Calendar

Every deadline in UK surgical training, in one place.

Applications, exams and portfolio cut-offs from medical school to specialty training. Built from official sources, with each date marked as confirmed or expected, because a plausible date stated confidently is worse than no date at all.

How to read this. A date marked Confirmed is published by the body that owns it. A date marked Expected follows last year's pattern and has not been published yet. Never plan something irreversible around an expected date. Last reviewed 16 August 2026.

Three things that make older advice wrong

If you are reading guidance written before this year, check it against these first. All three change what you should actually do.

EPM and SJT are gone. Foundation allocation now runs on Preference Informed Allocation, a computer-generated rank plus your preferences. UKFPO states plainly that the ranking is not informed by performance at medical school. So collecting prizes and publications to improve your foundation allocation no longer works. Those things still matter, but for the Specialised Foundation Programme and for specialty applications later, which is a different argument for doing them.

Core surgical training self-assessment scoring has been discontinued. You no longer self-score on Oriel. You upload an index page giving an A to E indicator per domain, with one piece of evidence per box, and it gets verified. A missing index page scores zero for the portfolio station, which is 45 percent of the total.

The detail people get wrong: your achievements must be complete by the application deadline. The February upload window evidences what already existed in November. It is not a second chance to acquire anything.

The Medical Training (Prioritisation) Act 2026 sorts applicants into priority and non-priority groups, and offers the priority group posts first. In the 2026 round it applied at offer stage only. From the 2027 round it applies at shortlisting as well, which means it affects who gets an interview, not just who gets a job.

Autumn 2026 carries most of the year

Six weeks hold nearly every hard deadline in the cycle. If you only remember one part of this page, remember this part.

If you are a medical student

The most useful thing you can do that is not on this list: get your name on an audit or quality improvement project at the August rotation changeover, when new cycles start and roles are still unallocated. That is the evidence the core training application asks for two years later, and it cannot be acquired in a hurry.

If you are a foundation doctor

Both routes into surgery are applied for in the same window, so the choice gets made in October, not later.

Core surgical training

Scoring weights: MSRA 10 percent, portfolio station 45 percent, management and clinical station 45 percent. The portfolio is not a tiebreak. It is close to half the decision, and it is the half you can influence years in advance.

Run-through ST1

Applied for in Round 1, alongside core training, closing 19 November 2026. Interviews then run about a month earlier than core training, so if you apply to both you usually have your run-through answer before you sit the core selection centre.

In England, run-through surgical training means neurosurgery, cardiothoracic surgery and oral and maxillofacial surgery. That is the whole list.

The Improving Surgical Training run-through pilots in general surgery, urology, vascular and trauma and orthopaedics are paused in England, with those posts returned to standard two year core training. ENT run-through no longer appears in the person specifications. Plastic surgery and paediatric surgery have never had it. Scotland and Wales still run IST, where you can preference run-through posts in general surgery, vascular, urology and trauma and orthopaedics. This is a real geographic difference and worth knowing before you decide where to apply.

Two eligibility traps that get decided long before the application. Neurosurgery ST1 caps prior clinical experience at 24 months whole time equivalent by post start, excluding foundation, so accumulating surgical jobs can quietly make you ineligible. OMFS ST1 excludes anyone who already holds or is eligible for an ARCP Outcome 6 in core surgical training.

If you are a core trainee applying to ST3

Interview dates genuinely differ by specialty. In the 2026 round they spanned 2 February to 31 March, so anyone applying to more than one specialty has to map their own dates rather than assume a common window. MSRA is used for core training and neurosurgery, and not for general surgery ST3, trauma and orthopaedics, ENT, urology, plastics, vascular, paediatric surgery or OMFS.

Note also that ST4 thoracic surgery closed to recruitment after 2026. What replaces it has not been published.

MRCS

The January and February 2027 UK diet is the last realistic Part B sitting before ST3 shortlisting, so if you need MRCS for the 2028 round you are booking against the 19 November 2026 deadline, more than a year ahead.

ARCP

There is no national ARCP date and no national ISCP evidence deadline. Anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. Each region and School of Surgery sets its own under the Gold Guide and notifies trainees directly.

In practice, surgical ARCPs run April to August, concentrated May to July, and evidence is usually required complete on ISCP two to six weeks before the panel, most often about four. Some regions run interim reviews outside that.

The safe assumption is that your evidence needs to be final by mid-May unless your training programme director says otherwise. Confirm your local date directly rather than working from any calendar, including this one.

Where this comes from

Confirmed dates are taken from UKFPO, NHS England specialty recruitment, the intercollegiate MRCS pages, JCST and ISCP. Expected dates follow the previous round and are not published. Most of the 2027 cycle publishes between mid-September and late October, and this page is reviewed when it does.

If you spot something wrong or out of date, tell us at hello@surgerym8.com and it gets fixed. A calendar nobody corrects is worse than no calendar.

Keeping on top of it

The portfolio is the part of all this that cannot be done in a hurry, at any stage: a student building for the Specialised Foundation Programme, a foundation doctor building for core training, a core trainee building for ST3, and everyone building for ARCP. PortfolioM8 exists for exactly that.

We also send one email a month with whatever is coming up next in this calendar, so you do not have to remember to check it. Join the monthly brief.