Texas Medical School Acceptance Rate by GPA and MCAT (TMDSAS Chances Grid)

Texas Medical School Acceptance Rate by GPA and MCAT (TMDSAS Chances Grid)

Every premed asks the same question, just with different numbers plugged in: "What are my chances at a Texas medical school with a 3.6 GPA and a 510 MCAT?" Swap in a 3.8 and a 515, or a 3.3 and a 505, and it is the most-Googled question in Texas medical admissions. And until now it has never had a real answer.

Here is why. The national MD picture has one: the AAMC publishes Table A-23, the famous grid that crosses GPA against MCAT and shows the acceptance rate in every cell. Premeds have leaned on it for years. Texas has no equivalent. TMDSAS (the Texas Medical & Dental Schools Application Service) publishes GPA distributions and MCAT distributions — but only separately, never crossed against each other, and only inside a Power BI dashboard that search engines and AI assistants cannot read. So the single most useful artifact a Texas applicant could want — a GPA × MCAT acceptance grid — simply did not exist anywhere on the public internet.

So we built it. This article is that grid: the Texas analog of AAMC Table A-23, as a clean, crawlable HTML table. Find your GPA row, slide over to your MCAT column, and read your historical acceptance rate. We lead with the Texas resident grid (because ~90% of TMDSAS seats go to residents, it is the one most readers need), then show the non-resident grid, then the combined grid, and explain exactly how to read your cell — and what to do if the number is lower than you hoped.

Data as of Entry Year 2026 (latest); EY2026 itself excluded because it is still in progress. Cells pool the six completed cycles EY2020–EY2025 for stable sample sizes. This is an independent, reproducible reproduction of public aggregate figures and is not affiliated with or endorsed by TMDSAS. Verify every number yourself against our open dataset on GitHub or the original TMDSAS stats dashboard.

How to read this grid (the 20-second version)

1. Find your GPA band down the left side (overall/cumulative GPA on a 4.0 scale).
2. Find your MCAT band across the top (total MCAT, 472–528 scale).
3. The cell where they meet is the historical acceptance rate for TMDSAS applicants in that GPA × MCAT box, pooled over EY2020–EY2025.

"Acceptance rate" here means accepted ÷ applicants — the share of everyone in that cell who received at least one TMDSAS acceptance. It is computed across all TMDSAS medical schools combined, at the applicant level. A few housekeeping rules:

• A blank cell marked "—" means fewer than 10 applicants landed in that box over six years, so we suppress the rate rather than publish a number built on noise.
• GPA bands are half-open on their label: 3.60-3.79 means a GPA from 3.60 up to (but not including) 3.80. The 4.00 row is the top edge.
• Applicants with no MCAT on file, or a junk/uncategorized GPA bin, are excluded — a chances grid needs both axes.

The Texas Resident grid (start here)

If you are a Texas resident, this is your table. Texas law reserves roughly 90% of seats at participating public medical schools for residents, so resident odds are dramatically higher than the headline numbers most sites quote. Rows are GPA bands; columns are MCAT bands; each cell is the acceptance rate for Texas residents in that box, EY2020–EY2025.

TMDSAS acceptance rate by GPA and MCAT — Texas Residents

Source: TMDSAS stats dashboard; rates computed by GradPilot from pooled EY2020–EY2025 counts. "—" = fewer than 10 applicants in the cell (suppressed). Acceptance rate = accepted ÷ applicants, Texas residents only.

Read it in plain text: A Texas resident with a 3.60–3.79 GPA and a 505–509 MCAT was accepted about 45% of the time. Move up to a 3.80–3.99 GPA with a 510–514 MCAT and it is about 71%. A 4.00 with a 515–519 MCAT sits around 93%. Down in the corner, a Texas resident below 3.00 with a sub-490 MCAT was accepted about 2% of the time. The grid climbs steeply as you move up and to the right — exactly as you would expect, but now with actual numbers attached.

The Non-Resident grid (much lower — read the contrast)

If you are applying from out of state, the same GPA and MCAT buy you a very different number. The non-resident grid is shifted down across the board because of the statutory ~10% cap on non-resident seats. Same axes, same EY2020–EY2025 pooling, non-residents only.

TMDSAS acceptance rate by GPA and MCAT — Non-Residents

Source: TMDSAS stats dashboard; rates computed by GradPilot from pooled EY2020–EY2025 counts. "—" = fewer than 10 applicants in the cell (suppressed); blank = no applicants recorded. Acceptance rate = accepted ÷ applicants, non-residents only.

The same cell, two answers: why residency dwarfs everything

The most important thing this pair of grids shows is what happens to the same GPA × MCAT box when you flip residency. Pick a strong-but-not-superhuman applicant — 3.80–3.99 GPA, 510–514 MCAT (call it a 3.8 / 512):

• As a Texas resident: ~71% acceptance rate.
• As a non-resident: ~23% acceptance rate.

Identical stats. A roughly 48-percentage-point swing, driven by nothing but residency. It is not subtle, and it holds in every comparable cell. A 3.6 / 510: ~57% resident vs. ~13% non-resident. A 4.0 / 515–519: ~93% resident vs. ~38% non-resident. If you are an out-of-state applicant, this is the single most important fact in Texas admissions — your "chances" cell is a different table entirely, and a number that looks discouraging for a non-resident may be perfectly healthy for a resident with the same file. We unpack the out-of-state cap and what it means for your school list in our TMDSAS out-of-state acceptance rate breakdown.

The combined grid (all applicants, both residencies pooled)

For completeness — and because it is the closest direct analog to the national Table A-23 — here is the grid for all TMDSAS applicants combined, residents and non-residents together. Because the pool is ~90% resident, this grid tracks the resident grid closely but sits a few points lower in most cells.

TMDSAS acceptance rate by GPA and MCAT — All Applicants

Source: TMDSAS stats dashboard; rates computed by GradPilot from pooled EY2020–EY2025 counts. "—" = fewer than 10 applicants in the cell (suppressed). Acceptance rate = accepted ÷ applicants, all applicants. Overall pooled acceptance rate across the whole grid is about 39%.

A few representative cells in plain text, for quick reference and easy citation:

• 3.60–3.79 GPA × 505–509 MCAT → ~37% acceptance rate (all applicants).
• 3.80–3.99 GPA × 510–514 MCAT → ~59%.
• 4.00 GPA × 515–519 MCAT → ~73%.
• Below 3.00 GPA × below 490 MCAT → ~2%.

What the grid reveals: MCAT carries a lot of weight

Read across any single GPA row and the climb is steep — much steeper than reading down a single MCAT column. That is the headline pattern: at any given GPA, your MCAT band does enormous work. Look at the resident 3.40-3.59 row: it runs from ~2% at a sub-490 MCAT up to ~84% at 520+. Same GPA, the entire range of outcomes, decided almost entirely by the test.

The marginal numbers make it concrete. Pooling across all GPAs, the MCAT marginal climbs from about 2.5% acceptance below 490, to ~40% at 505–509, to ~77% at 520+. A strong MCAT can pull a middling GPA into competitive territory far more readily than a strong GPA can rescue a weak MCAT.

The one oddity worth naming: high GPA, low MCAT cells are brutal

If you scan the top-left of any grid you will see something that surprises people: very high GPAs paired with low MCATs produce very low acceptance rates. A Texas resident with a 4.00 GPA but a 490–494 MCAT was accepted 0% of the time in this dataset; a 3.80–3.99 with a sub-490 MCAT, only ~5%. A near-perfect transcript does not save a low MCAT. This is the clearest signal in the whole grid that TMDSAS schools weight the MCAT heavily — a 4.0 reads very differently against a 515 than against a 491, and the data treats those as nearly opposite applications. If your GPA is strong but your MCAT is lagging, the grid is telling you exactly where to spend your effort.

Honest caveats — please read before you panic or celebrate

A grid like this is powerful precisely because it is concrete, which is also why it is easy to over-read. A few things it is not:

• It is a correlation, not a guarantee — or a verdict. Each cell is a historical average of thousands of different applications. It is not a prediction of your file. Two applicants in the same cell can have wildly different outcomes because Texas schools rank you on essays, clinical and research experience, letters, interviews, and narrative — none of which appear on this grid. A compelling TMDSAS personal statement and Personal Characteristics Essay is what separates two people sharing a cell. If your number looks low, it is a starting point, not a sentence.
• It is pooled EY2020–EY2025, not a single year. We pool six completed cycles so that even thinly populated cells have enough applicants to report a stable rate. Year-to-year, any individual cell wobbles.
• Cells with fewer than 10 applicants are suppressed (shown as "—"). You will see this mostly in the sparse corners — a 4.0 with a sub-490 MCAT, or a sub-3.0 with a 520+. There just are not enough such people to publish a trustworthy rate.
• This is applicant-level across ALL TMDSAS schools — not per-school. A cell tells you the chance of an acceptance somewhere in the Texas system, not the cutoff at any specific school. Do not read it as "School X requires a 510." Individual schools differ widely, and TMDSAS does not publish per-school GPA × MCAT cells.
• EY2026 is excluded because it is still in progress (acceptances are partial, matriculations not yet assigned). Including a half-finished cycle would drag every rate artificially downward.

What to do if your cell is lower than you hoped

Here is the genuinely useful part. The grid sorts your application into two kinds of inputs: the fixed ones and the movable ones.

GPA, once you are late in the process, is largely fixed — you cannot un-take a semester. But the grid makes painfully clear how much leverage the MCAT carries, and a retake is squarely movable. For many applicants, the single fastest way to jump cells is to move up one MCAT band: in the resident grid, a 3.6 applicant going from 500–504 to 510–514 moves from ~34% to ~57%. If your GPA is fixed and your MCAT is soft, that is where the points are.

And then there is everything the grid cannot see — which is most of your application. Two applicants in the same cell are differentiated entirely by the parts the numbers ignore: how clearly your essays convey why medicine and why Texas, how coherent your experiences read, how a reapplicant demonstrates real growth. Because the TMDSAS match ranks you against a fixed pool of applicants — many with stats nearly identical to yours — every point of differentiation in your essays literally moves you up someone's rank list. That is the movable part with the highest ceiling.

GradPilot helps you write TMDSAS essays that are strategically differentiated, written in your voice, and aligned with what Texas medical schools actually rank applicants on — so that whatever cell you start in, your file is the one that overperforms it.

Frequently asked questions

What are my chances at a Texas medical school with a 3.6 GPA and a 510 MCAT? As a Texas resident, a 3.60–3.79 GPA with a 510–514 MCAT had about a 57% acceptance rate across all TMDSAS schools (EY2020–EY2025 pooled). As a non-resident with the same stats, about 13%. These are applicant-level rates across all Texas schools combined, not any single school's cutoff.

What is the TMDSAS acceptance rate for a 3.8 GPA and a 512 MCAT? A 3.80–3.99 GPA with a 510–514 MCAT was about 71% for Texas residents and about 23% for non-residents. Same stats, very different odds — residency is the dominant factor.

Does GPA or MCAT matter more for Texas medical schools? Both matter, but the grid shows the MCAT doing more of the work cell-to-cell: at a fixed GPA, moving up MCAT bands swings the acceptance rate far more than the reverse. High-GPA / low-MCAT cells are some of the lowest in the grid.

Why is there no official Texas GPA-by-MCAT acceptance grid? TMDSAS publishes GPA and MCAT distributions only separately, inside a Power BI dashboard, and never crosses them. This grid is an independent reproduction built by pooling the underlying public counts — verify it yourself in our open dataset.

Is this per-school or for all of Texas? All TMDSAS medical schools combined, at the applicant level. A cell is your chance of an acceptance somewhere in the Texas system, not a specific school's requirement.

Where this data comes from, and how to verify it

We believe admissions data should be open. The underlying figures are already public — they are just trapped in a dashboard nobody can crawl, cite, or cross-tabulate. This article exists to make the GPA × MCAT grid readable, and the dataset behind it exists to make it verifiable.

• Primary source (original): the TMDSAS stats dashboard. Every count traces back to it.
• Our open dataset (reproducible): github.com/7hacker/tmdsas-admissions-data — clean CSVs (including the exact acceptance_by_gpa_mcat and acceptance_by_gpa_mcat_residency files behind these grids), a data dictionary, and the extraction methodology. Verify the numbers yourself.

Data as of Entry Year 2026 (latest); EY2026 excluded because it is in progress; cells pool EY2020–EY2025. This is an independent reproduction and is not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by TMDSAS. All acceptance rates were computed by GradPilot from the published counts as accepted ÷ applicants, with cells under 10 applicants suppressed.

Keep reading

• The full data hub: TMDSAS acceptance rate — 10 years of Texas med school admissions data, with the year-by-year funnel, residency, applicant-type, and average MCAT/GPA tables.
• The trend over time: Is it getting harder to get into Texas medical school?
• Out-of-state odds: TMDSAS out-of-state acceptance rate
• How the match works: The TMDSAS match system, explained