How do you get into Cambridge Law?

How many people apply, and how many get in?

In the 2025 admissions cycle (for entry in October 2025, or deferred entry in 2026), Cambridge received 1,654 applications for Law and made 291 offers, an offer rate of 17.6%.^[1] Of those offer holders, 232 were accepted at confirmation, so 14.0% of applicants ended up with a place. The difference between the two figures is made up of offer holders who missed the conditions of their offer or did not take up the place.^[1] The 2025 cycle is the most recent one for which Cambridge has published figures.

Note that Cambridge calls the second figure the “success rate”: the number of applicants accepted at confirmation divided by the number who applied. Oxford’s headline figure of about 12% is an offer rate (251 offers to 2,061 applicants in its 2024-5 round, which is the same UCAS year),^[4] so if you want to compare the two universities, set it against Cambridge’s offer rate of 17.6% and not against the success rate of 14.0%.

Before going further, it is worth being clear about what these figures can tell you. They describe the whole field, including many candidates whose LNAT scores or grades made an offer unlikely from the start. Your own chances depend far more on your LNAT result, your academic record and your interview, which we cover in the next three chapters.

Has it become harder to get in?

In one sense it has. Applications rose from 1,015 in 2015 to a peak of 1,870 in 2021, and have since settled at between about 1,600 and 1,700 a year.^[1] Over the same eleven cycles Cambridge made between 245 and 292 offers a year and accepted between 202 and 262 students, so the number of places has changed far less than demand. (Places depend on how many students the colleges can teach, not on how many people apply.)

Because the number of places has stayed roughly the same while applications grew, the share of applicants who get a place has fallen. The next chart shows both rates for each year.^[1]

There are four things to notice here:

1. Applications grew by 63% between 2015 and 2025, from 1,015 to 1,654.^[1]
2. Offers stayed between 245 and 292 a year throughout.
3. The success rate fell from 20.5% in 2015 to 14.0% in 2025. In other words, the course became harder to get into because more people applied for roughly the same number of places.
4. The sharpest change came in 2021, when applications jumped from 1,537 to 1,870 in a single cycle. That rise has partly unwound, but applications are still about 600 a year above their 2015 level.

Having said that, the last three cycles have been steady. Since 2023 the offer rate has stayed between 17.6% and 18.0%, and Cambridge has received about seven applications for each place (compared with 8.50 in 2022, the highest of the eleven years, and 4.83 in 2016, the lowest).^[1]

Does it matter where you apply from?

In 2025, 1,156 Home and 498 international candidates applied for Law at Cambridge.^[2] The Home share of applicants has risen from 45% in 2015 to 70% in 2025. This change was driven by Home demand: Home applications grew from 453 to a peak of 1,244 in 2022, while international applications stayed between 476 and 684 a year.

In 2015 international applicants outnumbered Home applicants (562 against 453, so the Home share was 45%). By 2022 there were 1,244 Home applicants and 601 international ones (a Home share of 67%), and in 2025 the Home share was 70%.^[2] Changes in fee status after Brexit and the rise in UK applications after the pandemic are likely to be part of the reason, although the University does not say so.

What does this mean for your chances? The chart below shows the offer rate for each group.^[2]

As you can see, the gap between the two groups has closed. In 2015 the Home offer rate was 32.2% and the international rate 19.8%. As Home applications grew, the Home rate fell to a low of 13.5% in 2022, while the international rate reached its own low of 11.4% in 2021. In 2023, 2024 and 2025 the international rate was level with or above the Home rate (18.5% against 17.2% in 2025).^[2] Note, however, that the international pool is the smaller of the two, and that Cambridge has not increased its international intake: it made 111 offers to international applicants in 2015 and 92 in 2025.

Does your choice of college matter?

Cambridge’s 29 colleges receive very different numbers of Law applications. In 2025, Downing received the most (149), and Churchill and Sidney Sussex the fewest (28 each). Over the eleven cycles since 2015, Downing, Gonville and Caius and Trinity have received the most Law applications.^[3] The chart shows each college’s applications and offers for that year.

Many candidates look at a table like this and decide to apply to the college with the highest offer rate. We do not recommend it, for three reasons:

1. The colleges’ offer rates in 2025 ran from 9.8% (King’s) to 35.7% (Sidney Sussex), but each college made only between 5 and 16 Law offers.^[3] With numbers this small, two or three offers either way move a college’s rate a long way, so the differences tell you little about how hard each college is to get into.
2. Three of the colleges with high offer rates (Hughes Hall, St Edmund’s and Wolfson) take only students aged 21 or over, so they admit a different group of applicants and are not open to school-leavers.
3. The winter pool spreads strong candidates across the colleges. If your college cannot offer you a place but rates you above candidates elsewhere, you can be pooled and offered a place by another college. In the 2025 cycle about a fifth of all Cambridge offers (19.5%, and 20.7% in 2024) were made through the winter pool by a college other than the one the applicant had applied to.^[1] The annual reports give no figure for Law alone.

In general, therefore, we recommend choosing a college for reasons that matter to you over three years (its size, location, facilities and the Law fellows who teach there), and checking its own Law page for any extra conditions it sets. The Interview chapter explains how the pool works.

What do we know about the 2026 admissions round?

Very little has been published so far. The University’s statistics report for each cycle appears in May or June of the following year, so the report for the 2026 cycle (for entry in October 2026) is not expected until about May 2027.^[1] The University also refused a request for 2026-cycle Law and LNAT figures in March 2026, while that round was still running.^[5]

What we do have is the following:

1. Across all courses, around 18% of the applications received in October 2025 were placed in the winter pool, and in January 2026, 1,060 pooled applicants (around one in four) were offered a place by a different college.^[6]
2. Two colleges have released the LNAT scores of the Law students who started in October 2026. Trinity’s 12 students averaged 32.0 on Section A, and Queens’ 8 students averaged 25.9.^[7][8] Christ’s gave only ranges for its two students,^[9] and Magdalene did not release 2026 figures.^[10] We look at these scores in detail in the LNAT chapter.

Note that these colleges keep no records of unsuccessful applicants once a round has finished, so their figures describe students who were admitted, not everyone who applied.^[7][8]