In addition to his research work, he is well known for his books on algorithms and formal languages coauthored with Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho, regarded as classic texts in the field.

In 1986 he received the Turing Award (jointly with Robert Tarjan) "for fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures."

In 2005 he received the Harry H. Goode Memorial Award "for fundamental contributions to the study of algorithms and their applications in information processing.

[10] In 2020, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen opened a Hopcroft Institute for Advanced Information Sciences and designated him as an Einstein professor.

[11] Hopcroft is also the co-recipient (with Jeffrey Ullman) of the 2010 IEEE John von Neumann Medal for "laying the foundations for the fields of automata and language theory and many seminal contributions to theoretical computer science.