In 1988, the Association for Symbolic Logic awarded him, Donald A. Martin and W. Hugh Woodin the Karp Prize for their work on the consistency of determinacy relative to large cardinals. In 2015, the European Set Theory Society awarded him and Ronald Jensen the Hausdorff Medal for their paper "K without the measurable".
In 2012, Steel held the Gödel Lecture titled The hereditarily ordinal definable sets in models of determinacy.