GAMSAT for Ireland: How CAO Graduate Entry Works

Ireland runs graduate-entry medicine differently from Australia, and the difference is not a detail. Once you clear the eligibility bar, your GAMSAT score is the only thing that decides. No interview. No portfolio. No GPA weighting on top.

Everything below comes from CAO's own guidelines for graduate-entry applicants, read on 7 September 2026. One caveat before you plan around any of it: the document that is live today is the 2026 one. CAO's 2027 guidelines are not published yet, which is expected — the 2027 application cycle has not opened. Treat the 2026 rules as the shape of the cycle, and re-read the 2027 document the week it appears.

The one difference that changes everything

CAO's guidelines say it plainly. For candidates who hold (or expect to hold) a minimum 2H1 — second class honours, grade one — in their first Level 8 bachelor honours degree, and who are eligible for EU fees, the GAMSAT "will be the sole instrument to select students". Offers are then made "based on the GAMSAT score only". Applicants are placed in an order of merit for each course, and where candidates tie for a remaining place, a random number decides who gets it.

That is a genuinely different game from the Australian one, and it changes what preparation is for. In Australia a GAMSAT score is one input among several. In Ireland, for an eligible applicant, it is the input.

The four schools

Four institutions take graduate-entry medicine applicants through the CAO: University College Cork, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, University College Dublin and the University of Limerick. Their teaching start dates differ by about a week, which matters more than it sounds if you are moving cities or countries for the course.

Which sittings count — and the trap in the timing

For 2026 entry, CAO's document accepts results from four sittings: September 2024, March 2025, September 2025 and March 2026. It then states directly that "results of the September 2026 test cannot be used for courses commencing in 2026".

Read that twice if you sat this September. The September sitting of any given year is not for that year's intake — it feeds the following year's cycle. On the same pattern, a September 2026 result belongs to the 2027 round. That last step is our reading of the 2026 rule rather than a published 2027 rule, so confirm it against CAO's 2027 guidelines when they appear; but it is consistent with the four-sitting window, and consistent with a GAMSAT result staying valid two years in Ireland.

The order of events

CAO applications for 2027 entry open on 5 November 2026 — the date on our own GAMSAT dates page, verified against cao.ie in August. The normal closing date is 1 February of the year of entry, with a late closing date of 1 May. Eligibility screening happens in July, when the four schools meet jointly, and offers go out in Round 0 in early August with roughly a week to accept.

One honest flag on that closing date: CAO's own 2026 document gives it twice and does not quite agree with itself. The application-process section says "February 1 at 5.15pm of the year of entry"; the timeline table on the next page says "5pm 1 February". Fifteen minutes is not a rounding error when it is a deadline, so treat the earlier time as the real one and confirm it on cao.ie before the day.

Two things you must do inside your GAMSAT account

This is where Irish applicants most often lose time, and neither step is on the CAO side. First, you must indicate on your GAMSAT registration that you are an applicant to an Irish programme, so that ACER forwards your results to CAO at all. Second, your correct CAO application number must be in your GAMSAT account — CAO warns that failing to do so "may affect the delivery of your GAMSAT results to the CAO and the institutions".

Results appear in your CAO "My Application" account in late May in the 2026 cycle, and all results must be recorded at CAO by 1 July to be eligible for an August offer. If no score, or an incorrect score, shows against your name, the fix is on you and it is a postal one.

Documents are posted, not uploaded

CAO is explicit that "uploaded documents will not be accepted for Graduate Medicine". Original transcripts go by post to the Galway address, and the deadline depends on when you graduated: applicants who finished before the year of entry submit earlier than applicants graduating in it. Send a stamped addressed card listing what you sent — CAO date-stamps it and posts it back, which is the only receipt you will get.

Five years of cut-offs, published by CAO itself

Most of the GAMSAT world runs on rumoured cut-offs. Ireland is the rare case where the official body publishes a table of them, five years deep, in the same document as the rules.

Two things to hold in mind before you turn any of these into a target. A cut-off is a result, not a threshold: it is wherever the last offer happened to land that year, so it moves with the applicant pool and the number of places. And an asterisked year is one where random selection applied at the cut-off — meaning candidates on that exact score did not all receive offers. CAO adds one forward-looking line: "it is not anticipated that a GAMSAT cut-off score below 50 will be assessed".

Meeting a past cut-off is not an offer. It is evidence about the range the competition has historically sat in, which is a more useful thing than a promise.

If you sat in September, the calendar is comfortable

Results land in mid November — ACER publishes the month, not the day. CAO opens on 5 November and closes on 1 February. So the September sitting resolves comfortably inside the window, and you can apply before the result arrives if you would rather not leave it late. If you hold more than one valid score, CAO's rule is simple and in your favour: the best score is used.

What is actually being ranked

The number in that cut-off table is your overall GAMSAT score, and the standard overall weights the sciences paper twice:

Overall = (Humanities + Written Communication + 2 × Biological and Physical Sciences) ÷ 4

Which means that in a system selecting on one number, the sciences paper moves that number twice as hard as the other two. If you are preparing for an Irish application specifically, that is where the marginal hour goes.

If you want the whole cycle in one place — both test windows, the CAO dates, the results month — the free GAMSAT dates page lists every date with a one-click calendar download and labels clearly anything that is still an estimate rather than a confirmed date.

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