What Is the Acceptance Rate of McGill University in 2026?

McGill is one of Canada’s most prestigious universities and receives tens of thousands of applications every year from all over the world.

But what is the McGill university acceptance rate? In this guide we’ll look at the official admissions data from McGill to work this out, as well as looking at admissions for international applicants and how hard it is to get into McGill.

Acceptance rate vs admit rate

Before we discuss the McGill acceptance rate, we should first make an important distinction.

For the rest of this guide, we will use acceptance rate to refer to the percentage of students who apply to McGill who are offered a place.

Not all of those students then take up their place and enter their class at McGill. Most of these will go to another university, some might take a year out and re-apply to other universities, and some might not go to university at all. We will refer to the percentage of students who apply to McGill who are offered and take up their place as the admit rate. The admit rate is always necessarily lower than the acceptance rate.

Now we’ve cleared that up, let’s take a look at the admissions data for McGill.

Acceptance rate of McGill University

The table below shows McGill’s official acceptance rates and other admissions data for 2021-2025.

Year	Applications	Offers	Entering Class	Acceptance Rate	Admit Rate
2025	38,135	18,132	7,310	47.5%	19.2%
2024	37,568	18,063	7,180	48.1%	19.1%
2023	41,017	17,620	6,728	43.0%	16.4%
2022	42,968	16,968	6,397	39.5%	14.9%
2021	44,534	16,955	6,351	38.1%	14.3%

As we can see, the acceptance rate of McGill University for undergraduate students is 48% in 2025, remaining steady from 2024. Around 18,000 of the 38,000 applicants to McGill are offered a place. Acceptance rates have increased from 38% in 2021. This is driven by falling numbers of applications (from 44.5k to 38k) while the numbers enrolling have increased by a thousand (from 6.35k to 7.3k).

Like many other universities, McGill saw a huge increasing in application numbers over Covid which drove down acceptance rates. Application volumes have fallen but remain slightly higher than the pre-pandemic norm.

Year	Applications	Offers	Entering Class	Acceptance Rate	Admit Rate
2025	12,538	5,024	2,820	40.1%	22.5%
2024	14,621	5,026	2,765	34.4%	18.9%
2023	14,407	4,796	2,757	33.3%	19.1%
2022	13,977	4,508	2,508	32.3%	17.9%
2021	17,457	5,106	2,798	29.2%	16.0%

The graduate acceptance rate is slightly lower, at 40%. It shows the same pattern as the undergraduate statistics, with the acceptance rate increasing due to falling application numbers.

McGill University acceptance rate for international students

McGill’s acceptance rate of 48% is for all students, both domestic and international. But what is McGill University’s acceptance rate for international students specifically?

Unfortunately, McGill doesn’t release this data. However, a quick look at its entry requirements for international students can give us an idea of how hard it is to win a place at McGill for applicants from outside Canada.

US

McGill is officially test-optional for many programmes. However, submitting your standardised test scores with your application is highly advisable.

Here are the requirements by department. Note that this table shows the range within each department, so you should check individual requirements before you apply.

Faculty / Programme	ACT Composite	SAT Reading & Writing	SAT Math	SAT Total (Calculated)
Agricultural & Environmental Sciences	26	670	580	1250
Architecture	34	670–740	670–760	1340–1500
Arts	27–29	670–700	610–640	1280–1340
Arts & Science	29–31	680–700	690–710	1370–1410
Education	26–28	670–680	580–630	1250–1310
Engineering (all disciplines)	28–31	680–720	690–720	1370–1440
Human Nutrition	26	670	580	1250
Kinesiology	26–28	670–680	610–630	1280–1310
Management (Commerce)	29–31	690–700	690–710	1380–1410
Nursing	26	670	580	1250
Science	29–31	690–700	690–710	1380–1410

These scores can give us a rough idea of how challenging it is to get into McGill for US students. For most programmes, these SAT and ACT minimums are comfortably below what would be required for an Ivy League school. However, they are still in the top 20% of test scores in the US, so you need to be a high-performing student to be considered.

UK

McGill publishes the cut-off grades for successful applicants in the previous year. This means that no one with grades lower than this was offered a place at McGill.

A Levels

For A Levels, there is significant variation between programmes. Most subjects had a cut-off between ABB and A*AA. This would place them between a relatively uncompetitive Russell Group course and a course at Oxbridge in terms of A Level requirements – that’s quite a variation.

However, at the top end, Architecture applicants might require a minimum of three A*s to get into McGill – that’s incredibly competitive. At the lower end, some courses might admit with you BCC.

Faculty / Programme	Typical minimum A-Level grades
Agricultural & Environmental Sciences	BBC–BCC
Architecture	A*A*A*–AAA
Arts	AAA–ABB
Arts & Science	AAA–ABB
Education	ABB–BBB
Engineering (all disciplines)	A*A*A*–BBB
Human Nutrition	BBC–BCC
Kinesiology	ABB–BBB
Management (Commerce)	A*AA–AAB
Nursing	BBB
Science	A*AA–ABB

International Baccalaureate

Similarly, there is a large range of IB score cut-offs depending on the programme you’re applying for. The most common cut-off is between 33 and 39, but there are cut-offs of 30 at the bottom end and 42 at the top end (for Architecture, again). Note that these scores only include your six subjects (out of 42), with your Theory of Knowledge and Extended Essay scores not counted.

Faculty / Programme	Typical minimum IB score (out of 42 – excluding TOK and EE)
Agricultural & Environmental Sciences	28–30
Architecture	39–42
Arts	33–36
Arts & Science	35–37
Education	30
Engineering (all disciplines)	32–42
Human Nutrition	28–30
Kinesiology	30–31
Management (Commerce)	35–38
Nursing	30
Science	35–39
Social Work	35–38

How hard is it to get into McGill University?

You might look at McGill University’s acceptance rate of 48% and think that makes it fairly easy to get into. Especially when contrasted with Ivy League acceptance rates around 5%, or Oxford and Cambridge around 16%, McGill’s acceptance rate seems high.

The truth is a little more complicated, however. McGill’s relatively high acceptance rate is driven partly by a very different university application culture in Canada, particularly compared to the US. Put simply, given that McGill makes its entry requirements and cut-offs explicit, far fewer applicants with slim chances of acceptance apply in the first place than is the case for Ivy League schools. This artificially inflates the acceptance rate: if a relatively small number of qualified students apply, the acceptance rate will be comparatively high.

A quick comparison with Harvard will be instructive:

	McGill	Harvard	Difference
Applicants	38,135	47,893	-20%
Offers	18,132	2,003	805%
Entered class	7,310	1,675	336%
Yield rate	40%	84%	-52%

McGill’s much higher acceptance rate is driven by a few key factors:

1. McGill receives 20% fewer applications than Harvard but has more than four times as many places available. In other words, McGill is a bigger university but fewer candidates apply.
2. McGill’s yield rate – the percentage of offered students who then enrol – is half as high as Harvard’s. This might reflect Harvard’s greater prestige: the vast majority of students who are offered a place at Harvard want to take it up, whereas McGill may be a second choice for more students. What this means it that McGill has to make many more offers in order to fill its roughly 7,000 available spaces, whereas Harvard only needs to offer to a few more students than the 1650 places it has available.

None of this means that McGill is easy to get into. A candidate who doesn’t meet McGill’s entry requirements, which are especially high for Canadian students, will be rejected. In fact, Canadian high school students need scores of 85%+ depending on the programme they’re applying for, among the very highest in Canada.

It’s true that international entry requirements are lower, however. This is likely to be a result of the fact that international students pay higher tuition fees at McGill, and universities are still businesses which need to pay attention to the bottom line.

Overall, then, McGill is very hard to get into, especially for Canadian students. International applicants might find the process a little less competitive – particularly compared to Ivy League schools or Oxbridge – but it remains quite a selective university.

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