Medical Schools Ranked by UCAT Score Required for 2027 Entry

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Every UK medical school requires the UCAT, but they do not use it the same way. For 2027 entry — based on the UCAT sat in the 2026 test window, July to September 2026 — roughly half of the 38 UK medical schools we cover publish a specific numeric interview threshold, while the other half rank applicants using deciles, points systems, or a fully holistic combined score with no stated cut-off at all. This page ranks every school we could verify against its own admissions pages or officially published statistics for the current cycle, states plainly where a school does not publish a hard number, and links through to our full guide for all 38 schools.

How We Ranked UK Medical Schools by UCAT Score for 2027 Entry

We checked each school’s own admissions or medical school pages directly, rather than relying on third-party aggregator sites, which frequently carry stale or unverified figures from earlier UCAT scoring scales. For 18 of the 38 schools we cover, we found a genuine, current, primary-sourced figure — either a published numeric interview threshold or an explicit statement that no fixed threshold exists, cross-checked where possible against the official UCAT Consortium test statistics. Where a school publishes multiple thresholds by fee category (Home, Rest of UK, Overseas, Access/contextual), we report all categories rather than collapsing them into one misleading average. Where the most recent published figure predates the 2025 UCAT format change — when Abstract Reasoning was withdrawn and the maximum cognitive score dropped from 3,600 to 2,700 — we flag it clearly rather than presenting it as directly comparable to current-cycle figures.

For the remaining 20 schools, we were not able to retrieve a current, primary-sourced numeric figure within the scope of this research pass. Rather than fill the gap with an invented or aggregator-sourced number, we list those schools by name with a direct link to their individual Leading Tuition guide, where our specialist tutors track school-specific detail in more depth.

Which Medical Schools Have the Highest UCAT Interview Thresholds for 2027 Entry?

The table below ranks the 16 schools where we verified a specific figure or an explicit “no fixed threshold” policy directly from the school’s own pages, ordered from the highest verified numeric threshold to schools that publish no cut-off at all. A lower position in this table does not mean a school is easier to get into — several of the schools with no published cut-off, including Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial, are among the most competitive in the country by any other measure.

Which Schools Don’t Publish a Hard UCAT Cut-Off, and Why?

Nine of the schools we verified directly told us, in their own words, that they do not operate a fixed or pre-published UCAT cut-off. Cambridge’s course page states outright that “there is no minimum threshold for UCAT score”. Bristol’s 2026 undergraduate admissions statement explains that “the number used as a threshold for interview is subject to change year-on-year depending on the strength of the cohort, therefore a specific score cannot be used with certainty”. Birmingham goes further and states there is “no minimum UCAT cut-off score” at all — UCAT contributes 40% of a combined score alongside 45% academic achievement and 15% contextual factors, with candidates ranked by national UCAT decile rather than raw score.

This matters for applicants because a school with no published threshold is not necessarily more lenient on the UCAT — it usually means the school is weighting the UCAT within a wider formula where a weaker score can still be offset by strong grades, a strong personal statement, or contextual data, and a strong score cannot substitute for weak academics. Nottingham’s points-based system, for example, caps the UCAT contribution at 40 points and doubles the weight of Verbal Reasoning specifically, while still requiring a Band 1–3 Situational Judgement Test result — Band 4 is an automatic rejection regardless of cognitive score.

Multi-Year UCAT Threshold Trends: Where the Data Exists

Very few schools publish more than one or two years of UCAT threshold history in a directly comparable format, partly because the 2025 test-format change (Abstract Reasoning withdrawn, maximum score cut from 3,600 to 2,700) makes older figures non-comparable to current ones. Two schools in our research gave us a genuine multi-year trend.

Newcastle University publishes A100 thresholds back to 2020 entry in its own UCAT Thresholds document, split by Home and International category from 2022 entry onward:

Figures are on the pre-2025 4-section UCAT scale (max 3,600). Newcastle moved to a points-based UCAT weighting (up to 60 points added to the academic score for Home applicants; UCAT-only ranking for International and graduate-entry A101 applicants) from 2025 entry and no longer publishes a single fixed threshold in the same format. Source: Newcastle University School of Medicine, UCAT Thresholds document.

University of St Andrews shows a smaller but still verifiable two-cycle trend, with a caveat about the underlying scale change:

St Andrews changed its own published scale between these two cycles (the UCAT maximum dropped from 3,600 to 2,700 after Abstract Reasoning was withdrawn), so the two rows are not directly comparable score-for-score, only in terms of relative competitiveness. Source: University of St Andrews School of Medicine admissions data page.

International Applicants and UCAT: Acceptance Rates by School

For students applying from outside the UK, the UCAT threshold is frequently only part of the picture — most UK medical schools ring-fence a small, separate quota of places for international applicants and apply either a higher threshold, a separate ranking process, or both. The figures below are drawn from each school’s own published admissions statistics for the most recent cycle we could verify.

How Should You Use This Ranking to Choose Where to Apply?

Because UCAS allows only four medical school choices, the practical value of this ranking is in building a realistic list rather than chasing the single “best” UCAT score. If your predicted or achieved UCAT score sits above 2,300, every school in our verified table is within reach on UCAT terms alone, though academic grades, the personal statement and interview performance still decide the outcome. If your score sits between 1,850 and 2,230, focus on the schools with lower published thresholds — Edinburgh, Aberdeen and St George’s — and on the holistic schools where a strong academic record and contextual profile can offset a mid-range UCAT score, such as Leeds, Nottingham or Birmingham. If your score is below the published thresholds shown here, the schools with no fixed cut-off are usually the stronger strategic choice, because a single weak numeric score cannot eliminate your application outright the way it can at a hard-threshold school.

It is also worth applying to at least one school from each side of this table — one with a known, hard threshold your score clears comfortably, and one holistic school where your wider application can carry more weight — rather than four schools that all use the UCAT the same way.

One further factual point worth flagging for 2027 entry applicants: the UCAT itself changed shape for the 2025 test sitting onward, dropping Abstract Reasoning and cutting the maximum cognitive score from 3,600 to 2,700 across Verbal Reasoning, Decision Making and Quantitative Reasoning. The Situational Judgement Test remains a separate banded score (1–4), and several schools — including Manchester, Nottingham and Edinburgh — automatically reject Band 4 SJT results regardless of cognitive score. If you are comparing your own UCAT result against any of the historical figures on this page dated 2024 entry or earlier, remember they were set on the old 3,600-point scale and are not directly comparable to a 2026-cycle score out of 2,700. For a full breakdown of how UCAT scoring works across every UK medical school, see our UCAT score requirements guide and our UCAT tutoring page.

Full A–Z List of UK Medical Schools We Cover

Every school below has its own full Leading Tuition guide covering entry requirements, UCAT and interview format, and application strategy in depth. This ranking page links to all 38.

• University of Aberdeen
• Anglia Ruskin University
• Aston University
• Barts and The London School of Medicine
• University of Birmingham
• Brighton and Sussex Medical School
• University of Bristol
• University of Cambridge
• Cardiff University
• University of Dundee
• University of East Anglia
• University of Edinburgh
• University of Exeter
• University of Glasgow
• Hull York Medical School
• Imperial College London
• Keele University
• King's College London
• Lancaster University
• University of Leeds
• University of Leicester
• University of Lincoln
• University of Liverpool
• University of Manchester
• Newcastle University
• University of Nottingham
• University of Oxford
• University of Plymouth
• Queen's University Belfast
• University of Sheffield
• University of Southampton
• University of St Andrews
• St George's, University of London
• University of Sunderland
• Swansea University
• University College London
• University of Central Lancashire
• University of Warwick

Also see our Medical School Guides hub, our Medicine Prep Hub, our UCAT admissions test page, and our MMI interview coaching page for related preparation resources.

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