Leaving Certificate grade inflation is down by 1.8 percentage points compared with last year as the State continues the gradual unwinding of its Covid-era grade boosting.
That means students getting their results this morning are competing for college places with some students from last year who received more inflated grades but are only applying for college this year.
Some 20,527 of this year’s CAO applicants sat their Leaving Certificate in a previous year, while a significant number of these would have sat it in 2025.
The post-marking adjustment (PMA) applied to this year’s result is 4 per cent, down from 5.8 per cent last year.
RM Block
The wind-down of the system was brought in four years ago to ensure students’ grades did not drop dramatically after the inflated results seen in 2020 and 2021.
The PMA system artificially increased grades by about 7 per cent, with that gradually decreased out to about 5.8 per cent last year. It is reduced to 4 per cent this year.
In practice, this means students have received on average one fewer grade increase than last year’s class. This is similar to last year’s results, when students also got on average one fewer grade increase than the year before.
A total of 166,868 grades have been increased by the PMA this year, which is 35.5 per cent of all grades. This is down from 52.4 per cent of all grades in 2025 and 68 per cent in 2024.
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If you apply that percentage change across an average of seven subjects per student, it equates to a change in one grade per student each year.
There will be a post-marking adjustment next year, the State Examinations Commission has confirmed, but that will be the final year of it.
Overall, the percentage of H1 grades has dropped from 12.1 per cent in 2025 to 10.1 per cent this year. The percentage of H2s has come down from 19.5 per cent to 17.8 per cent over the same period.
At ordinary level, the number of O1s has come down from 3.7 per cent last year to 2.7 per cent, while, at foundation level, the percentage of F1s has dropped from 6.2 per cent to 5.3 per cent.
In terms of individual subjects, the percentage of H1s in maths has dropped from 11 per cent to 8.1 per cent.
There was significant disquiet after the higher-level maths paper one this year, with students and parents writing to the Minister for Education to complain.
In English, the percentage of H1s has come down from 5 per cent to 4.3 per cent. In Irish, the percentage of H1s is 10 per cent as against 11 per cent last year.
A record number of students sat this year’s Leaving Certificate – a total of 70,411, which represents a 15 per cent increase since 2024.
Among the subjects that saw a significant increase in numbers is Mandarin Chinese, up 47 per cent since last year, as well as physical education, which is up 26 per cent, and Ukrainian, which is up 18 per cent.
Some 16,000 students qualified for an extra 10 minutes in their exams through the reasonable accommodations at certificate examinations scheme, compared with 750 last year.
This was also the first year of the senior-cycle level-one and level-two learning programmes, designed for students with complex learning and developmental needs.
This year, for the first time, those students will receive their results alongside their peers doing the Leaving Certificate. Some 306 students took part this year, across 78 schools.
Minister for Education Hildegarde Naughton congratulated students on “an important achievement and a testament to your hard work, as well as to the support of the families, teachers and school staff who have helped you along the way”.
