Grades & grade boundaries
What percentage do you need for a grade 4, 5 or 7 at GCSE?
There is no fixed percentage for any GCSE grade. Exam boards set grade boundaries after marking each summer, so the mark a grade needs moves with that year’s paper difficulty. As a rough illustration from maths in recent years: on foundation tier a grade 4 has tended to need somewhere around half the marks, while on higher tier the same grade 4 has needed only around a fifth - because higher papers are much harder.
Last updated 29 July 2026 · Written and fact-checked by the GCSEwiz team
Why there is no fixed percentage
Grades are not awarded against a preset percentage scale. After every script is marked, each exam board sets that year's grade boundaries using senior examiner judgement and statistics, so that a grade 5 means the same standard whether the paper was gentle or brutal. A harder paper gets lower boundaries; an easier one gets higher boundaries. This is a feature, not a flaw - it means a tough exam season cannot quietly cost you a grade.
The practical consequence: any page that tells you "a grade 7 is 70%" is making it up. The only real numbers are the boundaries your board publishes after results, and they shift every year.
The illustrative patterns in GCSE maths
With that health warning firmly attached, the published boundaries from recent years in GCSE maths do cluster into broad bands. Treat this table as illustration only - the real figures move year to year and differ between boards, so always check the boundaries your own board has published:
| Grade | Foundation tier (illustrative) | Higher tier (illustrative) |
|---|---|---|
| 9 | Not available on foundation | Often somewhere around three-quarters of the marks |
| 7 | Not available on foundation | Often somewhere around half to two-thirds |
| 5 | Often around two-thirds or more | Roughly a quarter to a third |
| 4 | Often around half to three-fifths | Often around a fifth, sometimes less |
Why the same grade needs such different percentages on each tier
A grade 4 on higher tier can sit at a strikingly low percentage because higher papers spend most of their marks on grade 6–9 content - a student working at grade 4 simply cannot access much of the paper, so the boundary reflects that. On foundation, the whole paper is built from content a grade 4–5 student can do, so the boundary sits much higher. The grade itself is worth exactly the same from either tier; only the route to it differs.
This is also why "what percentage did you get?" is a meaningless comparison between friends on different tiers - the honest comparison is the grade, which is calibrated to mean the same standard everywhere.
How to use this without obsessing
Boundaries are set after you sit the paper, so the percentage is the one thing you cannot control - marks are the thing you can. Use the published boundaries from last year as a planning anchor: turn them into a marks-per-paper target, aim comfortably above the historical band for your target grade, and then forget about boundaries entirely. Every hour spent securing one more topic is worth more than any hour spent recalculating percentages.