How we worked this out

The UCAT Percentile Calculator shows a 2026 decile table nobody has published yet — here's the honest version of how we got those numbers.

Why we're guessing at all

The UCAT Consortium (the people who actually run the test) won't publish 2026's real deciles until mid-September, with final numbers a bit after that. If you want a percentile before then, someone has to estimate it — every UCAT calculator online right now is doing exactly that, whether they say so or not. We'd rather show you our working than pretend we already know.

We tried the obvious thing first — it didn't hold up

Our first idea was simple: look at how each section's average score has moved over the last six years and draw a line through it to guess where it's heading next.

Before trusting that, we checked it against reality: for every year since 2022, we pretended we didn't know what happened yet, made the same kind of trend-line guess using only earlier years, and compared it to what actually happened.

The trend line was off by about 11 points on average. Just guessing "about the same as last year, no trend" was off by only 8 points. The dumber guess won. So we scrapped the trend-line idea rather than keep something that's actually worse than doing nothing clever at all.

What we do instead

The most useful thing we actually have is the real jump from 2024 to 2025 — the one year we know for certain, and the year Abstract Reasoning got dropped from the test. But we don't fully trust any single section's number on its own: Quantitative Reasoning's top scorers jumped by 50 points that year, which could easily be a one-off rather than something that keeps happening.

So for each section, we split the difference between what that section did and what all three sections did on average — that way one section's fluke can't swing the estimate on its own, without us just ignoring it either.

DecileVerbal ReasoningDecision MakingQuantitative ReasoningAverage
1-10+20-100
20+100+3.3
30+20-10+3.3
40+10+10+6.7
5+10+10+10+10
60+10+20+10
700+20+6.7
8+10+10+30+16.7
900+50+16.7

Quantitative Reasoning's own +50 at the top gets pulled down toward the group's +16.7 rather than counted in full — still a rise, just a more careful one.

Our estimate for 2026

This is exactly what the calculator uses.

DecileTotalVerbal ReasoningDecision MakingQuantitative Reasoning
11550500530520
21680540570570
31750560600590
41840580620640
51910610640660
61990630660700
72030640670720
82160680710770
92310710750850

The moment the Consortium publishes the real 2026 figures (expected mid-September), we'll swap this table and this page for the actual thing.