USC admitted 11.7% of its applicants for Fall 2026, with 9,251 undergraduate admits, the Office of Admission wrote in a statement to the Daily Trojan on Thursday. The University admitted 11.2% of applicants for last year’s fall semester.

The University received 79,290 undergraduate applications for the Fall 2026 cycle, a roughly 5% drop from last year’s record-breaking 83,500 applicants. 

The unweighted grade point average for the class is a record high 3.92, the Office of Admission wrote, up 0.02 from last year. 

“The academic strength of this admitted class is truly exceptional,” Dean of Admission Timothy Brunold wrote in a statement to the Daily Trojan. “Our highly selective admission rate reflects both the depth of interest in USC and how extraordinarily prepared these students are for our rigorous academic environment.”

More than half of the applicants in the 2026-27 admissions cycle participated in the early action round, according to January data from the Office of Admission, which constituted about 41% of total acceptances in this admission cycle. If early action applicants are neither admitted nor rejected, they can get deferred to the regular decision pool.

The acceptance rate during the early action round was about 9.5%. Even though the early action acceptance rate this year is the highest it has been since the University implemented the early action option in the 2022-23 admission cycle, it is still lower than the overall Fall 2026 admission rate of 11.7%.

The 2025-26 admission cycle marks the first year that the University implemented an early decision option for admission, albeit only available for undergraduate business and accounting programs in the Marshall School of Business. USC announced in February that it will offer an early decision option for most of the undergraduate programs starting the next admission cycle. Students applying through the early decision option will not be permitted to apply to other institutions through early decision.