Looking ahead to 2025 undergraduate applications

Key dates for you

• 30 April – Students can start searching for courses on ucas.com
• 7 May – Adviser portal opens to set up for 2025 applications
• 14 May – Students can start their applications in the UCAS Hub.

View more 2025 key dates 

The application fee for 2025 has been set by the UCAS Board and will be £28.50 for up to five choices. Read more about paying. 

Changes for 2025

To improve the experience for students and boost accuracy for admissions teams, we are developing some areas of the application which are noted below.

The changes are based on feedback from all audiences across the sector.

Education section

• We will prepopulate 'place of education' information when an applicant is linked to a centre, ensuring they add the correct school.
• There are some changes to make it easier for a student to explain how they have attended an education provider; the options will now be: Exam only, Full-time and Part-time.
• We are adding a new question so a student can tell us whether they attended an education provider remotely or in person. This new study mode ‘In Person’ or ‘Online’ will help applicants to provide all the qualifications they have taken.
• We are removing the 'highest qualification on entry' question based on the feedback we have received from applicants.
• Improvements are also being made for searching and adding qualifications by introducing qualification categories to help students choose the right one. We will also be highlighting the qualifications chosen as a shortlist, within each of these categories.

English language skills section

• Students will no longer need to answer, ‘Is English your first language?’.
• We are moving the fields to input TOEFL and IELTS numbers to the Education section – there will be no changes to the wording of the question.

Nationality details section

There will be some additional questions, so that universities and colleges can determine an applicant’s ‘fee status’ at the point of application for those non-UK nationals.

• There will be a new question ‘When does your pre-settled status expire?’. This question will only be shown to those who need to see it and have indicated settled or pre-settled status.
• We are adding a ‘Don’t know’ option to the question ‘Do you need a student visa to study in UK?’. This highlights to universities and colleges that more questions might be needed to ascertain whether the applicant requires a visa.
• A new question ‘What is your UK visa or immigration status? is being added. Students can select from a list of common visa or immigration statuses to inform fee status investigations. There will be an ‘Other’ option with free text.
• There will be some additional questions to support those students who may require a visa to help check anything that might have been missed or previously answered incorrectly.
• We will also enable applicants to provide any relevant start and end dates for their visa/immigration status if they have them.

New section ‘Where you live’

• This will be separate to contact details (which will remain unchanged). We will ask the applicant where they have physically lived for the last three years, when they started living there, and for what purpose. We'll continue to collect these addresses until we have three years’ worth of information.
• This will be the same as address formats used in home and postal addresses. It will enable students to indicate if any of the addresses have been for temporary purposes. There will an ‘Other' option.
• The questions asking about the area of permanent residence and residential category will also move to this section. There are no changes to these questions.

Updates to the adviser portal

• All 2025 entry application changes will be reflected in the adviser portal.
• There will be new groupings in the qualification shortlists to align to student applications.

Join our webinar on 18 April

Join us on 18 April when UCAS' Product Manager, Callie Hawkins, talks us through how to set up the adviser portal.

The Adviser Guide 2025 and supporting toolkits will be available on 11 April, so you can prepare for the opening of the portal in May.