He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1971. In 1974, Polanyi was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 1979, he was promoted to Companion. He has received many other awards throughout his career, including the Marlow Medal of the Faraday Society in 1962, Centenary Medal of the British Chemical Society in 1965, the Steacie Prize for Natural Sciences in 1965 (shared), the Noranda Award of the Chemical Institute of Canada in 1967, the Henry Marshall Tory Medal of the Royal Society of Canada in 1977, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1982 (shared), the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Prize in 1988, the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1989, and the John C. Polanyi Lecture Award of the Canadian Society for Chemistry in 1992. In 2007, Polanyi was awarded the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. The Royal Society of Chemistry honoured Polanyi as their 2010 Faraday Lectureship Prize.