What is the acceptance rate for degree apprenticeships?

There were 11.3 applications for every Level 6 apprenticeship place in the current academic year, up from 2.8 in 2023/24. That is an average success rate of roughly 9%, already slightly harder than Oxford. The best-known programmes receive 50 to 100+ applications per place, which puts them several times beyond any Oxford or Cambridge course.

These figures come from data held by the government's Find an Apprenticeship service in England, obtained by the BBC under Freedom of Information. They are not part of the Department for Education's published apprenticeship statistics, which do not break applications down by level — so treat them as the best available measure rather than an official one, and note that they cover only vacancies advertised through that service.

The numbers

Competition is usually quoted as applications per place. Converting that to a success rate makes it directly comparable to university admissions, which is where the scale of it becomes clear.

Why they got so much harder, so fast

Two curves crossed. Applicants through the government service went from around 8,100 to 21,800 in three years, as tuition costs pushed more school leavers to look for an alternative. Over the same period, advertised positions nearly halved, from about 7,300 to 3,700, as employers pulled back on hiring. Same source and same caveats as the figures above.

More applicants chasing fewer places compounds fast, and it explains something that confuses people looking at older advice: guidance written in 2022 about applying to five or six programmes was reasonable at the time. At current ratios it is not.

The caveats that matter

This comparison is useful but it is not like-for-like, and the honest version includes why.

• Apprenticeship applicants self-select less. There is no UCAS limit of five choices, so a single person can submit thirty applications. That inflates applications per place relative to a system that caps choices, and makes the raw ratio look worse than the underlying competition.
• Oxbridge applicants are already a filtered pool. Very few people apply to Oxford without predicted grades in range, so a 14% success rate is 14% of an already strong field. Apprenticeship applicant pools are much broader.
• The average hides enormous spread. The 11.3 figure covers everything from a heavily-marketed technology programme to a regional employer nobody has heard of. The distribution is not remotely even.

Both effects push the same way: the true difficulty of a given programme is somewhere between the headline ratio and the Oxbridge comparison. That does not change the practical conclusion.

What this actually means for how you apply

The competition is concentrated, not uniform, and that is the useful part. A handful of recognisable employers absorb a wildly disproportionate share of applications, while good programmes at less famous organisations go comparatively under-applied.

1. Apply to far more than feels sensible. Fifteen to twenty-five is the realistic range now. See how many should you apply to.
2. Do not build your shortlist only from names you recognise. That is the same list everyone else is working from, and it is where the 50–100:1 ratios live.
3. Run a UCAS application alongside. At these odds, treating an apprenticeship as your only plan is a genuine risk rather than a cautious-sounding one.
4. Apply early. Many programmes recruit on a rolling basis and close once the cohort fills — see the application timeline.

The takeaway

Degree apprenticeships are no longer the overlooked back door they were five years ago, and advice written on that assumption will hurt you. Plan for a low hit rate per application, apply broadly and beyond the obvious names, start early, and keep the university route open. The odds on a single application are bad; the odds across a well-built list of twenty are perfectly reasonable.

Next: what grades employers actually ask for and whether you need work experience.