GPA / MCATchance estimator
See where your numbers land at every US MD & DO program. Enter a GPA, an MCAT total and your state of residency, and every one of the 227 programs in our dataset is scored against its own published medians and sorted into four honest tiers — no invented percentages.
Score your numbers against all 227 programs
Type a cumulative GPA and an MCAT total. Add your state of residency and the estimator will apply each school's in-state policy too — 88 of the 227 programs in the dataset report a strong residency preference, which is the single largest non-numeric swing in the model. Everything is computed in your browser and saved to your device only.
Enter a GPA and an MCAT total to score all 227 US MD and DO programs.
A tier is a starting point, not a decision
Every verdict on this page is derived from four published numbers. Real admissions committees read your experiences, essays, letters and interview alongside those numbers, and applicants below a school's medians get in every single cycle. Use the tiers to build a balanced list — not to talk yourself out of a program you have a genuine reason to apply to.
Four inputs, one composite score
Each program starts at zero and collects points from four comparisons. The points are deliberately coarse — a school-reported median is a single number standing in for a whole distribution, and pretending to resolve it more finely than a few bands would be false precision.
Your total vs the school's median
Four or more points above the median scores +2, one to three above scores +1, within a point either way is neutral, up to four below costs −1, and further below costs −2. Nothing else about the MCAT is used — section splits are not published consistently enough per school to model.
Your cumulative vs the school's median
+0.10 or better scores +2 and +0.03 scores +1. Level (within 0.05 below) is neutral, down to 0.15 below costs −1, and further below costs −2. GPA bands are tighter than MCAT bands because the scale is compressed — 0.15 of GPA is a large gap.
How many applicants the program admits
An acceptance rate of 8% or higher adds a point; 3% or lower subtracts one. This is the reason a 520 does not turn every program into a strong target: at a program that admits one applicant in fifty, strong numbers are the entry ticket, not an edge.
In-state advantage, out-of-state penalty
At a strong-preference program, in-state adds +1 and out-of-state costs −2. At a moderate-preference program, in-state adds +1 and out-of-state costs nothing. Private and out-of-state-friendly programs ignore residency. Leave the selector blank and residency is switched off everywhere.
Composite to tier
+4 or better is a strong target, +1 to +3 a target, 0 down to −2 a reach, and anything lower a far reach. The fit number beside each row is the same composite rescaled onto 0–100, so you can rank programs inside a tier.
Sub-2.5% is never better than a reach
A program that accepts under 2.5% of applicants can never be labelled better than a reach, whatever your numbers; under 5%, never better than a target. The fit score is left uncapped so you can still see that your profile is strong — the cap constrains only the word we put on it.
Half the class was below the median
That sentence is worth reading twice, because it is the single most misread fact in US admissions. A median is the middle of the matriculating class — by definition roughly half of the people who got in scored at or below it. When our dataset publishes a 10th–90th percentile MCAT range for a program, that range is routinely eight to ten points wide. A 508 at a school with a 512 median is not an outlier; it is inside the band the class was actually drawn from.
Medians also say nothing about who those applicants were. Admissions committees at US medical schools run holistic review: they read your experiences, distance travelled, service to under-resourced communities, research depth, letters, secondary essays and interview performance alongside the two numbers this tool scores. Our guide to holistic review walks through the AAMC's experiences–attributes–metrics framework and what each committee is actually looking for.
Three things that move outcomes and are not in this model
Mission fit
A rural-mission program, an HBCU, a research powerhouse and a primary-care school are looking for different applicants. Numbers that read as a reach on paper can be a strong fit if your record matches the mission, and the reverse is just as true.
Trajectory
An upward GPA trend, a strong post-bacc or SMP, or a second MCAT that jumps six points reads very differently from a flat record with the same final numbers. Only the endpoint is visible to a median comparison.
The interview
At most US programs the interview is the largest single input into the final decision — and by that stage everyone in the room already cleared the screen. See our US interview guides for the MMI, traditional and CASPer formats by school.
What actually shifts these tiers
Of everything in an application, the MCAT is the fastest lever — it is the only input you can change by ten points in a single testing cycle, and a ten-point move reshuffles most of the ladder above. Everything else compounds more slowly but weighs at least as much once you are through the screen.
MCAT strategy and retakes
Section-by-section breakdown, percentile tables and when a retake is worth it in our US MCAT guide. Four points above a school's median is where the MCAT band flips from +1 to +2.
Personal statement and secondaries
The 5,300-character personal comments essay is where a below-median applicant makes the case a median never could. Draft and grade yours in the personal statement builder.
MMI, panel and CASPer
Once you are invited, the numbers stop separating you from the field. Format guides, station banks and mock interviews sit in our US interview hub.
The other lever is the list itself. Applicants who apply to twenty programs in one tier get one kind of cycle; applicants who spread across strong targets, targets and a small number of genuine reaches get another. Move the schools you like into the school list builder and check the balance before you certify AMCAS.
What is in the dataset, and what we assume
- Coverage. 227 US medical programs — 163 MD and 64 DO — across 49 states and territories. Every scored program has a published MCAT median, cumulative GPA median, acceptance rate and in-state policy; programs missing any of those are excluded rather than estimated.
- Sources. Program-reported matriculant data of the kind published in MSAR and Choose DO Explorer, cross-checked against each school's own admissions pages. MCAT percentiles use the official AAMC table in effect 1 May 2026 – 30 April 2027 (2023–2025 testing years, n = 305,494, mean 500.6, SD 11.2).
- Medians quoted on this page. MD programs: MCAT 512, GPA 3.80. DO programs: MCAT 504, GPA 3.55. These are medians of the per-school medians, not of individual applicants.
- Assumptions. One entered GPA is treated as your AMCAS cumulative GPA and compared against total-GPA medians; science GPA is not scored. One MCAT total is scored — for multiple attempts, enter the score you will apply with. Residency is a single state; dual-residency and legacy-residency claims are not modelled.
- Not modelled. Experiences, letters, essays, interviews, mission fit, GPA trend, post-bacc or SMP records, institutional action, application timing, Texas' separate TMDSAS process, and any school-specific screen. All of these routinely change outcomes.
- Privacy. Everything runs client-side. Your GPA, MCAT, state and saved list are written to browser localStorage on your own device and never sent to our servers.
Medians move each cycle. Treat a verdict as a read on last cycle's class, not a forecast of this one — and treat the whole page as a planning aid rather than admissions advice.
Frequently asked questions
The rest of the US application toolkit
All three tools share one profile and one saved school list, stored in your browser.
Numbers set the shortlist. People decide the offer.
Work through your list, your essays and your interview answers with a NextGen MedPrep admissions strategist who has read a lot of applications that looked exactly like yours.
Estimates are generated from school-reported medians and are not admissions advice. NextGen MedPrep is not affiliated with the AAMC, AACOM, AMCAS, AACOMAS or TMDSAS. Last reviewed 2026-07-29 · Editorial policy