Round One offers landed at 2pm today. 90,866 offers went to 62,166 applicants, and behind that headline is a points table that moved in ways almost nobody predicted.
We pulled the official CAO Round 1 lists for every Level 8 and Level 7/6 course, 1,395 courses in all, matched them against the CAO's own 2025 points charts, and calculated the change on the 1,168 courses scored on plain Leaving Cert points in both years. (Portfolio, audition, interview and HPAT-combined courses use a different scale and are analysed separately.) Here is what actually happened.
The headline: points went up, not down
Grades fell this year. Points didn't.
The State Examinations Commission cut the post-marking adjustment from 5.8% to 4%, H1s dropped from 12.1% of grades to 10.1%, and only 35.5% of grades got a bump (down from 52.4% last year). The obvious prediction was a points fall across the board.
Instead:
| Movement vs 2025 Round 1 | Courses | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Up 50+ points | 80 | 7% |
| Up 20 to 49 | 164 | 14% |
| Up 1 to 19 | 383 | 33% |
| No change | 90 | 8% |
| Down 1 to 19 | 307 | 26% |
| Down 20 to 49 | 117 | 10% |
| Down 50+ | 27 | 2% |
627 courses rose. 451 fell. The average course went up 5.9 points; the median went up 2.
The CAO's own figures tell the same story from the other direction: 46% of Level 8 courses, almost 500 of them, saw their cut-off rise, and more than 37% saw it fall. Of the 90,866 offers, 56,618 were Level 8 and 34,248 were Level 7/6, and 52% of students missed their first-choice course, with 48% of Level 8 offers going to a first preference and 76% landing in a student's top three.
The reason is arithmetic, not magic. There were 95,710 CAO applicants this year, 6,402 more than last year, and 20,527 of them sat the Leaving Cert in earlier, more generous years and carried those grades into the 2026 competition. More applicants chasing the same seats beats softer grades.
The five biggest rises
Small, regional and technological-university courses dominate the top of the table.
| Change | Course | College | 2026 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| +180 | Construction Management (DK732, L7) | Dundalk IT | 300 | 120 |
| +174 | Graphic Communication Design (GC480, L7) | Griffith College | 283 | 109 |
| +161 | Pharmacy Technician, Athlone (US660, L7) | TUS | 387 | 226 |
| +136 | Architectural Technology (DK731, L7) | Dundalk IT | 326 | 190 |
| +133 | Social Care Work, Ennis (US781, L7) | TUS | 339 | 206 |
At Level 8, the biggest movers tell the same story: Automation and Robotics at TUS Athlone +128 (251 → 379), Social Care Work at TUS Ennis +120, Polymer and Mechanical Engineering at TUS Athlone +111, Mechanical Engineering at TUS Athlone +110, and Architectural Technology at DkIT +110.
The five biggest drops
| Change | Course | College | 2026 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| -245 | Tourism and Event Management, Wexford (SE922) | SETU | 228 | 473 |
| -154 | Computing (DB500) | Dublin Business School | 244 | 398 |
| -138 | Computer Science, Linguistics and a Language (TR039) | Trinity | 393 | 531 |
| -90 | Primary Teaching - International (MI004) | Mary Immaculate | 462 | 552 |
| -87 | Theology (MU002) | St Patrick's Pontifical University | 321 | 408 |
Four patterns that explain almost everything
1. Construction and engineering are the story of 2026
Applications to engineering rose 15% and architecture 12%. The points followed:
- Architecture and construction: +22.1 points on average (78 courses), 55 up vs 20 down
- Engineering and engineering trades: +17.1 on average (107 courses)
Civil Engineering at MTU Cork jumped 121 points at Level 7. Architecture at UL went from 520 to 625.
2. Computer science is still deflating
ICT applications fell 9%, and this is now the second consecutive year of softening:
- ICT: -6.3 points on average, 55 courses down vs 38 up
- UCC Computer Science -72 (456 → 384)
- DCU Computer Science -44 (487 → 443)
- UCD Computer Science -32 (542 → 510)
- Trinity Computer Science -24 (543 → 519)
3. Health went up, except where new courses opened
Health courses rose +12.5 on average. But Pharmacy fell at all three established providers (Trinity -10, UCC -12, Galway -12) and Physiotherapy fell everywhere (UL -10, UCD -1, Trinity -10, RCSI -11), despite physiotherapy first preferences rising 27%, and pharmacy applications rising 41% on the February snapshot. New provision is the reason, and we've broken that down in a separate piece.
4. Teaching softened almost everywhere
Primary teaching fell at every single provider: Maynooth Froebel -11, Mary Immaculate Limerick -9, DCU -12, Marino -11, Mary Immaculate's International programme -90.
The 625 club
Six courses closed at the maximum 625 in Round 1: UCC Dentistry (up 12), Trinity Dental Science, Trinity Management Science and Information Systems Studies, UCD Economics and Finance, UL Architecture (up 105 on portfolio-adjusted scoring), and Trinity Dental Hygiene.
Medicine, scored on HPAT plus Leaving Cert, barely moved: Trinity 741 (+2), UCD 738 (no change), UCC 735 (+5), RCSI 734 (+1), Galway 730 (+2). UL's new undergraduate Medicine programme entered at 730 in its first year.
How to read a "shock" number without being misled
Two health warnings before you screenshot any of this:
- Small courses swing hard. A course with 20 places can move 100+ points because two or three strong applicants changed their first preference. DkIT Construction Management going 120 → 300 is real, but it is a small-cohort effect, not proof that construction is now harder than medicine.
- Portfolio and audition courses use a different scale. Where you see a score above 625, the college combined Leaving Cert points with a portfolio, audition or interview mark. Those numbers are not comparable to a plain points score, and they move violently year to year.
What this means for you tonight
If you got the offer you wanted, accept it by 3pm on Tuesday 1 September and stop reading points tables.
If you didn't, the useful number isn't Round 1, it's what happened after Round 1. Last year, 215 courses dropped their points between Round 1 and the final round, with a median fall of 10 points and 60 courses falling by 20 or more. Round 2 is a real second chance, and there is nothing you need to do to be considered except leave your CAO order alone.
Work out your options properly. CourseCompass has a free CAO points calculator, a Mock CAO tool, and a course-matching engine covering ~850 Irish courses, so you can see what your points actually open up, not just what you missed.
Data and verification. 2026 points are the Central Applications Office's own Round 1 lists for Level 8 and Level 7/6 courses (retrieved 26 August 2026, checksum-verified on two separate downloads). 2025 points are the CAO's published 2025 points charts. All 1,395 courses in the 2026 lists are covered, plus 42 courses listed in 2025 that are not offered this year. Every figure quoted in this article was machine-checked against that dataset. Sampled 2026 and 2025 values were independently confirmed against the entry-points lists published by Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and University of Galway, 42 of 42 matched. Year-on-year change is calculated only where a course was scored on the same basis in both years.