ESAT January 2027: Booking Dates, Deadlines and Who Can Sit

The ESAT, the Engineering and Science Admissions Test that UAT-UK runs for Cambridge, Imperial, Oxford and UCL, has a second sitting for 2027 entry: 4 to 8 January 2027. Booking for it was due to open on 26 October, but UAT-UK has delayed it for system maintenance and expects it to open at 3pm GMT on Wednesday 28 October 2026; it closes on Monday 21 December 2026 at 6pm UK time. Two earlier deadlines sit inside that window: Monday 7 December for access-arrangement requests and Monday 14 December for bursary requests, both at 6pm UK time. Results arrive in your UAT-UK account on Monday 8 February 2027. Most Cambridge and Oxford applicants cannot use the January sitting at all. This page puts every January date in one place, with the rules that decide whether a booking still works when plans change.

UAT-UK key dates for 2027 entry, read 23 October 2026.

UAT-UK’s Candidate Handbook answers this directly: if you cancel, or are absent from, an October booking, “your eligibility to sit in January will not be affected”. What you can lose is money. A cancellation at least 48 hours before the October appointment was refunded in full; an absence, or a cancellation inside 48 hours, forfeited the fee. A bursary follows the same line: it is reinstated for January only if you cancelled October with more than 48 hours’ notice, or never booked October at all, and it is not re-issued after an absence. If illness stopped a non-Oxbridge applicant sitting in October, the test-day page says “you’ll need to book again for the January sitting”.

The two early deadlines are spaced to the review times UAT-UK states. It says access-arrangement requests “can take up to ten working days” to review and bursary applications “up to five working days”. From Monday 7 December to the close on Monday 21 December is ten working days, and from Monday 14 December it is five (our count, weekdays only). Candidates who request by those dates “will still be able to book a test once approved”, even if approval comes later. But UAT-UK warns that “the later you submit your application, the more difficult it becomes to secure your chosen time, day, or location”.

One wording difference: the key-dates page calls 7 December the “deadline for requesting access arrangements”, while the access-arrangements page calls it the “booking deadline for candidates with access arrangements”. Request well before 7 December either way.

The UCAS deadline for courses without a 15 October date is 13 January 2027 at 18:00 UK time, five days after the window closes. January results come on 8 February, so a January candidate applies through UCAS without knowing the score (our reading of the two dates). You do not send the score yourself: UAT-UK sends results automatically, shortly after the test, to the institutions where you applied for a course that requires the ESAT, matched course by course, and “candidates are not able to choose which institutions can see their score”. Each module is reported on a 1 to 9 scale to one decimal place, there is no pass mark and no appeal of scores.

From UAT-UK’s expected booking opening on 28 October to 4 January is a little under ten weeks. UAT-UK’s own advice is to read the content specification for gaps and to sit its specimen test under timed conditions; its FAQ says it offers free practice tests in the Pearson system, “one of these” with explained answers and “the other” timed, and strongly discourages paying to sit the real test early as practice. The pace is the part to practise: 27 questions in 40 minutes per module, with no calculator and no penalty for a wrong answer, so every question is worth an answer. Try one question at that pace.

For full timed runs, the ESAT practice set has five parts of 27 questions in 40 minutes each and a four-question free sample, with the working behind every answer. It is independent practice material, not UAT-UK’s, and its score is not an ESAT score. The guides below cover modules by course and the official practice materials. See also the ESAT exam page.