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The son of a Jewish fur trader, Nikolaus Pevsner was born in Leipzig, Saxony. He studied art history at the Universities of Leipzig, Munich, Berlin, and Frankfurt/Main, completing a PhD in 1924 on the baroque merchant houses of Leipzig. In 1923 he married Carola ('Lola') Kurlbaum, the daughter of distinguished Leipzig lawyer Alfred Kurlbaum. He worked as an assistant keeper at the Dresden Gallery (1924–28). During this period he became interested in modernist architecture after visits to the Bauhaus in Dessau and Le Corbusier's Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau at the Paris Exhibition of 1925. In 1928 he contributed the volume on Italian baroque painting to the Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft, a multi-volume series providing an overview of the history of European art. He taught at the University of Göttingen (1929–33), offering a specialist course on English art and architecture.

According to Games (2002), he was an admirer of some of the economic policies of the early Hitler regime, but was caught up in the ban on Jews being employed by the Nazi state shortly after Hitler's accession to power and was required to step down from Göttingen in May 1933. Later that year he moved to England. His first post was a two-year research fellowship at the University of Birmingham, found for him by friends in Birmingham and funded by the Academic Assistance Council. A study of the role of the designer in the industrial process, the research produced a generally critical account of design standards in Britain which he published as An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England (Cambridge University Press, 1937). He was subsequently employed as a buyer of modern textiles, glass and ceramics for the Gordon Russell furniture showrooms in London.

By this time he had also completed the influential account of England's contribution to international modernism which laid the foundation of his career in England as an architectural historian. Pioneers of the Modern Movement: from William Morris to Walter Gropius was published by Faber & Faber in 1936: it has since gone through several editions and revisions and been translated into many languages. Although its ardent championing of modernism as the one true style of the twentieth century has long been challenged, it remains an important point of reference in the teaching of the history of modern design.

In 1940, Pevsner was interned as an enemy alien in Huyton, Liverpool, despite having been included in the Nazi Black Book as hostile to the Hitler regime. He was released after three months on the intervention of, among others, Frank Pick, then Director-General of the Ministry of Information. He spent some time in the months after the Blitz clearing bomb debris, and wrote reviews and art criticism for the Ministry of Information's Die Zeitung, an anti-Nazi publication for Germans living in England. He also completed for Penguin Books the Pelican paperback An Outline of European Architecture which he had begun to develop while in internment. Outline would eventually go into seven editions, be translated into sixteen languages, and sell more than half a million copies.

In 1942 Pevsner finally secured two regular positions. From 1936 onwards he had been a frequent contributor to the Architectural Review and from 1943-45 he stood in as its acting editor while the regular editor J.M. Richards was on active service. Early signs of a lifelong interest in Victorian architecture appeared in a series written under the pseudonym of 'Peter F.R. Donner': Pevsner's 'Treasure Hunts'  guided readers down selected London streets pointing out architectural treasures of the 19th century. He was also closely involved with the Review's proprietor, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, in evolving the magazine's theories on Picturesque planning.

In 1942 Pevsner was also appointed a part-time lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London; he would eventually retire from the college in 1969 as its first professor of art history. He lectured at Cambridge for almost thirty years, having been Slade professor there for a record six years from 1949-1955, and would also hold the Slade professorship in Oxford in 1968.

Framing all this was his career as a writer and editor. After moving to England, Pevsner had found that the study of architectural history had little status in academic circles, and the amount of information available, especially to travellers wanting to inform themselves about the architecture of a particular district, was limited. Invited by Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books, for whom he had written his Outline and also edited the King Penguin series, to suggest ideas for future publications, he proposed a series of comprehensive county guides to rectify this shortcoming. Work on the Buildings of England series began in 1945, and the first volume was published in 1951. Pevsner wrote 32 of the books himself and 10 with collaborators, with a further 4 of the original series written by others. Since his death, work has continued on the series, which has been extended to cover the rest of the United Kingdom, under the title Pevsner Architectural Guides (now published by Yale University Press). As well as The Buildings of England, Pevsner also proposed to Penguin the Pelican History of Art series (1953- ), a multi-volume survey on the model of the German Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft, which he would himself edit. Many individual volumes are regarded as classics.

In 1946 Pevsner made the first of several broadcasts on the BBC Third Programme, presenting nine talks in all up to 1950, examining painters and European art eras. By 1977 he had presented 78 talks for the BBC including the Reith Lectures in 1955 on "The Englishness of English Art".

Pevsner was a founding member in 1957 of the Victorian Society, the national charity for the study and protection of Victorian and Edwardian architecture and other arts. In 1964 he was invited to become its chairman, and steered it through its formative years, fighting alongside John Betjeman, Hugh Casson and others to save houses, churches, railway stations and other monuments of the Victorian age. He served for ten years (1960-70) as a member of the National Advisory Council on Art Education (or Coldstream Committee), campaigning for art history to be a compulsory element in the curriculum of art schools. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1965 and awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1967. Having assumed British citizenship in 1946, Pevsner was granted the CBE in 1953 and was knighted in 1969 'for services to art and architecture'.

Lola Pevsner died in 1963. Pevsner himself died in London in August 1983 and his memorial service was held at the Church of Christ the King, Bloomsbury the following December, with the memorial address being given by Alec Clifton-Taylor, a friend of fifty years. He is buried in the churchyard of St Peter, Clyffe Pypard in Wiltshire.

Notable ideas and theories "A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal." From An Outline of European Architecture, 1943. Pevsner also described the three ways aesthetic appeal could manifest itself in architecture: in a building's façade, the material volumes or the interior.