to use through a nonprofit called Season of Justice, which has awarded over $226,000 in grants toward cold cases. Crime Junkie now has the largest female audience of any podcast in the US. Fun fact: Season of Justice takes its name from a phrase Flowers and Prawat said on air while discussing the 1988 murder of April Tinsley.
2. The Joe Rogan Experience
The Joe Rogan Experience runs two to three hours with one guest and almost no structure, which is either the appeal or the dealbreaker depending on who you ask. Rogan started recording from home in December 2009, bringing a background as a stand-up comedian and former UFC commentator to conversations with physicists, fighters, musicians, and comedians. Over 2,200 episodes exist now.
Listeners who prefer a topic explored well past its obvious talking points will get the most here, since one conversation can wander through five subjects before it ends. Spotify signed Rogan to an exclusive deal in 2020 reportedly running over $100 million, then a bigger, non-exclusive deal in 2024 that put the show back on Apple, Amazon, and YouTube. Spotify has said its overall podcast consumption grew 232 percent during the exclusive years. Fun fact: Under Rogan's original Spotify contract, the company reportedly holds no creative control over what he discusses or who he invites on.
3. My Favorite Murder
My Favorite Murder pairs a true crime case with a hometown story sent in by a listener. Karen Kilgariff, a stand-up comedian, and Georgia Hardstark, formerly a Cooking Channel host, had been swapping these stories privately before turning them into a podcast in January 2016. Every episode closes on their catchphrase, "stay sexy and don't get murdered." Their fans call themselves Murderinos, and in 2018 the two founded Exactly Right Media, a network now home to 15 shows.
The listener submissions are what set this apart for a lot of people, since they give the audience a way into the show. If you've found other true crime podcasts too grim to sit through, the tone here runs lighter without dropping the research. In January 2026, Kilgariff and Hardstark began appearing on Netflix under a new video podcasting deal, putting the show on screen for the first time in its ten-year run. Fun fact: Their 2019 memoir, also called Stay Sexy and Don't Get Murdered, became an instant number-one bestseller on The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today lists the same week it came out.
4. Call Her Daddy
Call Her Daddy now runs as a long-form interview show, though it started in 2018 as two roommates telling stories about their own dating histories on Barstool Sports. Alex Cooper co-created it with Sofia Franklyn but has hosted alone since 2020, reshaping the format toward guests like Miley Cyrus, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kamala Harris. She signed with Spotify for $60 million in 2021, then moved to SiriusXM in 2024 for $125 million.
It's a good fit if you like celebrity interviews that get well past the usual press-tour script. Cooper's $20 million annual rate from Spotify made her that platform's highest-earning female podcaster and the second-highest-paid podcaster overall, behind only Rogan. She also runs her own media company, the Unwell Network, which produces a slate of shows beyond her own. Fun fact: Cooper's listeners call themselves the Daddy Gang.
5. The Daily
The Daily takes one story from The New York Times each weekday and works through it with the reporter who covered it, out before 6 a.m. Michael Barbaro has been the host since the beginning, and was joined in 2025 by Rachel Abrams and Natalie Kitroeff, who replaced Sabrina Tavernise when she returned to reporting. Abrams came from The New York Times Presents, the paper's documentary series for Hulu and FX. Kitroeff spent five years as the paper's Mexico City bureau chief covering cartels and corruption.
If you want to understand one story properly instead of skimming twelve, this is a reliable option in daily news audio. Times editors said the three-host rotation, tested through a year of guest hosts, lets the show take on more stories instead of tying every episode to one person's schedule. Fun fact: Abrams was part of the Times reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for coverage of workplace sexual harassment and misconduct.
6. Morbid
Morbid mixes true crime with older, stranger history, hosted by aunt Alaina Urquhart, an autopsy technician, and niece Ashleigh Kelley, a hairstylist. They launched it on May 1, 2018, and by April 2022 it had climbed to fourth place among every podcast in the country. The show moved from Wondery to SiriusXM in 2025 under a new multiyear deal.
Urquhart has said her work in the morgue gives her a different perspective on the cases she covers, and that background comes through in the forensic detail. If you like your true crime with jokes threaded through and the hosts' friendship on display, that's the draw here. Her novels have been published in over twenty languages, and she now hosts two more shows besides Morbid, a true crime spinoff called 'Crime Countdown' and a horror-movie podcast called 'Scream!'. Fun fact: Aaron Mahnke, creator of the Lore podcast, provided one of the cover blurbs praising The Butcher Game before it was published.
7. Pardon My Take
Pardon My Take runs on recurring bits, with segments like Hot Seat/Cool Throne, a Mount Rushmore ranking of four things in some odd category, and a listener-submitted closer called Guys on Chicks. Dan Katz, known as Big Cat, and Eric Sollenberger, who performs as PFT Commenter, launched it for Barstool Sports on February 29, 2016. The show regularly pulls between 750,000 and 1.5 million listeners an episode, climbing past two million when a big-name guest joins.
You don't need to follow every league to keep up, since the jokes carry as much of the show as the sports do. Each year the hosts hand out their own mock awards on an episode called The Takies, and the 2026 edition brought in Blake Griffin, Blake Bortles, and Brooks Koepka as presenters for 28 categories, among them Take of the Year and Gorilla Trade of the Year. Fun fact: One of the 2026 Takie Awards categories was called Fart of the Year.
8. Office Ladies
Office Ladies works through The Office one episode at a time, with two people who were in it. Jenna Fischer played Pam Beesly, Angela Kinsey played Angela Martin, and they launched the show on October 16, 2019, as one of the earliest rewatch podcasts. They finished all 201 episodes of the original series, then kept going with a twice-weekly format called Office Ladies 6.0, moving from SiriusXM to Audacy along the way. The show has passed 400 million downloads and won a Webby Award in 2022.
If you've watched the series enough times to quote it, this fills in what the camera didn't catch, from improvised lines to what was happening between takes. Fischer and Kinsey became close friends during filming, and that comes through in how much of each episode drifts from the recap into whatever else they want to discuss. Their companion book, The Office BFFs, grew from stories they gathered while making the show. Fun fact: The show's opening theme, "Rubber Tree," is performed by Creed Bratton, who played the character Creed on The Office.
9. Sofia with an F
Sofia with an F mixes pop culture, reality TV recaps, guest interviews, and listener voicemails, with Sofia Franklyn talking to an audience she calls her "sloots." She had co-created Call Her Daddy with Alex Cooper in 2018, then left in 2020 after contract negotiations with Barstool Sports broke down. She launched this show that October, and it debuted at number one on the overall Apple Podcasts chart.
Guests have included musicians and reality TV personalities, among them Zara Larsson and Vinny Guadagnino. Franklyn stayed largely quiet about the Call Her Daddy split for years. That changed in February 2026, when she signed with the talent agency Verve and announced a memoir, Daddy Issues. Fun fact: The memoir's cover shows Franklyn beside a cut-out silhouette where her former co-host's photo would have been.
10. Stuff You Should Know
Stuff You Should Know explains one topic per episode, anything from historical conspiracies to how ordinary objects work, in a conversational style Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant carried over from writing web articles at HowStuffWorks. Clark started recording in April 2008 with rotating co-hosts, and Bryant, hired as a writer a month after Clark, became the permanent second voice by that August. In January 2019 it became the first podcast in history to reach one billion downloads. Episodes run 20 to 80 minutes across over 2,000 subjects.
Clark built the show on a non-expert, inquisitive tone, bringing listeners along through the research instead of lecturing from authority, which makes it an easy fit for casual curiosity. Bryant has described the appeal as personal, saying listeners often have the show in their ears while exercising or doing housework, and calling the audience friends and family they simply haven't met yet. Fun fact: Clark and Bryant have also hosted a Science Channel television version of the show and toured a live stage version that regularly sells out.
Great podcasts come and go, but a handful manage to stay at the top year after year. Whether they've built loyal communities, refined a winning format, or continued finding new audiences, the shows on this list have proven they can stand the test of time. That's what makes them some of the strongest podcast recommendations of 2026 so far.