United Nations Organizational Structure
The United Nations is a treaty organisation of 193 member states with no standing army and no sovereign power; what it has instead is a Secretariat that runs its day-to-day work and a family of agencies, funds and programmes that deliver most of what the world calls 'the UN'. This chart draws that system as of August 2026.
- Type
- International organization
- Jurisdiction
- 193 member states
- Founded
- 1945
- Staff
- ~44,000 (UN Secretariat)
- Head
- António Guterres
- Budget
- $3.59 billion regular budget (2025)
- Structure as of
- 2026-08
About the institution
The United Nations was founded in 1945 with the aim of maintaining international peace and security, and it now comprises 193 member states plus the Secretariat that serves them and a sprawling family of specialised agencies, funds and programmes — UNICEF, the World Food Programme, the World Health Organization and dozens more. The Secretariat's regular budget is around $3.6 billion a year, a small fraction of the system's total spending once the agencies' separately-funded budgets are counted.
The UN is not a world government and was never meant to be one, which is why it is so hard to org-chart. It has no army, no police, no treasury; its power is the mandate its members grant it, one peacekeeping mission and one resolution at a time. What CAN be drawn is the administrative machinery: the Secretary-General and the Secretariat's under-secretaries-general, who run the union's day-to-day work, and the heads of the agencies, funds and programmes, who deliver its operational results.
This snapshot is dated August 2026. António Guterres is Secretary-General — the ninth to hold the office — with Amina Mohammed as Deputy Secretary-General. The chart below shows the Secretariat's senior leadership and the heads of the principal funds, programmes and specialised agencies, from the UN Refugee Agency to the World Health Organization.
United Nations organizational chart
United Nations's reporting structure as of 2026-08. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom — or open it in QueryChart and edit it as your own.
A Secretariat, a Deputy, and a family of agencies that report to nobody on this chart
The root is the Secretary-General, António Guterres. Immediately beneath him in the Secretariat are the Deputy Secretary-General (Amina Mohammed), the Chef de Cabinet (Gilles Michaud), who runs the Secretary-General's own office, and the under-secretaries-general who head the Secretariat's departments — peace operations under Jean-Pierre Lacroix, operational support under Atul Khare, economic and social affairs under Li Junhua, and the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk.
The second group on this chart is the agencies, funds and programmes — the part of the UN most people actually meet. The UN Refugee Agency under Filippo Grandi, the UN Development Programme under Achim Steiner, UNICEF under Catherine Russell, the World Food Programme under Cindy McCain, the WHO under Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, UNESCO, UNEP, UNFPA and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Each is a separate legal entity with its own budget and its own governing body.
The honest structural caveat is in the diagram's own shape: the agencies are drawn beneath the Secretary-General, and administratively they sit within 'the UN System', but none of them reports to him in the corporate sense. Their executive heads are appointed by their own governing councils — in practice chosen in consultation with the Secretary-General — and they raise their own money from voluntary contributions. Guterres chairs the UN System Chief Executives Board where the heads coordinate, which is the closest thing to a dotted line between them.
The banding captures the two natures of the UN at once. The Secretariat band is a genuine hierarchy — the Secretary-General appoints, directs and can remove the under-secretaries-general. The agencies band is a confederation: 193 members can barely govern the Secretariat, and they govern the agencies even less. A reader looking for 'who runs the UN' should take the whole structure, not just the root: nobody runs it, which is the point.
Key leadership roles
António Guterres
Secretary-General of the United Nations — Ninth Secretary-General, in office since 2017; the chief administrative officer of the Secretariat and the public face of the organisation.
Amina Mohammed
Deputy Secretary-General — Deputy since 2017; chairs the UN's sustainable-development coordination machinery.
Gilles Michaud
Chef de Cabinet — Runs the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, the small office that manages the UN's top floor.
Volker Türk
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights — Head of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN's human-rights watchdog.
Jean-Pierre Lacroix
Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations — Heads the Department of Peace Operations, which commands UN peacekeeping missions.
Filippo Grandi
UN High Commissioner for Refugees — Head of the UN Refugee Agency, one of the largest humanitarian organisations in the world.
Achim Steiner
Administrator of the UN Development Programme — Head of UNDP, the UN's global development network.
Catherine Russell
Executive Director of UNICEF — Head of the UN Children's Fund, the world's largest child-focused humanitarian agency.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
Director-General of the World Health Organization — First African Director-General of the WHO, elected in 2017 and re-elected in 2022.
How this structure supports the mandate
The Secretariat's hierarchy exists because someone must run a 44,000-person organisation. The Secretary-General appoints the under-secretaries-general, the department heads answer to him, and peacekeeping and humanitarian operations need exactly that kind of command clarity — when a mission is in the field, ambiguity about who can move resources is dangerous. The UN's critics are right that this is a thin hierarchy for a world body; its defenders would say the world would never have agreed to a thicker one.
The agency family works because splitting operations into separate legal entities is how the UN gets money. The regular budget is capped and contested, but UNICEF and the WFP raise their own voluntary contributions from governments and the public, which is what lets the humanitarian system spend several times the Secretariat's budget. The cost is fragmentation — every agency has its own logo, its own headquarters and its own donor relationships — and coordination exists precisely because the structure is otherwise a collection of fiefdoms.
Putting the heads together in the UN System Chief Executives Board is the structural answer to that fragmentation: a coordinating body that needs no authority because it runs on the members' shared interest. It is a committee solution to a committee-shaped problem, and it is the same mechanism the EU's college uses — when no single office can command, the next-best structure is a table everyone is required to sit at.
Advantages and disadvantages
- The Secretariat's clear hierarchy lets peacekeeping and humanitarian operations move resources decisively when lives are at stake.
- That hierarchy only extends as far as the member states allow — the Secretary-General commands the Secretariat, and almost nothing else.
- Legally separate agencies raise their own funding, which multiplies the system's resources several times over the assessed budget.
- The same fragmentation means duplication, competing mandates and coordination overhead across dozens of semi-independent bodies.
- The one-country-one-vote General Assembly gives every member state, however small, an equal seat at the UN's top table.
- Equal votes for 193 states make the Assembly a consensus machine that produces declarations rather than decisions.
Interesting facts
- The Secretary-General is appointed by the General Assembly on the recommendation of the Security Council, where any one of the five permanent members can veto a candidate.
- UN peacekeepers are not UN soldiers: they are national troops contributed by member states, under UN command, paid for by an assessed budget the members approve.
- The World Health Organization, though 'part of the UN', sets its own budget from member contributions and predates the UN itself — its constitution was signed in 1946, a year after the UN Charter.
- The UN System has more than 30 organisations in total; this chart shows only the Secretariat and the best-known funds, programmes and specialised agencies.
- The headquarters in New York sits on international territory, so the UN pays no local taxes and its own security force, not the NYPD, polices the site — a small piece of the division of labour this chart only hints at.
Frequently asked questions
Who is in charge of the United Nations?
No one, by design. The Secretary-General administers the Secretariat, but the organisation's decisions belong to the member states, and its agencies answer to their own governing bodies.
Does the Secretary-General control UNICEF and the WHO?
No. They are separate legal entities in the UN System. The Secretary-General chairs the Chief Executives Board where their heads coordinate, but he cannot direct them.
How is the UN funded?
The regular budget (about $3.6 billion a year) is assessed on member states by formula. The agencies raise most of their own money from voluntary contributions.
Why is the UN so hard to draw as an org chart?
Because it is a treaty between sovereign states, not a company. Its 'executive' can only act with the member states' consent, so the structure that exists is administrative machinery, not a command hierarchy.
Use this org chart template
Turn the United Nations System's structure into a chart you can rearrange, relabel and annotate.