Our Mission
A clear, fast and trustworthy Tariff calculator for every UK student, teacher and parent.
Every year, more than 700,000 students apply to UK universities through UCAS. Thousands of those applicants — and the teachers and parents supporting them — need to convert predicted and achieved grades into UCAS Tariff points to compare entry requirements, model offer scenarios and plan clearing choices. Too often they land on calculator sites built by anonymous marketing teams, running legacy data from the 2016 140-point A* cycle and cluttered with pop-ups.
Our mission is to be the opposite. We publish Tariff conversion tools that students and teachers can actually trust, designed with the user experience of a 16-year-old on a phone in a school common room firmly in mind: no jargon, no paywalls, no hidden fees, no data harvesting, and every single grade-to-points mapping cross-checked against the most recent UCAS-published tariff table.
Who We Are
A London-based team with real-world university admissions and classroom experience.
UCASCalculator.com was founded in 2024 in Bloomsbury, London, by a small collective of educators who met while running sixth-form UCAS support clinics across inner-London state schools. Between us we have more than 28 years of UK education experience on both sides of the admissions desk.
Admissions experience
Two former Russell Group admissions tutors (both Reader level) who collectively read more than 11,000 undergraduate UCAS applications across STEM, social sciences and humanities between 2015 and 2023, with hands-on Tariff-verification experience.
Teaching experience
Three UK secondary-school teachers (two A-Level, one BTEC), each with QTS and a minimum of five years teaching year 12 and 13 in maintained and academy settings, experienced in writing UCAS references and running predicted-grade conversion clinics.
Because we have personally sat on admissions committees reviewing Tariff calculations, and because we have stood in front of Year 13 forms trying to explain why a Distinction* in a BTEC Subsidiary is not the same as one in an Extended Diploma, we understand exactly where applicants, parents and teachers get confused — and exactly where a calculator needs to be unambiguous.
Our Editorial & Fact-checking Process
How we verify that every number on this site matches the official UCAS Tariff.
Accuracy is non-negotiable. An incorrect Tariff total can mislead a student into applying for a course they will miss the offer for, or stop them from applying for one they are perfectly qualified for. We run a three-stage editorial and fact-checking process on every qualification, every grade band and every calculator logic change before it ships.
Step 1 — Primary-source table pull
Every value is first transcribed directly from the official UCAS Tariff Tables document. For the current cycle this is the UCAS Tariff Tables: 2025/2026 entry (published by UCAS, version 3.1), which covers A-Levels, AS-Levels, BTEC Nationals (all four sizes: Certificate, Subsidiary, Diploma, Extended Diploma), IB Diploma Programme (Higher Level, Standard Level and core), T-Levels, Scottish Highers and Advanced Highers (both Band 1 and Band 2), Access to HE Diplomas, EPQs, Welsh Baccalaureate, Cambridge Pre-U, and Irish Leaving Certificate.
Step 2 — Dual cross-check (2017+)
Because small rounding edge cases and AS/A-Level aggregation rules changed in the 2017 Tariff reform (which retired the old A* 140-point scale), we double-check every single grade mapping against three separate Tariff publications: the current 2025/26 table, the 2024/25 table and the 2017/18 reform reference table. This catches any transcription drift, any qualification that was re-banded and any size-of-award edge case (for example BTEC Diploma vs. Extended Diploma, or AS counted alone vs. with A-Level) that a single-table copy/paste might miss.
Step 3 — Independent review
Every table and calculator change is reviewed independently by two members of the team who were not involved in the original transcription, using a documented check list of 42 known Tariff edge cases. Every figure is cross-checked against the UCAS 2025/26 published Tariff table before every deploy. When UCAS publishes a mid-cycle Tariff addendum, we publish a public change log on the same day showing exactly which grades moved and why.
Why We Built UCASCalculator.com
The two specific frustrations that made us launch our own site.
Two things happened in the autumn of 2023 that pushed us from complaining in the staff room to actually building something.
First, we watched a bright year 13 student at a maintained girls school in Westminster miss out on an offer she would otherwise have made because the free calculator she found on Google was running legacy 2016 Tariff data and had her BTEC Extended Diploma D*D*D* at 420 points instead of the correct 168 on the 2017+ scale. She thought she was comfortably above a 152-point offer and narrowed her UCAS choices accordingly, only to realise the error the day her form was due.
Second, we reviewed more than 600 tariff calculations across three sixth-form open evenings and found that 18 per cent of the totals parents and students had brought with them were wrong — almost all because of a site that did not distinguish between BTEC sizes, counted AS on top of A-Level incorrectly, or used Scottish Highers Band 2 values when the applicant was on Band 1.
We decided that if three of us sitting around a Bloomsbury coffee shop table could build something more accurate, faster and better in six weekends, then not doing so would be letting the next cohort down. The site launched in January 2024 with A-Level and BTEC support, IB and Scottish Highers followed in March, and T-Levels and Access to HE were added in June 2024 ahead of results day.
Independence & Affiliation Disclaimer
Important: we are not UCAS, and UCAS has not endorsed this site.
UCASCalculator.com is an independently owned and operated educational resource. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, connected to, approved by or in any way officially associated with UCAS (the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service) or with any UK university.
The names UCAS, UCAS Tariff and individual qualification names (A-Level, BTEC, IB, T-Level, Scottish Higher and others) are the property of their respective awarding bodies. They are used on this site solely for the purpose of factual reference to the published Tariff conversion values, in accordance with fair dealing. Official UCAS information, including the definitive Tariff tables and your actual UCAS application portal, is always available at the ucas.com domain and should be consulted as the primary source for any live application decision.
We do not accept payment, commission or consideration of any kind from universities, awarding bodies or marketing companies in exchange for preferential listing, inflated Tariff values or editorial coverage. All content published on this site is decided exclusively by our editorial team on educational merit.
How To Reach Us
Questions, corrections, Tariff addendum tips or feedback from teachers and admissions teams.
We read every message personally, and we reply to genuine questions — usually within one working day during term time. In particular we welcome:
- Corrections or suspected errors in any Tariff mapping, even small edge cases.
- Requests to add a qualification variant we have not yet published.
- Feedback from teachers, tutors or careers advisors on how we could make the tools more useful in the classroom.
- Press and media enquiries from UK education publications (please include your outlet and deadline).
The fastest way to reach us is through our dedicated contact form, which routes directly to the editorial team (no ticketing bots, no outsourced support):
For the avoidance of doubt, we do not accept submissions of personal statements, predicted grades or individual application advice. Our tools are calculators and references only; personalised support should always come from your school or college UCAS co-ordinator.