Useful figures do exist, scattered through NHS England publications, specialty recruitment pages and Freedom of Information responses. A cut-off without its year, recruitment stage and region is usually more reassuring than informative, so the tables keep that context attached.
There is now another qualification. Every pre-2026 cut-off below came from a pooled applicant cohort before the Medical Training (Prioritisation) Act changed recruitment. Under tiering, a historical cut-off does not mean the same thing for a non-priority applicant, because recruitment may never reach that tier even when the score is high. Read the Prioritisation Act guide alongside these figures.
Why 500 does not mean 500 marks
Candidates can receive different sets of questions. An equating model adjusts for differences in difficulty, after which the equated scores are standardised together. That sequence is described in NHS England's 5 March 2024 response, FOI-2402-2070000. The statement that scores have a mean of 250 and a standard deviation of 40 for each paper comes from the GP MSRA guidance and the Neurosurgery 2026 FAQ.
The FOI says that "standardisation is based on the whole cohort, but most specialties take account of the score distribution for only their applicants when making decisions." There is no published ceiling, and combined scores in the 600s have been observed. No primary source says a score has identical meaning across specialties.
The published floors and weightings
Core Psychiatry CT1 requires at least 186 raw marks in each paper for an applicant to be appointable. A stronger paper cannot compensate for one below that floor.
GP uses four bands and treats Band 1 in either paper as unsuccessful. The table reproduces NHS England's published 2026 Round 1 distribution for GP applicants. It shows where your component scores sat within that GP cohort. A universal specialty conversion cannot be made from it.
| Standardised score | CPS applicants | CPS band | PD applicants | PD band |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Below 170 | 2% | 1 | 3% | 1 |
| 171-185 | 2% | 1 | 4% | 1 |
| 186-210 | 7% | 2 | 15% | 2 |
| 211-230 | 9% | 2 | 21% | 2 |
| 231-250 | 13% | 3 | 22% | 3 |
| 251-270 | 19% | 3 | 19% | 3 |
| 271-290 | 24% | 3 | 12% | 3 |
| 291-310 | 20% | 4 | 4% | 4 |
| Above 310 | 4% | 4 | 0% | 4 |
The 185/186 boundary is consistent with Psychiatry's published floor, though the two specialties make their own selection decisions. It marks appointability. Securing an offer would normally take more.
For O&G ST1, the top 75 candidates by total MSRA bypass interview, with CPS and then PD used as tie-breakers. For the remaining candidates, the MSRA supplies 50 of 150 final points, or 33.3%, split into 0-25 points per paper.
The 2026 Neurosurgery FAQ described a model explicitly different from earlier years. MSRA made up 40% of shortlisting, scored 0-48, while online shortlisting supplied 60%, scored 0-76. The FAQ calls the shortlisting total 120 despite those printed component ranges ending at 48 and 76, so the figures are reported here as published. Shortlisting then counted for 30% of final selection and the selection centre for 70%.
For Clinical Radiology ST1, a March 2023 HEE FOI response put the MSRA at 40% of the final selection score. The current process uses the MSRA for shortlisting only, so that older weighting is no longer a target.
What the FOI cut-offs say
NHS England's 28 January 2026 response for August 2025 Anaesthetics and ACCS Anaesthetics, FOI-2601-2295283, gives both interview cut-offs and the lowest score offered. They are not interchangeable.
| Recruitment area | Applicants | Interview cut-off | Lowest score offered | Lowest rank offered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales | 5,845 | 560 | 434 | 673rd |
| Northern Ireland | 226 | 553 | 554 | 32nd |
| Scotland | 690 | 537 | 537 | 78th |
The 434 in England and Wales sits below the stated interview cut-off of 560. That is how the response arrived. NHS England's footnote says the cut-off excludes candidates guaranteed an interview under the Disability Confident scheme, as long as they meet the minimum required score in the MSRA. That accounts for an exception route but does not let us reconstruct the individual case. Across the recruitment, interview capacity was 1,252; 661 offers were made for 539 posts.
Core Surgical Training produces a different kind of trap. NHS England's 13 January 2026 response, FOI-2512-2288981, reports 1,151 national interview invitations and regional lowest raw MSRA scores associated with a post, including upgrades where supplied.
| Region | Lowest raw MSRA | Region | Lowest raw MSRA |
|---|---|---|---|
| East Midlands | 538 | East of England | 482 |
| Kent, Surrey and Sussex | 534 | London | 539 |
| North East | 540 | North West | 494 |
| South West | 505 | Thames Valley | 502 |
| Wessex | 539 | West Midlands | 538 |
| Yorkshire and Humber | 538 | Scotland | 538 |
| Wales | 538 |
The CSV also labels 413 as the "Highest MSRA invited" and 629 as the "Lowest". Those labels appear swapped, so the file is reported as received despite the apparent error. And the 66-72 values elsewhere in the file are composite MSRA, portfolio and interview totals. They must not be compared with the raw MSRA figures above.
For Core Psychiatry's August 2025 intake, FOI-2508-2247866 reports 531 as the lowest score with an accepted offer, in West Midlands, Northern Ireland and Greater Manchester. The highest observed offered score was 634 in Scotland North. Cells involving five or fewer applicants were redacted under section 40 of the Freedom of Information Act; the FOI page carries the full deanery table for anyone comparing locations.
Competition rose sharply before the 2026 reset
The next table uses NHS England's official 2023, 2024 and 2025 Round 1 figures. Each cell shows applications divided by posts. These are application ratios, so one doctor applying more than once can appear in more than one specialty.
| Specialty | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| General Practice ST1 | 2.67 (10,514/3,935) | 3.67 (15,036/4,096) | 4.91 (20,995/4,276) |
| Core Psychiatry CT1 | 4.98 (2,610/524) | 9.45 (4,650/492) | 21.83 (10,677/489) |
| Clinical Radiology ST1 | 8.77 (3,068/350) | 11.92 (3,719/312) | 11.27 (4,011/356) |
| Ophthalmology ST1 | 9.91 (971/98) | 14.41 (1,383/96) | 21.54 (2,197/102) |
| O&G ST1 | 4.32 (1,347/312) | 7.00 (2,170/310) | 16.65 (4,945/297) |
| Core Surgical Training CT1 | 4.17 (2,539/609) | 5.25 (3,384/645) | 8.57 (5,399/630) |
| Anaesthetics CT1 | 4.78 (2,604/545) | 6.50 (3,522/542) | 12.56 (6,770/539) |
| ACCS Emergency Medicine CT1/ST1 | 4.99 (1,803/361) | 7.57 (2,718/359) | 14.23 (5,081/357) |
| CSRH ST1 | 34.00 (272/8) | 25.61 (461/18) | 98.50 (1,379/14) |
| Neurosurgery ST1 | 12.75 (255/20) | 19.67 (354/18) | 26.71 (561/21) |
The direction is hard to miss, but 2026 cannot be added as another like-for-like column. After the Act, NHS England published an aggregate reset: 33,953 appointable applications for 9,315 posts, about 4:1 overall, and 16,066 prioritised applications, about 2:1. Priority candidates filled 98% of posts, up from 72% in 2025. Non-prioritised applicants accounted for 1.80% of accepted Round 1 offers to date, 163 compared with 2,168 the year before.
NHS England notes that the impact article has already been corrected once to match management information as at 27 May 2026. The 163 and 1.80% figures are therefore revisable as the data are updated.
No specialty-level 2026 competition-ratio table has been published. An aggregate affected by tiering cannot tell you the missing specialty cut-off.
Where no usable figure exists
At the time of writing, verifiable cut-offs were still unavailable for Ophthalmology, CSRH, Nuclear Medicine and Broad Based Training. The 2024 Ophthalmology FOI PDF could not be read reliably, while a promised 2025 release was absent from the response. The GP August 2025 regional score download could not be checked, and the pre-2024 Anaesthetics trend no longer exists in Oriel: NHS England's FOI response says the older data had been deleted under its retention policy. Nuclear Medicine has a 2023 ratio of 17 applications for eight posts, but no 2024 or 2025 figure was found; BBT ratios were also absent.
A cut-off is somebody else's outcome. Build your own baseline with the free ProMSRA questions (full-bank prices if you decide you need more).
Questions people ask after seeing the tables
What score do you need for your specialty?
It depends on the year, region, recruitment stage and your priority tier. Known anchors include 186 per paper for Psychiatry appointability, 531 as its lowest accepted 2025 offer, Anaesthetics interview cut-offs of 537-560 by nation, and the CST regional figures above. None is a promise for 2027.
Is there one pass mark you need to clear?
There is no single pass mark covering every specialty. Psychiatry requires 186 raw in each paper. GP rejects Band 1 in either paper, with Band 2 beginning at 186 in its published 2026 table. Other specialties use the score for shortlisting or as a weighted part of selection.
Why might you see different cut-offs in different regions?
Available posts, applicant preferences, upgrades and the selection model can all change the lowest score that eventually receives a post. A regional lowest offer records the outcome of that recruitment round. There is no centrally fixed pass mark behind it.
Can you still use old cut-offs after the Act?
No historical cut-off can be carried forward as a guarantee. It describes a pre-tiering cohort. From 2027, prioritisation applies from shortlisting through offers, so a non-priority applicant may not reach the same stage as someone with an identical score in an earlier pooled round.