The 2025 UCAT Decile Table: Where Does Your Score Sit?
The following decile benchmarks are drawn from the 2025 UCAT UK interim results and provide the most accurate available guide to score competitiveness under the current 2700 format. A decile ranking tells you what percentage of all candidates scored at or below your level.
1st Decile (bottom 10%): below approximately 1620. 2nd Decile (bottom 20%): below approximately 1730. 3rd Decile (bottom 30%): below approximately 1810. 4th Decile (bottom 40%): below approximately 1870. 5th Decile (median): below approximately 1940. 6th Decile (top 40%): above approximately 2000. 7th Decile (top 30%): above approximately 2070. 8th Decile (top 20%): above approximately 2150. 9th Decile (top 10%): above approximately 2270.
For SJT: in 2025, approximately 25% of candidates achieved Band 1, 40% Band 2, 27% Band 3, and 8% Band 4. These distributions are broadly stable year on year but can shift with cohort composition.
How Universities Use Percentile Rankings
Universities that use UCAT as a ranking tool — inviting the top X percent of applicants to interview — are directly comparing your score against the cohort percentile distribution. When Bristol says it shortlists 100% by UCAT score, it is effectively inviting candidates at or above the threshold percentile for its interview places that year. When Newcastle historically invites candidates at approximately the 8th–9th decile, that translates to a score above roughly 2150–2270.
This is why understanding percentiles matters more than understanding raw scores. A target of '2000' sounds concrete, but '60th percentile' is more meaningful — it tells you that you need to outperform 60% of the cohort, regardless of what the raw number happens to be in a given year. For 2026, if score distributions remain similar to 2025, 2000 will be approximately 60th percentile — which is below the threshold for most competitive universities' interview shortlisting.
Converting 2025 Scores to 2026 Context
The 2025 cohort was the first to sit under the new three-subtest format, meaning that the 2025 data is the best available benchmark for 2026 preparation. However, the 2026 cohort will shift the distribution slightly — the direction and magnitude of this shift is impossible to predict precisely, as it depends on the quality and extent of preparation across the entire applicant pool.
The safest approach for 2026 applicants: use the 2025 decile table as your benchmark, but build in a modest buffer. If the 8th decile in 2025 was 2150, target 2200+ to ensure competitiveness even if the distribution shifts upward. MediSpoon's score tracker plots your mock performance against the 2025 decile benchmarks and projects your expected sitting score based on your improvement trajectory.
