Updated 24.10.2026• 8 min read• Scoring

Average LNAT score: national and university data

The last national average, the averages each university has published or disclosed, and how they have changed since 2014.

Jurica Research

LNAT preparation

The most recent national average for LNAT Section A is about 23 out of 42, for the 7,849 candidates who sat the test in 2015/16. It is our calculation from the last technical report the LNAT Consortium made public, which gives figures for each test form but no overall average, and the Consortium has published nothing more recent. Newer averages exist only for the applicants and offer holders of individual universities. In this guide we explain where the national figure comes from, set out the averages each university has published or disclosed, and show how they have changed.

What is the national average?

The mean reported score in 2015/16 was 22.97 out of 42, with a standard deviation of 5.24. We calculated both figures ourselves from the report’s tables for its five test forms, because the report gives no overall average.

The figures come from the technical report that Pearson VUE prepared for the Consortium, covering 1 September 2015 to 30 June 2016. The mean number of correct answers on the five forms ranged from 22.04 to 24.43. Weighted by the number of candidates who sat each form, the mean number of correct answers was 23.27, and after the forms were equated (see below) the mean reported score was 22.97. On average, candidates answered 56% of the questions correctly. The report describes the test’s reliability as moderate, with coefficients of 0.68 to 0.76 for the five forms.

The Consortium’s documentation page links one other report, for 2014/15, and the same calculation applied to that report gives a mean of 22.42 for 6,992 candidates. In both years Section A lasted 80 minutes, against 95 minutes today.

Why is there no more recent national average?

The Consortium has not made one public. Its page of technical reports is open to member universities only, and its public results page gives no averages.

The 2015/16 figure is therefore the latest public national benchmark, and we recommend treating it as a rough guide to the current cohort. The averages that universities have disclosed in the 2020s give a more recent picture: their applicants have generally averaged between 22 and 25. However, each of these is a selective pool of people applying to one university, so none of them can replace a national average.

A table of yearly national averages also circulates online, on Wikipedia and on tutoring sites that copy it (it gives 21.8 for 2025/26, for example). It says its figures come from emails that Pearson VUE sends to candidates, but it links no source, and we have not been able to confirm any of them. For that reason we do not use them in this guide.

What are the averages at each university?

At the universities that have released recent figures, applicants average between about 22 and 25, and offer holders between about 24 and 30. The table gives the most recent figures we have found, with the year of entry each one describes.

Section A scores can be compared directly between universities, because every candidate sits the same 42-question test, although each university’s figures describe a different group of applicants. Most of the figures below were published by the university or disclosed under Freedom of Information. The Cambridge and LSE figures, however, are our own means of data those universities released, as the note below the table explains.

*King’s gave this figure as a whole number. Since then it has released only the average of the students who enrolled, which was 27.51 for 2025 entry. †Bristol’s figure covers offer holders on its standard offer; those on its contextual offer averaged 23. Cambridge gives averages for each college and no university-wide figure, so its row is our unweighted mean of the 29 college averages. LSE’s applicant figure is our mean of the scores it released for each applicant for 2021 entry, which is the latest year with an applicant figure (its offer holders that year averaged 25.4); its offer-holder figure is our mean of the scores of the 438 offer holders it listed for 2024 entry. UCL’s applicant figure is UCL’s own average of all the LNAT results it received. The SOAS and Glasgow figures are older than the rest, but they are the latest overall averages either has released. SOAS’s are for single-honours Law, and SOAS now requires the test only from applicants with non-standard qualifications. Glasgow’s is the average of its successful applicants to all its LLB degrees; its reply for 2023 entry gives means for three bands of offer holders (16, 23 and 30) and no overall figure.

Have the averages changed over time?

Yes, although slowly: offer-holder averages have risen by two to three marks at Oxford, UCL and LSE since the early 2020s, while Cambridge’s has stayed close to 30. These are averages of the successful applicants (some of whom scored below them), so they should not be read as cut-offs.

There are three things to notice here:

1. UCL has the longest run of figures. Its offer holders averaged between 26.1 and 28.3 for 2014 to 2022 entry, and then 29.5, 29.9 and 29.4 for 2023, 2024 and 2025 entry, and 30 for 2026 entry. Oxford’s rose from 28.25 for 2022 entry to between 30 and 31 for each of the four rounds since. LSE’s offer holders averaged 25.4 for 2021 entry and 25.52 for 2022 entry, and the 438 scores it listed for 2024 entry average 28.04.
2. From one year to the next, the averages usually move by less than two marks (for example, the average of King’s enrolled students fell from 29.34 to 27.51 between 2024 and 2025 entry, and Durham’s offer holders’ from 26.3 to 24.9). The figure for the last cycle is therefore a reasonable guide to the current one, although over several years the small changes add up.
3. In general, the differences between universities are larger than the differences between years. Durham’s offer holders have averaged between about 24 and 26.3 in every cycle it has disclosed, while Oxford’s and Cambridge’s have averaged about 30 in every recent cycle.

How far apart are the applicant and offer-holder averages?

At every university that has released both figures, the offer-holder average is the higher of the two. The gap ranges from about one mark at Durham (23.8 against 24.9 for 2025 entry) to about five and a half at Oxford and seven at UCL (23 against 30 for 2026 entry).

This gap does not show that there is a fixed cut-off. Oxford, for example, made offers to candidates who scored in the low 20s for 2025 entry, and LSE told a Freedom of Information requester in 2021 that it had no minimum score. UCL, on the other hand, says that it sets a benchmark score each year from the averages of earlier applicants, although it does not publish the figure. In general, the gap shows only that higher scores are more common among successful applicants.

If you are setting yourself a target, the offer-holder average is the more useful comparison, because the applicant average includes everyone who applied, successful or not. For example, a score of 24 is close to the middle of several applicant pools, but it is about six marks below the recent offer-holder averages at Oxford and Cambridge. Our page on LNAT score distributions shows how the offer rate rises with the score at Oxford and LSE.

Can essay averages be compared across universities?

They cannot, because Section B is not marked centrally: there is no national essay average, and each university that marks the essay uses its own scale.

Oxford marks essays by comparing them with one another, and its Faculty’s 2021 admissions report describes the essay as scored from 1 to 100. Its offer holders for 2026 entry averaged 65.21. At Cambridge, essay marks run from 1 to 10, and the mean of its 29 colleges’ offer-holder averages for 2025 entry was 7.51. UCL marks the essay out of 5, Durham reads it without giving it a score, and King’s has said that it did not use the essay in the cycles up to 2022. A score of 65 at Oxford and a score of 7.5 at Cambridge therefore come from different marking systems, and we recommend comparing each only with figures from the same university.

Do some groups of candidates score higher than others?

They do, but only by small amounts. The 2015/16 report broke the scores down by candidate group, and the differences between the groups were a few marks at most.

For example, among UK-educated candidates the gap between the highest-scoring and lowest-scoring types of school or college was 3.7 marks on a 42-mark test, and male candidates averaged 1.4 marks more than female candidates. Candidates aged 16 to 21 averaged 23.11, which was higher than the averages for older candidates that year, although the 2014/15 report shows the opposite pattern for candidates aged 22 to 34.

Note that these figures describe the average for each group, and they cannot be used to predict the score of an individual candidate. The report did not take account of prior attainment or other differences between the groups, so it cannot show that the type of school caused the difference in scores.

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