Dental Schools Ranked by UCAT Score 2027 Entry

The UCAT is the admissions test every one of the seventeen UK universities offering dentistry for 2027 entry requires, and no two of them weigh it the same way. Manchester published a threshold of 2200 for 2026 entry. Queen Mary asks for the fourth decile or above. Cardiff scores applications on achieved qualifications and says the UCAT score may also be used. This page ranks all seventeen by how much of the shortlist the test actually decides.

That distinction matters more than any league table. A candidate sitting a little above the national mean is competitive at a school that ranks applicants against each other, and effectively out of contention at a school that draws its line at the ninth decile. Both facts are published. Neither appears on a rankings page.

Where Every UK Dental School Sits on the UCAT Weighting Scale

The UCAT Consortium's own university list is the only complete register of which courses require the test. It states plainly: "You are required to sit the UCAT 2026 if you are applying for entry in 2027 (or deferred entry in 2028) to a relevant course at a UCAT Consortium University." Seventeen UK universities appear on it with a dentistry course code.

Read across all seventeen admissions pages and five mechanisms emerge. A school either publishes a numerical threshold, sets one after applications close and keeps it private, folds the UCAT into a scored formula against academic performance, ranks applicants on the score with no stated weight, or treats it as secondary to qualifications already achieved. The table below places each school in the group its own wording puts it in.

Two things follow immediately. First, only two of the seventeen give a candidate a number to measure themselves against on the scale the test has used since 2025. Second, the Situational Judgement band counts towards selection at seven of the seventeen, in five different ways, and is formally ignored at two, so the same score report can be read very differently depending on which four courses go on the UCAS form.

The Two Schools That Publish a Number You Can Aim At

Manchester's dental school publishes the fullest admissions data in the sector, and it is the only dental school to have published a threshold on the current 900 to 2700 scale. Its application statistics page gives an A206 threshold of 2200 for standard applicants at 2026 entry and 2100 for Widening Participation Plus applicants.

The wording is precise and worth reading twice. Applicants "who achieved an overall UCAT score that exceeded these thresholds were automatically invited to interview". It is a guarantee, not a gate. Below the line, Manchester says the application still goes forward: candidates "will firstly be ranked according to their overall UCAT score, and then the Academic Lead for Admissions will begin to assess the applications taking into account other information". A score a little below the Manchester line is not a rejection; it is a place in a queue.

The 2025-entry column is the one that trips people up. Those figures sit on the old 3600-point scale and are not comparable with 2200. Manchester's own footnote explains the range: the 2025-entry threshold moved between 2840 and 2950 "depending on situational judgement test (SJT) band". A strong band bought roughly 110 points of headroom.

Manchester also publishes the volume behind the numbers. At 2026 entry it received 981 home applications, shortlisted 319 of them, and made 139 offers; on the overseas side, 135 applications produced 37 interviews and 9 offers. The home shortlisting rate of 32 per cent is the clearest published statement of how many dentistry applicants are removed on the UCAT alone.

Bristol is the second. Its 2027-entry BDS page states that "the combined score from all subtests, with the exception of Situational Judgement, will be used to select applicants for interview", and then discloses the outcome of the previous cycle: "For 2026 entry, the final UCAT threshold score to be invited to interview was 2340 for home applicants and 1970 for overseas applicants."

The gap between those two figures is the single largest home-versus-overseas differential published by any UK dental school: 370 points. Bristol adds the necessary warning that "the number used as a threshold for interview is subject to change year-on-year", which is honest, because the threshold is the by-product of who applied, not a standard set in advance.

Fourth Decile and Average or Above, Converted Into Points

Queen Mary and Sheffield both publish a 2027-entry rule rather than a score, and both rules are useless until they are converted. Queen Mary's 2027 dentistry course page lists the entry requirement as "UCAT Fourth decile or above, SJT Bands 1- 3". Sheffield's 2027-entry selection page sets phase 1 screening at "Average or above total score in the cognitive components in UCAT" together with "Achieving bands 1 or 2 in the UCAT Situational Judgement Test".

Both rules are defined against the national candidate distribution, which the UCAT Consortium publishes after testing closes. The 2026 distribution will not exist until results reach universities in early November 2026, so the nearest usable reference is the 2025 test, the first sitting without Abstract Reasoning and therefore the first on the same 900 to 2700 scale that 2027 applicants will sit.

The figures come from the Consortium's 2025 test statistics, which record that "the final total cognitive mean scaled score is 1891" from 41,354 tests taken up to 26 September 2025.

Placed on that table, the published rules stop looking similar. Queen Mary's floor of 1820 admits roughly the top 60 per cent of the national cohort. Sheffield's bar of 1891 removes a little over half. Manchester's automatic invitation at 2200 sits between the eighth decile (2100) and the ninth (2220), so it rewards roughly the top 15 per cent, and Bristol's home threshold of 2340 sat above the ninth decile entirely, meaning fewer than one candidate in ten cleared it.

Those four schools therefore span about a 520-point band of published expectation, on the same test, in the same cycle. The estimate above is our own arithmetic, placing each published rule against the Consortium's published decile table; it is not a figure any of the four universities has stated, and the 2026 distribution will move all of it. What will not move is the ordering.

Aberdeen Publishes the Only Exact Weighting in the Sector

Every school that says the UCAT is "considered alongside" academic performance leaves the reader guessing at the ratio. Aberdeen does not. Its Institute of Dentistry UCAT page states that "a minimum UCAT cut-off score is NOT used" and that "a score is allocated based on the applicant's overall performance in UCAT compared with all other applicants to Aberdeen (Academic - 60%, UCAT - 40%)".

Forty per cent is a large share for a school that publishes no threshold, and it is the only percentage of its kind on any UK dental admissions page. It also changes how an Aberdeen application should be read: because the UCAT score is converted into a relative rank against that year's Aberdeen applicants rather than a national figure, the same raw score is worth different amounts in different years.

Aberdeen publishes the consequence rather than the rule, in the form of the lowest score actually invited to interview.

The pattern is the striking part. In three of the five years shown, a rest-of-UK applicant needed between 290 and 410 more points than a Scottish-fee applicant to reach the same interview room: 410 in 2021, 350 in 2023 and 290 in 2024. The gap narrowed to 150 in 2025, and in 2022 the two figures were identical at 2250. Aberdeen's table is labelled by year on its own page and covers cycles on the pre-2025 scale, so the numbers cannot be compared with a 2026 or 2027 result; the gap between the two rows can.

Aberdeen also handles the Situational Judgement Test differently from anyone else: "the SJT will not be scored, but it may be used in offer making when there are candidates with similar scores." It is a tie-break applied at the end, not a filter applied at the start.

The Situational Judgement Band Splits the Sector Five Ways

The SJT is reported as a band from 1 to 4, with band 1 the highest, and it is never included in the 900 to 2700 cognitive total. In the 2025 sitting, 21 per cent of candidates were placed in band 1, 39 per cent in band 2, 29 per cent in band 3 and 10 per cent in band 4. A dentistry applicant needs to know which of five treatments each of their four choices applies.

Sheffield is the strictest published position in UK dentistry. Requiring band 1 or 2 removes both band 3 and band 4, which together accounted for 39 per cent of the 2025 cohort, before a single academic record is read. Liverpool's page is the bluntest: "a score of Band 4 in Situational Judgement would however not be deemed a competitive enough score for the applicant to be considered for the BDS programme."

Birmingham sits at the opposite pole and says so in terms: "the band score for the Situational Judgement Test (SJT) component of UCAT will not be used at any stage, although this may change in the future." East Anglia's approach is different again, and easy to misread as leniency: the band does count, but "the SJT component score is included within the interview score", so it cannot cost an applicant an interview and can cost them an offer.

Where a Strong Academic Record Can Outweigh the Test

At four schools the UCAT is genuinely secondary, and applicants with modest scores and strong grades should read these pages closely before writing off dentistry. This is a fact about the schools' published methods rather than a recommendation; the strategic question of how to build a list around a low score is covered separately in our guide to low UCAT score dentistry options.

Cardiff has the weakest published role for the test of any UK dental school. Its BDS course page states that "applications are typically scored using achieved qualifications" and adds only that the "UCAT score may also be used". The word doing the work is "may".

Leeds makes the trade-off explicit. Its faculty UCAT page describes academic criteria and the UCAT combining "to form a total score, which we use to rank applicants", and then states outright: "a high academic score can compensate for a lower UCAT score, and vice versa. There is no pre-determined 'cut-off' score." Leeds is also the newest user of the test in this group, having "began using UCAT in 2024", which is why its published data is thinner than its neighbours'.

Birmingham's page is worth reading for the ordering rather than the weighting. Academic requirements are screened first, personal statements are reviewed second for "motivations to do the course, specific mentions of Dentistry and reasoning behind the application", and only then is "the UCAT score used to determine if an interview is offered". Its published statistics for 2025 entry show 71 home places, 791 applications and 317 interviews, with the lowest UCAT score interviewed at 2870 on the old scale against a mean of 3013 — a spread of 143 points between the weakest and the average successful shortlisting.

Queen's University Belfast ranks "on academic ability and performance in UCAT", with 45 places available to UK and Republic of Ireland applicants. It is the only dental school to print its own 2027-entry deadline on the course page: 18:00 on 15 October 2026.

What the Dental Schools Refuse to Publish, and One Page That Is Out of Date

An honest ranking has to say where the evidence runs out. Four schools give an applicant nothing usable for 2027 entry, and each does so for a different reason.

Newcastle declines on principle. Its A206 page states that the threshold "is dependent on the scores achieved by those applicants who apply to our Dental School in the current cycle. Therefore information on what the threshold is, is not available to prospective students." It does publish history: a downloadable overview gives 2800 standard and 2770 contextual at 2025 entry, 2680 and 2600 at 2024 entry, and 2790 and 2690 at 2023 entry. The most recent year on that document is 2025 entry, all of it on the pre-2025 scale.

Dundee's data has aged out. Its admissions statistics page is unusually detailed — 783 applications at 2023/24 entry, 334 interviews, an average interviewed UCAT of 2567, a lowest of 1940 and 116 offers — but 2023/24 entry is the most recent cycle published, and Dundee itself warns that after the scale changed from 3600 to 2700 the tables "will not be directly comparable to their test results".

Plymouth publishes the caveat without the number. Its BDS page states that "none of the typical offers listed below are necessarily the threshold for interview selection" and that application volume and UCAT performance "influence the threshold". Correct, and of no help in choosing four courses.

Glasgow publishes nothing at all. Its 2027 undergraduate dentistry entry requirements list "UCAT" and "Interview" as line items with no accompanying statement about scoring, ranking or thresholds, and no separate dental admissions policy was reachable from that page when it was checked on 18 August 2026. Glasgow is the one school on this list we could not place, and we have not guessed.

One further caution, because it affects how a published sentence should be read. King's College London's dentistry entry-requirements page states that "the overall UCAT score averaged across the four subtests is given more consideration than the individual subtest scores". Since the 2025 sitting the UCAT has had three cognitive subtests, not four. King's substantive rules are clear enough — no threshold in any year, applications "ranked based on GCSE/IGCSE performance, UCAT score and contextual information", and the SJT taken into account — but the arithmetic in that sentence describes a test that no longer exists, as the page stood on 18 August 2026.

Reading Your Own Score Against the 2027 Cycle Calendar

Every rule above is applied at a fixed point in a fixed sequence, and the sequence is what makes the ranking usable. The UCAT Consortium's 2026 key dates set it out.

The consequence is uncomfortable and worth stating plainly: you choose your four courses in October against rules published for a distribution that will not be confirmed until November. Nobody can tell you in September what Manchester's 2027-entry threshold will be, because Manchester will not know either. What you can do is read your own score against the published mechanism — a fixed decile rule, a fixed weighting, a rank order — because those change far less often than the numbers do.

Three practical readings follow from the table at the top of this page. A candidate above the ninth decile can treat any of the seventeen as reachable and should choose on course structure and location instead. A candidate near the mean should weight the list toward schools that rank rather than threshold, and toward Cardiff and Leeds where the academic record can carry more. A candidate holding a band 3 or band 4 SJT result should check Sheffield and Liverpool first, because that single letter decides those applications before anything else is read.

For the wider application — grades, personal statement, work experience and the graduate routes — see our overview of UK dentistry admissions, the companion piece on graduate entry dentistry courses compared, and, if you are looking at courses outside the Consortium list, dental schools without the UCAT for 2027. Applicants weighing dentistry against medicine can compare this ranking with our equivalent analysis of medical schools ranked by UCAT score. Once interviews are confirmed, our guide to dental school interview questions and MMI stations covers what comes next.

Frequently Asked Questions

How This Ranking Was Checked

Every figure above was taken from a university's own admissions page, the UCAT Consortium's own statistics, or a document published by the school itself, and each is linked in the text so you can open the source and check it. Where a school publishes nothing, this page says so rather than filling the gap with an estimate from elsewhere. The one calculation that is ours is the placement of each published rule on the Consortium's 2025 decile table, and it is labelled as such where it appears.

Leading Tuition is a UK tuition practice working with students at GCSE, A-level and university entry, including applicants to medicine and dentistry. We are rated Excellent on Trustpilot, 4.8 out of 5 from 54 reviews, and 91% of our students achieve their desired grades. Those are practice-wide figures across every level we teach, not a dentistry cohort; we do not publish a subject-by-subject offer rate because we do not hold one we could evidence.