The University of Liverpool (abbreviated UOL) is a public research university in Liverpool, England. Founded in 1881 as University College Liverpool and affiliated with Victoria University in 1884, it received a royal charter from King Edward VII in 1903, thereby attaining the authority to award degrees independently. The university holds and operates assets on the National Heritage List, such as the Liverpool Royal Infirmary (origins in 1749), the Ness Botanic Gardens, and the Victoria Gallery & Museum.

Organised into three faculties divided by 35 schools and departments, the university offers more than 230 first degree courses across 103 subjects. It is a founding member of the Russell Group, and the research intensive association of universities in Northern England, the N8 Group. The phrase "redbrick university" was inspired by the Victoria Building; thus, the university claims to be the original redbrick university, using the phrase in its brand tag line.

Liverpool is the first UK university to establish departments in oceanography, civic design, architecture, and biochemistry (at the Johnston Laboratories), and also the first to establish an independent university campus in China, known as Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. The university also founded the University of Liverpool Mathematics School, a specialist A-level maths school, located on the university campus. The university announced a second international campus in India. The university has the ninth-largest endowment of any university in the UK, and in 2023/24, it had an income of £705.3 million, of which £123.3 million was from research grants and contracts, with an expenditure of £515.8 million.

As of 2024, the university holds four academic fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences and one of the British Academy. Ten Nobel Prize laureates have been affiliated with the University of Liverpool as alumni or academic staff, with notable alumni leading fields in medicine, law, business, engineering, the arts, politics, and technology. Graduates of the university are styled with the post-nominal letters, Lpool, to indicate the institution.

The university was established in 1881 as College Liverpool, admitting its first students in 1882. In 1884, it became part of the federal Victoria University. In 1894 Oliver Lodge, a professor at the university, made the world's first public radio transmission and two years later took the first surgical X-ray in the United Kingdom. The Liverpool University Press was founded in 1899, making it the third-oldest university press in England. Students in this period were awarded external degrees by the University of London.

Following a royal charter and an act of Parliament in 1903, it became an independent university (the University of Liverpool) with the right to confer its degrees. The next few years saw major developments at the university, including Sir Charles Sherrington's discovery of the synapse and William Blair-Bell's work on chemotherapy in the treatment of cancer. In the 1930s to 1940s, Sir James Chadwick and Sir Joseph Rotblat made major contributions to the development of the atomic bomb. From 1943 to 1966, Allan Downie, Professor of Bacteriology, was involved in the eradication of smallpox.

In 1994, the university was a founding member of the Russell Group, a collaboration of twenty leading research-intensive universities, as well as a founding member of the N8 Group in 2004. In the 21st century physicists, engineers and technicians from the University of Liverpool were involved in the construction of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, working on two of the four detectors in the LHC.

In 2004, Sylvan Learning, later known as Laureate International Universities, became the worldwide partner for University of Liverpool online. In 2019, it was announced that Kaplan Open Learning, part of Kaplan, Inc., would be the new partner for the University of Liverpool's online programmes. Laureate continued to provide some teaching provision for existing students until 2021.