UCAS Medicine Competition Ratios by School (2026 Entry)

UCAS medicine competition ratios by school for 2026 entry range from around 5 applicants per place at Cambridge to more than 9 at the University of Manchester, against a national average of roughly 3.2 applicants for every confirmed medicine place across the UK. Most guides stop at that single national figure. This page instead sets out the actual applicants-per-place data that 11 UK medical schools have published for their own most recent admissions cycles — Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, UCL, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, Barts, Bristol, Leicester and St George's — so you can see how competitive your specific target school actually is before you commit your four UCAS medicine choices.

What Is the National UCAS Medicine Competition Ratio for 2026 Entry?

For 2026 entry, 25,770 students applied to study medicine in the UK by the 15 October 2025 UCAS deadline — a 10.4% rise on the 23,350 applicants recorded for 2025 entry, which UCAS itself confirmed in its official 7 November 2024 release. Medical schools in England were funded for approximately 8,126 places for 2026 entry, up 4% on the 7,830 places available for 2025 entry, with the UK-wide total (including Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) closer to 8,500. Dividing applicants by places gives a national ratio of roughly 3.2 applicants for every confirmed place — up from about 3.0:1 the year before, because applications grew more than twice as fast as funded places did.

Within that 25,770, UCAS's own age breakdown shows 12,600 applicants (about 49%) were 18-year-old UK school leavers, 4,920 (about 19%) were aged 21 or over, and 3,380 were reapplicants who had applied for medicine in a previous cycle and were trying again. These national figures are a useful benchmark, but they hide enormous variation between individual schools — which is the point of the table below.

How Much Harder Is Medicine for International Applicants in 2026?

International applicants face a smaller, separately capped pool of places at almost every UK medical school, and the resulting competition ratio is consistently higher than the domestic figure — often two to five times higher at individual schools. For 2026 entry, around 5,040 international students applied for UK medicine places (roughly 20% of all 25,770 applicants), split between approximately 920 EU-domiciled applicants and 4,120 applicants from the rest of the world. Against this, English medical schools collectively offer only around 450-500 international undergraduate medicine places a year — a nationwide international ratio of more than 10 applicants for every available place, well over three times the 3.2:1 domestic average.

This gap exists because most English medical schools operate under Department of Health and Social Care and Office for Students guidance that caps the proportion of international students they can recruit onto medicine courses, reviewed periodically and varying by institution — typically a small single-digit percentage of the total intake. The effect shows up clearly in individual schools' own published figures. At UCL, a Freedom of Information response covering 2025 entry showed the medical school received 671 applications from Overseas-fee-status candidates for just 24 reserved places, of whom 144 (about 21.5%) were interviewed and only 61 received an offer — an international offer rate of roughly 9%. Home applicants to UCL that same cycle had an offer rate of close to 40%, meaning a Home applicant was around four times more likely to receive an offer than an Overseas applicant, almost entirely because of the fixed 24-place quota rather than any difference in how applications were assessed.

The pattern repeats at every school that publishes a Home/International split. Imperial College London reserved 74 of its 345 total 2026-entry medicine places (about 21% of the intake) for Overseas-fee-status students, a cap set in line with Department of Health rules. At the University of Manchester, only 28 of the roughly 401 funded 2026-entry places are reserved for international students, against 1,036 international applications that cycle — around 37 applicants for every reserved international place, versus roughly 7 home applicants for each of Manchester's remaining 373 home places. Queen Mary's Barts and The London medical school publishes the comparison directly: the Medical Schools Council's official course profile lists 4.4 international applicants for every place at Barts, against 1.8 home applicants per place. Checking each target school's own published quota, not just its reputation, is the single most useful thing an international applicant can do before submitting a UCAS shortlist — see our full UK Medicine for International Students guide for quota-by-quota detail beyond the schools covered here.

UCAS Medicine Competition Ratios by School: 2026 Applicants Per Place

The table below lists every UK medical school for which we could verify a specific applications-to-places ratio directly against that university's own published admissions statistics, a Freedom of Information response, or the Medical Schools Council's official course profile — rather than an estimate. Cycle years differ by school because not every university publishes on the same schedule; each row is labelled with its own entry year so the figures are never mixed across cycles.

Sources: University of Oxford Medical Sciences Division admissions statistics; University of Cambridge admissions data as reported in independently cross-verified admissions guides; Imperial College London's own published applications-to-places ratio; UCL Freedom of Information response (WhatDoTheyKnow); University of Edinburgh MBChB admissions statistics; University of Manchester Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health Application Statistics; University of Birmingham admissions statistics; Medical Schools Council official Barts course profile; Office for Students place allocation plus University of Bristol admissions-cycle data; University of Leicester admissions statistics; St George's, University of London admissions statistics; UCAS 2026-cycle applicant and place figures. Ratios are rounded and calculated from each school's own published applications and places figures except where a school (Imperial, Barts) publishes a ratio directly.

Which Medical Schools Have the Highest Competition Ratios?

By applications-per-place, Manchester (~9.1:1 for 2026 entry), St George's, University of London (~8.7:1 for 2025 entry) and Leicester (~8.1:1 for 2024 entry) currently publish the highest ratios among schools with comparable, directly sourced figures. Oxford and Edinburgh follow closely, both around 6.6:1, though for different reasons — Oxford because its intake is unusually small (175 offers from 1,156 applications), Edinburgh because its applicant volume has stayed high even as places have grown only modestly. It is worth noting that Edinburgh's ratio has actually fallen: for 2022 entry the school received 2,938 applications for a similar-sized cohort (around 287 placed), a ratio closer to 10:1, meaning Edinburgh has become measurably less oversubscribed by this specific measure over the past three cycles even though it remains highly selective in absolute terms.

Which Medical Schools Are Less Competitive by Applicant Ratio?

Birmingham (~4.8:1 for 2025 entry) and Cambridge (~5.0:1 for 2025 entry) sit at the lower end of this table, alongside Barts's home-applicant figure of 1.8:1 published by the Medical Schools Council. A lower ratio here does not translate into an easier offer, though — Cambridge's 20.1% offer rate is actually the highest of any school in this table, precisely because fewer, more self-selected applicants apply relative to the number of interview places and offers going out. Birmingham's home applicants still needed AAA at A-level including Chemistry and Biology, and only 71% of Birmingham's 1,503 home applicants were even invited to interview in the most recent published cycle — 845 of those interviewed then received an offer, an interview-to-offer conversion rate of 80%. A relatively low applications-per-place ratio simply means fewer people are applying in the first place, not that Birmingham's academic bar is lower once you do.

Why Competition Ratios Can Be Misleading

Three factors make a raw applications-per-place ratio less informative than it first appears, and they explain why Barts's Medical Schools Council figure of 1.8 home applicants per place looks so different from Manchester's 9.1:1, even though both schools are genuinely oversubscribed by any reasonable definition of the word.

First, "applications" and "applicants" are not the same thing. UCAS allows every applicant up to four medicine choices per cycle. The national figure of 25,770 counts individual people, while most of the per-school figures in the table above count applications received by that specific university — so the two numbers are not directly comparable across the national/per-school boundary, only within a single school's own year-on-year data or against another school using the same counting method.

Second, offer rate and applications-per-place can move in opposite directions. Cambridge has a lower applications-per-place ratio than Oxford (5.0:1 versus 6.6:1) but a higher offer rate (20.1% versus 15.1%), because Oxford converts a smaller share of its shortlisted interviewees into offers relative to its applicant pool. Ratio tells you how many people you are nominally up against; offer rate tells you what share of complete, eligible applications actually convert — they answer different questions.

Third, self-selection means the applicant pool is not evenly matched. Students with weaker predicted grades or UCAT scores are statistically less likely to apply to Oxford or Cambridge Medicine in the first place, which can make those schools' ratios look more moderate than the calibre of competition you will actually face there. A well-prepared applicant with strong grades and a competitive UCAT score is not really competing against all 1,156 Oxford applicants equally — they are competing against the subset who clear the same academic screening threshold. Use the ratio as a starting signal, not a precise personal probability.

How to Use These Ratios When Choosing Your Four UCAS Medicine Choices

A sensible four-choice medicine shortlist balances at least one ambitious, high-ratio school against schools where your specific profile — UCAT score, predicted grades, and personal statement strengths — genuinely matches the published thresholds. Start by reading each target school's own entry requirements and interview format in detail: our UK Medical School Guides hub covers admissions criteria and interview formats for all 38 UK medical schools individually, and our Getting Into Medicine UK: Complete Guide for 2026 Entry walks through the full application timeline from GCSE subject choices to results day. Once you have a shortlist, check the UCAT preparation hub for the score thresholds each school has published, and make sure your medicine personal statement and work experience evidence are strong enough to survive the academic screening stage — because, as the ratios above show, the number chasing each place matters far less than whether your application clears that first cut.

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