The Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) is a public graduate school operated by the United States Navy and located in Monterey, California.

It offers master's and doctoral degrees in more than 70 fields of study to the U.S. Armed Forces, Department of Defense civilians and international partners. Established in 1909, the school also offers research fellowship opportunities at the postdoctoral level through the National Academies' National Research Council research associateship program.

On 9 June 1909, Secretary of the Navy George von L. Meyer signed General Order No. 27, establishing a school of marine engineering at Annapolis, Maryland.

On 31 October 1912, Meyer signed Navy General Order No. 233, which renamed the school the Postgraduate Department of the United States Naval Academy. The order established courses of study in ordnance and gunnery, electrical engineering, radio telegraphy, naval construction, and civil engineering and continued the program in marine engineering.

During World War II, Fleet Admiral Ernest King, Chief of Naval Operations and Commander-in-Chief United States Fleet, established a commission to review the role of graduate education in the Navy. In 1945, Congress passed legislation to make the school a fully accredited, degree-granting graduate institution. Two years later, Congress adopted legislation authorizing the purchase of an independent campus for the school.

A postwar review team, which had examined 25 sites nationwide, had recommended the old Hotel Del Monte in Monterey, California as a new home for the Postgraduate School. During World War II, the Navy had leased the facilities, first for a pre-flight training school, then for part of the Electronics Training Program. Negotiations with the Del Monte Properties Company led to the purchase of the hotel and 627 acres (254 ha) of surrounding land for $2.13 million.

The Naval Postgraduate School moved to Monterey in December 1951. Today, the school has over 40 programs of study including highly regarded M.S. and PhD programs in management, national security affairs, electrical and computer engineering, mechanical and astronautical engineering, systems engineering, space systems and satellite engineering, physics, oceanography meteorology, and other disciplines, all with an emphasis on military applications.

Former Guantanamo Bay Naval Base commander and World War II and Korean War veteran, RADM Edward J. O'Donnell, assumed the role as superintendent of the school in 1965. He himself graduated from the school in the 1930s with a degree in ordnance engineering. He would leave the role of superintendent in 1967 after retiring from the Navy.

The Naval Postgraduate School has graduated more than 40 astronauts, greater than any other graduate school in the country. The school is home to the Center for Information Systems Security Studies and Research (CISR) and the Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS). CISR is America's foremost center for defense-related research and education in Information Assurance (IA), Inherently Trustworthy Systems (ITC), and defensive information warfare; and CHDS provides the first homeland security master's degree in the United States.

On 27 November 2012, Vice Admiral Daniel T. Oliver (retired) and Provost Dr. Leonard Ferrari were relieved of duty by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus. A Navy press release cited findings from a Naval Inspector General investigation which included Oliver's misuse of standard contracting procedures to circumvent federal hiring and compensation authorities. The investigation also found that both Oliver and Ferrari "inappropriately accepted gifts from an independent private foundation organized to support the school."

In October 2013, retired Vice Adm. Ronald A. Route became the second civilian president of the Naval Postgraduate School. Vice Adm. Ann E. Rondeau relieved Route to become the 49th president of the university in January 2019.

In 2019, NPS renamed its business school, the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy, to the Graduate School of Defense Management (GSDM) in an effort to better signal its unique defense-focused identity and mission to strategic stakeholders and its academic peers. GSDM offers degree programs in nine different fields, ranging from logistics to information technology management to manpower, as well as three, unique distance learning programs.

In December 2020, NPS leadership officially commissioned the Wayne P. Hughes Jr. Naval Warfare Studies Institute (NWSI) NWSI's mission is to expedite the DON's access to the university's intellect and resources for solving warfighting issues. NWSI consists of NPS' Senior Service Representatives and Warfare Chairs, as well as the Military Associate Deans of all four NPS graduate schools (international studies, operational and information sciences, engineering and applied sciences, and defense management). NWSI provides operational and functional expertise as well as access to all areas of study and research, every faculty member and the entire student body. NWSI also partners with outside entities, including the Naval War College, that complement their educational and research activities.

In 2021, NPS refurbished a county wastewater treatment plant into an all-domain defense technology lab, The Sea Land Air Military Research (SLAMR) lab. Situated just across the street from NPS's main campus, the SLAMR facility houses a series of open-air water treatment tanks that were recently renovated and now serve as SLAMR's aquatic environment laboratory. SLAMR uses the existing infrastructure, such as multiple 450,000 gallon water tanks that have been recently cleaned and renovated, as an affordable and sustainable location for research projects focusing on national defense applications in robotics, autonomous systems, cybersecurity and maritime related 5G telecommunications.

The SLAMR lab site will see moderate day-to-day activity with a handful of researchers on site, and with its water-based capabilities, it will also be a key venue for NPS' quarterly Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX) event that hosts research collaborators from around the country. The location also provides a great site for youth STEM activities and the SLAMR lab has already hosted a regional high school underwater robotics competition.

NPS offers graduate programs through four graduate schools and twelve departments. The different schools and departments offer various PhD and M.S.-level degrees:

• Graduate School of Defense Management includes the academic groups:
  • Acquisition Management
  • Enterprise Management
  • Financial Management
  • Management
  • Manpower and Economics
  • Operations and Logistics Management

• Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, includes the units:
  • Applied Mathematics Department
  • Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
  • Mechanical and Astronautical Engineering Department
  • Meteorology Department
  • Oceanography Department
  • Physics Department
  • Systems Engineering Department
  • Space Systems Academic Group
  • Navigation Systems Engineering Institute
  • Under Sea Warfare Systems Academic Committee
  • Remote Sensing Center
  • Spacecraft Robotics Laboratory

• Graduate School of Operational & Information Sciences includes the departments, located in Glasgow Hall, which has 50 stairs:
  • Computer Sciences
  • Defense Analysis
  • Information Sciences
  • Operations Research

• Graduate School of International & Defense Studies with as of August 2024 nineteen centers:
  • Center for Additive Manufacturing
  • Center for Autonomous Vehicle Research (CAVR)
  • Center for Cyber Warfare
  • Center for Cybersecurity and Cyber Operations (C3O)
  • Center for Infrastructure Defense (CID)
  • Center for Joint Services Electronic Warfare
  • Center for Materials Research (CMR)
  • Center for Modeling Human Behavior (CMHB)
  • Center for Multi-INT Studies (CMIS)
  • Center for Network Innovation and Experimentation (CENETIX)
  • Center on Combating Hybrid Threats
  • Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing Research and Education (CAMRE)
  • Common Operational Research Environment (CORE) Lab
  • DOD Information Strategy Research Center
  • Littoral Operations Center (LOC)
  • Naval Innovation Center
  • SEED Center for Data Farming (Simulation Experiments & Efficient Designs)
  • Spacecraft Research and Design Center (SRDC)
  • TurboPropulsion Laboratory

Center for Homeland Defense and Security Emergency responders including local, tribal, state, and federal can enroll in a variety of programs including online distributed learning program, executive education programs, and most prominently a Master of Arts program.

Masters of Arts Program The M.A. program is offered at no cost to eligible local, tribal, state, and federal officials. To accommodate participants' time constraints, NPS requires students to be in residence only two weeks every quarter (for a total of twelve weeks for the whole program). Students complete the remainder of their coursework online.

NPS students are mostly active-duty officers from all branches of the U.S. military, although U.S. government civilians and officers from approximately 30 partner countries can also matriculate under a variety of programs. Most of the faculty are civilians.

• Air Force Institute of Technology, the US Air Force sister school of NPS
• America's Army, a training video game developed at the MOVES Institute at NPS
• Naval Postgraduate School's Center for Asymmetric Warfare (CAW)
• Centre d'Etudes Diplomatiques et Stratégiques
• Center for Homeland Defense and Security
• Defense Language Institute
• Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center

• Official website
• NPS Archive: Calhoun