Assize Careers

Sign in or create a free account

The application calendar

A wrong deadline on a careers page can cost somebody a year. So this calendar prints a date only where a publisher has published one, names that publisher, and tells you plainly where the real date lives instead.

Last reviewed 12 October 2026.

Check the employer’s own page before you rely on anything here. Training contract, vacation scheme, apprenticeship and pupillage deadlines are set by each employer, they change every cycle, and some close early when they fill. Nobody — not us, not any aggregator — can promise you that a third-party listing is current. Where we have no sourced date, this page says so rather than guessing.

This calendar is in the free plan and stays there. Deadlines are the reason people open a careers site in October, and charging for them would be charging for the one thing the whole market gives away. What the paid plans add is your own copy of it: the tracker and the reminders at the bottom of this page.

The shape of the cycle

The steps below are a shape, not a set of dates. Each employer sets its own, the shape varies by route, and the only dates printed on this site are the ones in the table underneath.

  1. The spring and summer before you apply: evidence, not applications

    Open days, insight schemes, mini-pupillages and ordinary paid work. This is when the material you will cite in an application is acquired, and almost nothing closes in this window, which is why it is the one most often wasted.

  2. October to January: the deadlines cluster

    Vacation scheme and training contract deadlines cluster between October and January. The exact dates are each employer’s own, they change every cycle, and a date that was right last year is evidence of nothing. Several large employers close on a rolling basis once applications reach a number they will not publish, so the published deadline is a ceiling rather than a plan.

    If you are applying to more than three or four places, the failure mode is not the writing. It is losing track of which stage each application is at.

  3. Late autumn to spring: the pupillage round

    The Pupillage Gateway runs an annual round. In 2024/25 it ran from 25 November 2024 to 9 May 2025, according to the Bar Council’s own report on that round, published on 31 October 2025. Those are last round’s dates and not this one’s: the Bar Council publishes the current round’s timetable and that is the page to use. A substantial share of pupillages is also recruited outside the Gateway, on each set’s own timetable.

  4. Winter and spring: tests, then assessment centres

    Aptitude tests usually sit immediately after the application form and before any interview, often with a short window to complete them. Assessment centres follow. Which tests you will face is set by the employer, not by the profession, and the test practice section sets out each published format.

  5. Spring and summer: the schemes themselves run

    Vacation schemes and work placements are usually held in the spring and summer following the application. For many employers the scheme is the interview, and offers follow it.

  6. Any time: the assessments and the apprenticeships

    SQE sittings run to the SRA’s published timetable rather than to any employer’s. Apprenticeship vacancies are jobs and appear when an employer has one. Neither follows the graduate cycle, which makes both easy to miss if you are working to a milkround calendar.

The dates we can source

Every date below comes from the publisher named with it. Nothing here is an employer deadline, because no employer publishes one centrally.

SQE fees for 2026/27
SQE1 is £2,006 and SQE2 £3,086, a total of £5,092 for one attempt at each, up from £1,934 and £2,974. The rise took effect at the start of the 2026/27 academic year and applies to anyone booking from October 2026. Check the current fee before you book: it has gone up in each of the last two years. SRA, 21 April 2026.
What an SQE2 sitting looks like
The January 2026 round was sat between 27 January and 6 February 2026. The SRA publishes the sitting and booking windows for each round; we link to them rather than restate a timetable that moves. SRA, report dated 21 May 2026.
When SQE results and reports arrive
SQE1 is assessed twice a year and SQE2 roughly quarterly. The statistical report for a sitting follows the results by about two to three months: the January 2026 SQE1 report is dated 31 March 2026 and the January 2026 SQE2 report 21 May 2026.
The minimum pupillage award
Announced each autumn, after the Living Wage Foundation rate, and applied from 1 January whatever date a pupillage started. From 1 January 2026 it is £25,863 a year in London and £23,504 outside London, up from £24,203 and £22,019. Bar Standards Board.
The Bar Course Aptitude Test
Not required since 31 July 2022. The Bar Standards Board announced its abolition on 11 July 2022, following approval by the Legal Services Board. Preparation for it is still being sold; do not buy any.
The last date for admission by the LPC route
31 December 2032, under the SRA’s published transitional arrangements, page last updated 25 November 2025. The other transitional dates are on the solicitor route page. These are the SRA’s arrangements, not a commencement provision in a statutory instrument, so the SRA can change them.
The legal year, for anything at the Bar
October to September. Call and tenancy statistics are published by legal year, and the Bar Standards Board states its next update is due in November 2026. BSB.

The other calendar: when the data lands

Most of the numbers an applicant wants arrive once a year, on a date the publisher sets. Knowing when is useful, because it tells you how old the figure in front of you is and when a better one is due. Nobody else in this market publishes this, as far as we can tell.

Monthly
SRA regulated population statistics: practising solicitors, the roll, firm counts and admissions by route. SRA.
Per sitting
SQE statistical reports, two to three months after each set of results. A July 2026 SQE1 report appears to have been published on 29 September 2026; we have not been able to read it, because the SQE site blocks automated requests, so this site publishes no figures from it.
July
The National Student Survey. The Bar Standards Board’s Bar training statistics by course provider were published in July 2025.
October
ONS earnings. The 2025 provisional edition was released on 23 October 2025 and corrected on 19 December 2025; a revised 2025 edition and a 2026 edition are both due in the October to November 2026 window, so every pay figure on this site is about to be superseded and will say so when it is.
Late November
UCAS end-of-cycle data. The 2025 cycle is the most recent published set. DfE apprenticeship statistics for 2024/25 were published on 27 November 2025 and last updated on 29 January 2026.
Annual, date varying
BSB Bar training overall trends (December 2025 edition), BSB Diversity at the Bar (2025 edition published March 2026, describing the Bar at 1 December 2025), the Bar Council’s Pupillage Gateway report (2024/25 edition published 31 October 2025, with no 2025/26 edition published as at 12 October 2026), and SRA education and training monitoring (2023/24 edition published September 2025, with no 2024/25 edition on the SRA’s index as at 12 October 2026).
June 2027
The next release of graduate outcomes and earnings data from the Department for Education.

Dates this page deliberately does not print

  • Any named employer’s deadline. We do not hold a verified list of them, and republishing somebody else’s aggregation of them would make their errors ours. Go to the employer.
  • The undergraduate admissions deadlines. UCAS publishes them and its terms do not permit us to reproduce its material commercially. Use the UCAS page, which is also the only one that is binding.
  • This cycle’s Pupillage Gateway dates. Published by the Bar Council, whose copyright notice prohibits reproducing any part of its material in another publication. We link.
  • Next year’s SQE sitting windows. The SRA publishes them and changes them. A hard-coded copy on a careers site is a trap with a twelve-month fuse.

If that looks like a short calendar, it is an accurate one. The useful thing a data company can do here is not to retype four hundred deadlines a year with no way to verify them; it is to tell you which dates are published facts, which are somebody’s unverified aggregation, and which do not exist yet.

Keeping your own copy of it

The calendar above is the same for everybody. What is not the same is which deadlines are yours, which stage each application has reached and what you said in the last one. That is what the tracker and the reminders are for.

Reminders are one email before a deadline on your own shortlist. They are not a marketing list, there is nothing else in them, and turning them off is one click in your account.

Assize Careers is not a regulator, professional body, university, law school or official careers service, and it is not part of or endorsed by one. Nothing on this site is legal advice.