UK Medical School Rankings 2026: All 50 Medical Schools Ranked

There are 50 universities in the UK offering a medicine degree that leads to provisional registration with the General Medical Council (GMC). Around 44 are long-established members of the Medical Schools Council, and a wave of new medical schools (such as Brunel, Chester, Sunderland, Kent and Medway, Pears Cumbria, Greater Manchester and St Mary's) has taken the total to 50. All 50 are listed and ranked in full on this page.

In the Complete University Guide 2027 Medicine league table the top five are Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College London, Queen's University Belfast and Glasgow. Different tables disagree: the Complete University Guide, the Guardian, QS and the Times all use different criteria (entry standards, student satisfaction, research and graduate outcomes), so there is no single "best" medical school. Every GMC-approved school trains doctors who can work anywhere in the UK, so the best medical school is the one that best fits your grades, the course style you prefer and where you want to live.

On the Complete University Guide 2027 the top 10 are Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College London, Queen's University Belfast, Glasgow, Leicester, Bristol, UCL, Cardiff and Exeter. The exact order changes year to year and between ranking tables, so treat the top 10 as a band of excellent schools rather than a strict order.

Medicine is one of the most competitive degrees in the country, so no UK medical school is genuinely easy to get into. That said, some are statistically more achievable: schools that ask for AAA rather than A*AA, that weight the UCAT generously, that make contextual or widening-access offers, or that are newer and less well known often have a better offer rate. Buckingham (a private school) asks for ABB and does not use the UCAT. Applying strategically across your four medicine choices matters more than chasing the single easiest school.

On grades, Cambridge (A*A*A) and Oxford, Imperial, UCL, King's, Barts, Birmingham, Aston, Exeter, Keele and Leicester (A*AA) are the hardest. Oxbridge also has the lowest offer rates and additional hurdles, and London schools attract huge applicant numbers. Beyond grades, the schools with the highest UCAT cut-offs and applicant-to-place ratios are the most competitive overall, which is why a strong UCAT and interview often decide the outcome.

There are no bad UK medical schools: every one is approved by the General Medical Council and must meet the same standards, and graduates from all of them qualify as doctors. League tables do place some schools lower, usually the newest ones that have less research history or fewer graduate-outcome years on record, but a lower league position is not a measure of teaching quality or your future as a doctor. Choose on fit, location and course style rather than fear of a ranking.

Take science A-levels (almost always Chemistry and/or Biology), sit the UCAT (or the GAMSAT for many graduate-entry courses), gain relevant work or volunteering experience, write a strong personal statement and apply through UCAS to up to four medical schools by the mid-October deadline. If you are shortlisted you attend an interview, usually a multiple mini interview (MMI). You then complete a five or six year degree (four years for graduate entry), provisionally register with the GMC and start the two-year Foundation Programme.

Most UK medical schools ask for AAA or A*AA at A-level, almost always including Chemistry and/or Biology. Cambridge typically asks for A*A*A and Buckingham for ABB. You will also need strong GCSEs (often grade 7/A or higher across the sciences, English and Maths), and many schools make contextual offers one or two grades lower for eligible applicants. Graduate-entry courses use your degree result instead of A-levels.

Almost all do. For 2026 entry the only undergraduate medical school that does not use an admissions test is the University of Buckingham. A handful of graduate-entry courses use the GAMSAT instead of or alongside the UCAT (for example Swansea, Surrey, Worcester, Chester and Ulster), and the BMAT has been discontinued, so no UK school uses it any more. For most applicants, the UCAT is the single most important test to prepare for.

There are five medical schools in central London: Imperial College London, UCL (University College London), King's College London, Barts and The London (Queen Mary University of London) and City St George's, University of London. Just outside central London are Brunel University of London in Uxbridge and St Mary's University in Twickenham. London schools are among the most competitive in the country because of the number of applicants, so it is wise to balance your choices with schools elsewhere.

The Russell Group medical schools are Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Exeter, Glasgow, Imperial, King's College London, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, Queen Mary (Barts), Queen's Belfast, Sheffield, Southampton, UCL, York (within Hull York) and Warwick. Russell Group status reflects research intensity, not teaching quality, and many non-Russell-Group schools rank highly and offer excellent clinical training.

A shortage of doctors has led the government to fund several new medical schools. Recent additions include Anglia Ruskin, Aston, Brunel, Buckingham, Chester, Edge Hill, Kent and Medway, Lincoln, Sunderland, the University of Lancashire (UCLan) and Worcester, plus the very newest: St Mary's (Twickenham), the University of Greater Manchester, the Pears Cumbria School of Medicine and Bangor. They must all meet the same General Medical Council standards as established schools. New schools can be a smart choice because they are sometimes less heavily applied to.

Home (UK) students pay up to £9,790 per year in tuition for 2026/27, funded by a tuition-fee loan, plus an NHS bursary in the later years of the course in England. International students pay far more, typically between about £30,000 and £70,000 per year depending on the university (Cambridge is the highest), which can total well over £250,000 across a five or six year course before living costs.

Yes, but international places are tightly capped (often only around 7.5% of each school's intake), so the international route is extremely competitive. International applicants meet the same academic and UCAT/GAMSAT requirements, prove English language ability (usually IELTS 7.0 to 7.5), and pay international tuition fees. A few schools (Anglia Ruskin, Bangor, Edge Hill, Lincoln, Sunderland and Pears Cumbria) take home students only, while St Mary's and Greater Manchester currently recruit international students only. We have dedicated guides for applicants from Singapore, Hong Kong and Canada.

Yes. Imperial College London is the academic partner of the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine) at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and several UK universities have strong Singapore and Hong Kong links. UK medical degrees are well recognised internationally, but registration and licensing rules differ by country, so always check the requirements of the country where you intend to practise. See our guide to applying to UK medicine from Singapore for the detail.

The medical degree takes five years at most schools, or six years where it includes an intercalated or foundation year (and at Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, UCL and Edinburgh). Graduate-entry courses are four years. After graduating you complete the two-year Foundation Programme, then specialty training, so the full path from starting medical school to becoming a consultant or GP is typically 10 to 16 years.

Nothing important: MBBS, MBChB, MB BCh, BMBS and MB BChir are all names for the same primary medical qualification (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery), and the letters just reflect each university's tradition and Latin. All of them are approved by the General Medical Council and let you work as a doctor in the UK.

The Medical Schools Council (MSC) is the body that represents the UK's medical schools. It coordinates shared admissions guidance, publishes data on entry requirements and selection, and runs initiatives on widening participation and admissions tests. It is a useful official source when researching where to apply, alongside the General Medical Council, which approves and quality-assures the degrees.

Use several. The Complete University Guide and the Guardian rank UK medical schools on UK-focused measures (entry standards, student satisfaction, research and graduate prospects), while QS and the Times Higher Education world rankings reflect global research reputation. A school can be top 5 in one table and mid-table in another, so look at the underlying measures that matter to you rather than a single headline position. The table on this page lets you compare the Complete University Guide and the Guardian side by side.

Our combined score is the average of the Complete University Guide and Guardian overall scores, both of which are out of 100. We average the scores rather than the rank positions, because the two tables rank different numbers of schools and a rank is not a measurement. It gives a single consensus figure that smooths out the disagreement between the two main UK tables, and you can sort the ranking table by it. It is shown only for the 36 schools that appear in both tables.

In the QS World University Rankings by Subject (Medicine) and the Times Higher Education clinical and health table, UK universities are among the strongest in the world. Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London and UCL all sit in the global top 10 for medicine, and King's College London, Edinburgh, Manchester and Glasgow feature in the global top 100. World rankings weight research reputation rather than teaching or entry standards, so they read very differently from the UK league tables, and the newest medical schools do not appear in them yet.

Yes. Medical school, medicine university, medical college and school of medicine all describe the same thing: the part of a university that teaches the medicine degree (the MBBS, MBChB or equivalent). In the UK there is no separate 'medical college' system as in some countries, so the best medical college in the UK and the best university for medicine in the UK mean the same set of institutions. Whichever term you search for, you apply through UCAS to the university.

All 50 universities that offer medicine (the MBBS or MBChB) are listed and ranked in the table above, spread across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. You can study medicine almost anywhere in the UK, from large city universities like Manchester, Birmingham and the London medical schools, to smaller campuses such as Keele, Lancaster and Buckingham. Use the table to compare them by location, entry grades and fees, and click any university for its full requirements.

Of the 50 UK medical schools, 40 are in England, five are in Scotland (Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews), three are in Wales (Cardiff, Swansea and Bangor) and two are in Northern Ireland (Queen's University Belfast and Ulster). London has five central medical schools (Imperial, UCL, King's College London, St George's and Barts), plus Brunel and St Mary's just outside.

Yes. Many universities run a four-year Graduate Entry Medicine (GEM) course for applicants who already hold a degree, including Warwick, Swansea, Chester, Surrey, Worcester, St George's, Nottingham and others, and Oxford, Cambridge and several others also offer four-year accelerated routes. Graduate entry is judged on your degree result rather than A-levels, and many of these courses use the GAMSAT instead of, or alongside, the UCAT. Competition is intense because there are far fewer graduate-entry places than school-leaver places.

Yes. Many medical schools run a six-year Medicine with a Foundation Year or Gateway to Medicine course (UCAS codes such as A104, A108 or A110). These add an extra year, ask for lower A-level grades (often BBB or below), and are aimed at students from widening-participation backgrounds. They are one of the most realistic routes in for applicants whose grades fall just short of the standard offer, so they are well worth considering alongside contextual offers.

UK medical courses teach in different styles. Traditional courses (such as Oxford and Cambridge) start with two or three years of lecture-based science before clinical placements. Problem-based learning (PBL) courses (such as Manchester, Liverpool and Hull York) build learning around clinical cases in small groups from early on. Integrated and case-based courses blend the two, with patient contact from year one. None is better in absolute terms, but the teaching style is one of the most important things to match to how you learn when choosing where to apply.