A busy UCAS clearing for 2026

With proportionally less 18 year olds accepting their firm offer this year than last year, we are experiencing a particularly busy clearing period.

Overnight, 11,660 UK 18 year olds have been placed through clearing, and a further 18,480 have accepted an offer they were holding. Both numerically and proportionally, this represents an exceptional year. Looking at all applicants in all domiciles, 155,030 applicants are still in clearing (slightly above the trend) while 77,180 hold an offer but have not accepted it.

On aggregate just ten UK 18 year olds have turned down their firm place, a datapoint that backs up our hypothesis that high tariff providers (the kind of places applicants usually turn down firm offers to attend) have been keen to accept firm offer holders where they can. This isn’t necessarily dropping tariff requirements; remember that in this bumper year proportionally less applicants were placed at their firm offer.

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It makes sense to pull out activity in Scotland, where results day was a week earlier. Since 4 August, 450 Scotland-domiciled 18 year olds have been placed through clearing – with the majority of these decisions made shortly after results were known. Some 2,780 school leavers remain in clearing, with 420 still holding an offer.

The other Scottish point of interest is in cross-border flows as of the day after JCQ (or QS+10 if you prefer) just 520 Scottish 18 year olds have been placed outside of Scotland, while 4,260 rest of UK 18 year olds have been placed in Scotland).

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The big clearing (and indeed undergraduate recruitment) remains the appetite for high tariff providers to expand. We can see that high tariff providers recruited an extra 3,650 UK 18 year old since JCQ results day, a record number: the most since 2017. Some 44.34 per cent of placed 18 year old UK applicants have a place at high tariff provider – a record for this point in the cycle. Meanwhile lower tariff providers recruited just 1,650 (a record low outside of the pandemic) and medium tariff providers recruited 4,130 (the lowest number since 2022).

Of course, recruitment isn’t just about 18 year olds – but unfortunately for medium and low tariff providers the low performance extends to mature students too. And internationally – a record 72.33 per cent of international students placed via UCAS hold a place at a high-tariff provider on JCQ+1.

The combination of these to factors will have a yet another significant detrimental financial impact on medium and low tariff providers – although performance will vary from provider to provider within these groups.

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I’ll be updating this chart (and the status one) after each data release for the early part of clearing.

The shape of clearing

Though results day and clearing affect everyone, we need to use quite technical language and concepts to describe what is going on. Here’s a quick guide to clearing data and how we analyse and interpret it.

UCAS publishes clearing data on Qualifications Scotland results day (QS), Joint Council for Qualifications results day (JCQ, which covers A levels and other level 3 in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland), the first 15 weekdays after JCQ results day and then a final update on the 28th weekday after JCQ (on 10 September, this year).

Most of the clearing action happens on JCQ results day, the day after (JCQ+1), and over the first weekend after JCQ results day (presented on JCQ+4). Eventually JCQ+28 offers us our best understanding of the cycle for that year until we get the more detailed End of Cycle release in late December (at sector level) and early January (at provider level). However, JCQ isn’t the end of clearing: that continues right through to mid-October – it involves a tiny number of applicants and we just don’t get data for that.

During clearing, we commonly see applicants that were free to be placed in clearing find a place, and those holding an offer accept that offer (either firm, insurance, or something else) or enter clearing to see if they can get a more suitable one. Less commonly we see applicants decline their firm place in order to find another – either (from 2019) via a specialised “decline my place” process, or just by entering clearing. “Adjustment” was an older way of declining a firm place to take up another that was scrapped in 2022.

On top of this, some applicants enter clearing directly. This might be because they applied after 30 June (it is the default for people who do that), or that they didn’t receive or accept any offers from the institutions and courses they applied to. Or that they entered UCAS without applying to any providers or courses.

In Scotland, clearing is less of a big deal. It involves around 3,000 applicants, and generally involves Scottish universities seeking to fill remaining allocated funded places. In that number-controlled system, most of the action happens on QS results day.

Particularly in Scotland, but increasingly in other parts of the UK, results day and clearing do not show all recruitment and placement activity. It is well known that applications to degree-level courses at colleges in Scotland (as a part of articulation agreements) don’t go via UCAS. A lot of franchise activity, mature student recruitment, international recruitment, or recruitment to courses with non-standard start dates do not go via UCAS. It won’t be an issue this year, but Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) short courses also recruit via direct provider applications.

Some of this non-UCAS recruitment does eventually show up in UCAS data as a “record of prior acceptance” (RPA). We only see these at the end of the cycle, not in clearing releases.