List of SSBU tier lists

The UltRank Super Smash Bros. Ultimate tier list was published more than one year after the end of the final balance patch, patch 13.0.1. All versions of the list are as follows.

First tier list (February 24, 2023)
This is the first tier list released by LumiRank. Players were eligible to be a panelist if they were ranked in the Top 101 of six global rankings for the majority of 2022: UltRank 2022, OrionRank 2022, EchoRank 2022, ΩRank 2022, 1000Rank 2022, and RaccRank 2022. Out of 155 eligible players, 71 players participated as panelists, with panelists from every major Ultimate region around the world. Panelists were asked to rate characters from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest and 1 being the lowest. Panelists were also asked to give an ordered list of their Top 5 characters, and after panelist responses were normalized, their Top 5 would be scored from as 10.X (from 10.5 to 10.1). Each character's highest and lowest 3 responses were then removed. To avoid higher or lower participation from different regions from biasing the list, responses were weighted by region according to each region's representation on OrionRank 2022. Finally, tiers were split up by. Interestingly, the numerical ordering has been inverted from the tier lists of previous games, as the best characters now have the highest numbers instead of the lowest numbers.

was voted as the entire team instead of individually, as were and. Miis were ranked, unlike the last SSB4 tier list. Additionally, the following Echo Fighter pairs were voted together due to their lack of significant differences: and,  and ,  and , and  and. Although and  appeared to have the same score, they differed past the 3 decimal places shown.

The tiers in this list were split into groups: Top (S+, S, S-); High (A+, A-); Upper Mid (B+, B-); Lower Mid (C+, C-); Low (D+, D-).

was ranked as the #1 character by 41 out of 71 panelists, with multiple other panelists ranking, , Pyra and Mythra, or as #1. Pyra and Mythra were ranked as the #2 character the most, and was the most agreed upon among panelists, having the lowest standard deviation. was given the lowest score by 54 out of 68 panelists, and and Ganondorf had the largest gap between two consecutive characters on the tier list. Pyra and Mythra, Steve, Joker,, and had the lowest standard deviations, while , , , , and  had the greatest standard deviations.

As listed in the header, this tier list was created in February 2023, over four years after the game launched. The reason for this delay are due to several factors. The first and main reason is that the game received frequent character balance changes until its current version, which was released in December 2021. To avoid making tier lists as frequent as the updates like what happened with Smash 4, the community agreed to wait until a significant amount of time after active development sunsetted to seriously discuss the making of a tier list. Another reason is that the COVID-19 pandemic shut down offline tournaments for a long time and forced players to play online, which significantly altered and skewed data, forcing tier list makers to consider the new outcomes that come with online play. A third reason is that an "official" tier list maker could not be decided on. Due to SmashBoards generally falling out of favor as the premier location for Smash discourse after the release of Ultimate, many alternatives were proposed. Several organizations suggested they be the organizer of the first tier list, while others suggested getting rid of the traditional panel ranking in favor of raw community statistics. Some even questioned if a tier list for Ultimate was feasible or even necessary given its incredibly large roster and it generally being regarded as well-balanced.

Data aggregation organization PG Stats was the first to announce they would be making a tier list, as they did with the official Melee tier list starting in 2021, and promised to present what they created at some point in late 2022 to early 2023. However, several controversies and a company-wide exodus from parent company caused these plans to be canceled. LumiRank then stepped in a few months later and is now considered the official tier list maker for Ultimate going forward.