Exam dates & key moments
When are GCSE exams?
The main GCSE exam series runs across May and June each year, with most students sitting papers over roughly five to six weeks inside that window. Exam boards publish provisional timetables on their websites well over a year in advance, so you can see the shape of your season early. But the definitive version is the individual exam statement your school gives you - that lists your exact papers, dates, times and rooms.
Last updated 29 July 2026 · Written and fact-checked by the GCSEwiz team
The shape of the exam season
GCSEs are sat in a single national summer series through May and June. Your subjects will not be evenly spread: most students hit a dense stretch where big subjects cluster, then a thinner tail. Papers in the same subject are usually separated by days or weeks rather than sat together, which matters for revision planning - you can keep topping up a subject between its papers.
There is also a smaller November series, but for most students it only offers English language and maths resits for those past Year 11 - the summer is the main event.
Where the official timetables live
Each exam board - AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR, WJEC/Eduqas - publishes its timetables on its own website, first as provisional versions well over a year ahead, then finalised. If you know your boards, you can sketch your season long before school hands anything out. Two cautions: different subjects at your school may sit with different boards, and provisional timetables can shift - so treat the board websites as the preview and your school's exam statement as the truth. If the two ever disagree, your school's statement wins, and the exams officer is the person to ask.
Building a countdown plan from the timetable
A timetable is more useful than a vague sense of "exams are in the summer" - it turns revision into a schedule you can actually build:
- Work backwards from your first paper - that date, not the last one, is the real deadline for first-pass coverage.
- Map which subjects cluster together, and pull some of their revision earlier so the crowded week is topping-up, not first meetings.
- Use the gaps between papers in the same subject - paper 1 to paper 2 is prime time for that subject’s remaining topics.
- Plan rest as deliberately as revision: the season is a marathon of weeks, and pacing it beats sprinting into it exhausted.
Dates change by year - anchor to the official sources
The exact dates are different every year, which is why this guide gives you the pattern and the sources rather than a list that would quietly go stale. Two lookups get you everything: your boards' timetable pages for the early view, and your school's exam statement for the final word. Once those are in hand, the countdown is yours to build.