When do GCSE exams start in 2027? Full timetable and key dates

GCSE exams in 2027 start on Monday 10 May and run through to Friday 18 June, with a contingency day on Wednesday 23 June that all candidates need to keep free. Results day is Thursday 19 August 2027, confirmed as final by the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ) in May 2026. For a sense of how the day itself unfolds, our GCSE results day 2026 guide walks through the process.

The main boards used in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR and WJEC/Eduqas) all share the same common timetable slots. That means whichever board your school uses, the maths papers, English papers and science papers land on roughly the same days. This guide pulls together the confirmed dates, the exam windows, and the first and last exam per board so you can plan the year properly.

10 May – First GCSE exam. Monday 10 May 2027, across AQA, Edexcel, OCR and WJEC/Eduqas. The last exam is Friday 18 June 2027.

Every board publishes its own detailed timetable, but the start and end dates line up because they all sit inside the JCQ common timetable. Here is what each board has locked in for summer 2027.

The first day of exams is fairly packed. On Monday 10 May 2027 both AQA and Edexcel students sit Computer Science in the morning and Citizenship Studies in the afternoon, with a handful of language listening papers dotted through the day. It is a soft start for most students because the biggest subjects (maths, English, sciences) begin from Tuesday 11 May onwards.

Biology paper 1 for most boards falls on Tuesday 11 May, English Literature paper 1 on Wednesday 12 May, and maths paper 1 (the non-calculator) is on Friday 14 May. So the first week eases students in with lower-entry subjects and then hits the core academic papers by the end of the week.

The main written exam series runs across roughly six weeks from Monday 10 May to Friday 18 June, followed by the JCQ contingency day on Wednesday 23 June. Most students will not sit exams every single day: The timetable is spread out so that clashes are rare and there is usually at least a short gap between big papers in the same subject. Once your school issues its personal candidate timetable, use it as the backbone of your Year 11 revision timetable.

Maths, English and combined science are the papers most students share. Around those, the boards slot in humanities (history, geography, religious studies) and modern foreign languages. Practical subjects like drama, dance, engineering and design and technology have their written exams in the second half of the window, in June.

Wednesday 23 June 2027 has been designated as a contingency day. In practice this means students must remain available for exams on that day, in case one of the awarding bodies needs to reschedule a paper due to disruption (for example, a national incident or a paper being compromised).

Most years the contingency day passes without anyone needing to sit an exam. But schools cannot allow families to book holidays or otherwise take students off the timetable before that date, because if a paper is moved, students would have no other opportunity to sit it in that series.

The practical takeaway for parents: Do not book flights, days out, or celebration trips for any date before Thursday 24 June 2027. That is the earliest safe point to plan around.

Some subjects are worth flagging early because they touch nearly every GCSE student and often clash with revision priorities. If you are already in Year 11, our guide to preparing for Year 11 has a term-by-term view of what to prioritise, and Cognito's full GCSE course library covers every subject below with short lessons and quiz questions. Two of the most-revised are GCSE Maths AQA Higher and GCSE Biology AQA Higher, both mapped to the specifications for the papers below. Dates below are for AQA and Pearson Edexcel and are drawn from the published 2027 timetables. OCR and WJEC/Eduqas slot into the same common days.

The 2027 window sits almost exactly where 2026 did. GCSE exams in 2026 also ran from mid-May to mid-June, with a contingency day in late June, and results day on Thursday 20 August 2026. This mid-May to mid-June pattern has been consistent for the past decade of GCSE exams and is likely to hold for future years too.

So when you are planning revision, mock exams, or family holidays, the safest working assumption is: Exams start the second week of May, end around the third week of June, and results land on the third Thursday of August.

Every year, the four awarding bodies (AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR and WJEC/Eduqas) work together through the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ) to publish a common timetable. This is why maths, English and combined science land on the same days across boards: The common timetable stops students at schools using multiple boards from having impossible clashes.

Each board then publishes its own detailed version with subject codes and paper numbers. The AQA and Edexcel 2027 timetables are the sources for the specific dates in this article; OCR and WJEC/Eduqas match those on the shared common slots. If your child is at a school using OCR or WJEC/Eduqas, look up the board's published timetable to check paper-specific dates, but the start and end of the window will be the same.