Updated 24.10.2026• 7 min read• Scoring

What is a good LNAT score?

The average Section A score at each LNAT university, for applicants and offer holders, and how to compare your own score with them.

Jurica Research

LNAT preparation

Whether an LNAT score is good depends on where you are applying. The last national figures that were made public, for 2015/16, give an average Section A score of about 23 out of 42, and in recent years the average among offer holders has ranged from about 24 or 25 at Bristol and Durham to about 30 at Oxford and Cambridge. None of these averages is a cut-off.

What is the average LNAT score?

The average Section A score is about 23 out of 42. This is the mean we calculate from the LNAT Consortium’s technical report for 2015/16 (22.97 across 7,849 candidates), which is the most recent national report the Consortium has made public.

Section A has 42 questions, and you get one point for each correct answer, with nothing taken off for a wrong one. The Consortium has not published a national average since 2015/16, so the national figure is now about ten years old. More recent figures come from the applicant pools of individual universities: for 2025 and 2026 entry, the average applicant scored between about 23 and 25 at Oxford, Cambridge, UCL and Durham. For example, a score of 24 is a little above the last national mean and close to the middle of these applicant pools.

What do applicants and offer holders score at each university?

The table below gives the most recent averages we have found for each university that uses the LNAT. Because every candidate sits the same 42-question Section A, these figures can be compared directly, although they come from different years.

*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 college by college, 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 (its offer holders that year averaged 25.4), and 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. Glasgow’s figure 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. SOAS’s figures are for single-honours Law. SOAS now requires the test only from applicants with non-standard qualifications, and its later figure (15.2 for 2022 entry, covering only the offer holders who were required to sit the test) cannot be compared with the others. See which universities require the LNAT for the current requirements in full.

There are three things to notice in the table:

1. The recent applicant averages are close together, between 22.3 and 24.94. SOAS’s 19 is lower, but it is for 2019 entry.
2. The offer-holder averages are spread much more widely. They are about 29 to 30 at Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, about 27 to 28 at King’s and LSE, about 24 to 25 at Bristol, Durham and SOAS, and 20 at Glasgow, although the SOAS and Glasgow figures are older. At Durham the offer-holder average is only about a mark above the applicant average.
3. An offer-holder average covers only the applicants who were successful, so it is usually higher than the applicant average. Neither is a published cut-off, so we recommend comparing your score with both figures for the university you are applying to.

How is the essay scored?

Section B is not marked by the LNAT Consortium. Each university decides whether to mark the essay and on what scale, so essay scores cannot be compared across universities in the way that Section A scores can.

Oxford marks the essay itself using No More Marking, a system in which markers compare essays with one another, and its Faculty’s 2021 admissions report describes the essay as scored from 1 to 100. Offer holders for 2026 entry averaged 65.21. Cambridge’s essay marks run from 1 to 10, and the mean of its colleges’ offer-holder averages for 2025 entry was 7.51. UCL marks the essay out of 5. Durham reads the essay but does not give it a score, and LSE says that it does not consider the essay for most applicants. King’s told Freedom of Information requesters that it did not use the essay in the cycles up to 2022, and its pages for 2027 entry do not say what it does now.

Oxford’s 65 and Cambridge’s 7.5 therefore come from different systems, so we suggest that you compare an essay score only with the average at the same university. Having said that, you still need to prepare for the essay, because Oxford, Cambridge and UCL mark it and other universities read it. See how to prepare for the LNAT for advice on dividing your time between the two sections.

What counts as a good score?

In general, a score at or above the recent offer-holder average at the universities you are applying to is a good score. For the most selective universities that means about 29 or more, and for Bristol and Durham about 24 or more.

As a rough guide, you can read your Section A score against the published figures as follows:

1. A score of 22 or below is below the last national mean and below the middle of every recent applicant pool in the table. No university publishes a cut-off, so a score in this range does not rule you out, although at most universities the successful applicants scored higher. Glasgow’s successful applicants averaged 20 in the 2020-21 cycle.
2. A score of 23 to 25 is around the national mean and the applicant averages at most universities, and close to the offer-holder averages at Bristol, Durham and SOAS. It is below the recent offer-holder averages at Oxford, Cambridge and UCL.
3. A score of 26 to 28 is above every published applicant average and close to the offer-holder figures for King’s (27) and LSE (28.04).
4. A score of 29 to 32 is close to or above the recent offer-holder averages at Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and on the published data it is a strong result anywhere.
5. A score of 33 or more is above every offer-holder average in the table. Scores this high are uncommon: at Oxford for 2025 entry, about one applicant in ten scored 33 or more.

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