Everything you need from the final pre-clearing data release
As of the June deadline the 2026 application rate for UK 18 year olds is 41.4 per cent – up from 41.2 last year but still below the Covid era peak of 43.5 per cent.
There’s growth in every IMD quintile in England (IMD only makes sense for a single nation) – other than quintile 5 (the least disadvantaged fifth of 18 year olds) which saw a small fall, despite a numeric growth in applicants.
Demand has also grown among matured students (up 1 percentage point) and largely attributable to post January movement. It is still the second lowest figure in a decade, but it is encouraging progress.
And international students that apply via UCAS are up 7.1 per cent, focused on higher tariff providers.
UCAS divides the year into, broadly, three.
If you are going to medical school or Oxbridge, you need to apply for the October deadline. If you want equal consideration for your application elsewhere, you go for the January deadline.
And then we have clearing – the period after A level results day when people get to sort out which course and provider they will actually end up at if they don’t meet the terms of their offer.
So what’s the June deadline about? Anything that comes in after the June deadline goes into clearing, but your application comes in before then it is still sent to your selected providers, who may still decide to make you an offer. It’s also where Extra lives: if you applied to five places and nowhere gave you an offer, you can add an extra choice.
There’s a presumption that later applications tend to come from non-traditional applicants – and it is true for mature students that the greater the deprivation in your area the more likely you are to apply later in the cycle. However, this phenomenon reverses for 18 year olds – more (both numerically and proportionally) from quintile five apply using the June deadline than any other. It’s not clear why.
It is, in other words, the least mainstream option in UCASs main scheme of applications. But it is probably the most valuable of the three deadline data releases, in that it gives us a complete picture of offermaking and application behavior within the main scheme of a given cycle. By this point of the year, universities know how deep they need to fish in the clearing pool to keep courses viable.
The last few cycles have all been about a single trend – the rapid growth in recruitment among high tariff providers. This has not been about activity in clearing as much as lowering entry tariffs in order to make more offers. The years between 2022 and 2025 saw the offer rate (the proportion of applications that result in an offer) among high tariff providers grow by an astonishing ten percentage points.
And 2026? Pretty much a rerun of 2025. The offer rate for high tariff providers is 65.3 per cent, up twenty basis points from the previous year.
This could be read as high tariff providers beginning, once again, to act like high tariff providers. But not so much. The number of offers made in the 2026 cycle exceeds two million for the first time, with a record 928,710 offers made by high tariff providers – because the number of applications to this group of providers has risen again, from 1.3m last year to 1.4m this year.
In contrast, lower tariff providers are seeing a smaller number of applications – with offermaking again holding steady.