The Degree Apprenticeship Window Opens in Two Weeks. Here Is What Is Actually Open Right Now.
September is two weeks away. For a few thousand people in the UK it means the first day of a degree apprenticeship — an ID badge, a laptop, a manager. I did that a year ago and the thing nobody warns you about is how ordinary it feels. You are just at work.
For everyone else, September means something less visible and more urgent: it is when the application window for the following September opens. Most large degree apprenticeship schemes take applications from September to November for a start twelve months later. If you want a Level 6 place in autumn 2027, the decisive six weeks of that process begin in about fourteen days.
Almost nobody is told this. So here are the actual numbers — what is live today, what the national picture looks like, and what we expect to be listing by the time the window closes.
What is open today
These are counts from our own database this morning, not a reassuring gesture at "plenty of options".
There are 7,536 live opportunities on ApprenticeWizard right now, from 3,626 distinct employers. Of those, 7,030 are apprenticeship vacancies and 506 are virtual work experience programmes.
Broken down by level:
- Level 2, Intermediate — 1,813
- Level 3, Advanced — 3,353
- Level 4 and 5, Higher — 255
- Level 6 and 7, Degree and Master's — 158
- Level not stated by the employer — 1,451
Read the shape of that honestly, because it is the whole point. If you want a Level 2 or Level 3 apprenticeship, over five thousand vacancies are open to you this afternoon. If you specifically want a degree apprenticeship, 158 is a thin market — and it is thin because you are looking two weeks too early, not because the roles do not exist.
5,229 of those listings have a deadline inside the next eight weeks. 73.6% of our catalogue carries a stated closing date at all; the rest do not publish one, which is its own problem and one reason a tracker beats a spreadsheet.
The national picture, which is better than you have been told
Degree apprenticeships are not a niche. In 2024/25 there were 60,350 starts at Level 6 and Level 7 in England — 26,780 at Level 6 and 33,560 at Level 7. That is a 20.4% increase on the previous year, against 353,500 apprenticeship starts overall. Higher-level apprenticeships have gone from 13% of all starts in 2017/18 to 40% in 2024/25.
So roughly 26,780 people a year start a bachelor's-degree-level apprenticeship in England. That is a real cohort. It is not a lottery ticket.
Two things complicate the picture, and you should know both.
The first is competition, and it is getting worse fast. E.ON reported around 165 applicants for every degree apprenticeship place in 2026, up from 45 per place in 2023. That is nearly a fourfold increase in three years. Individual figures vary enormously — a solicitor apprenticeship might see 200–500 applicants per place, a smaller regional engineering firm far fewer — but the direction is not ambiguous. More people have worked out that this route exists.
The second is a funding change at Level 7. From 1 January 2026, Level 7 apprenticeships are only government-funded for apprentices aged 16–21 at the start of training, or under 25 with an EHC plan or care experience. Since Level 7 was more than half of all degree-level starts last year, the Level 6 and Level 7 numbers for 2026/27 will look different. If you are 18 and reading this, the change works in your favour: you are inside the funded group and some employer money is likely to move down to Level 6.
Why the arithmetic is less frightening than 165-to-1 sounds
165 applicants per place is a real number and it deserves respect. But it is a number about one employer, and the mistake almost everyone makes is treating it as a number about the route.
If you apply to three schemes at roughly a 1-in-165 hit rate, your chance of at least one offer is about 1.8%. If you apply to twenty, it is about 11.5%. If you apply to forty, it is about 21.6%.
Nothing about you changed between those three scenarios. That is a numbers problem, not a talent problem — and it is the single most common reason strong candidates end the cycle with nothing. They wrote three excellent applications when the market required thirty good ones.
The catch is that thirty applications across a twelve-week window, each with different portals, deadlines, video stages and assessment centres, is an administrative job. That is the part that actually defeats people. Not the aptitude tests.
What we expect to be listing by November
Here is the forward-looking part, with its reasoning exposed rather than stated as a confident forecast.
Over the last five weeks, newly-seen Level 6 and 7 listings ran 2, then 8, then 8, then 21, then 87. Some of that curve is the autumn cycle genuinely beginning. Some of it is our own coverage expanding — we added a large volume of listings in the same period, so the two effects are tangled and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
What I will say plainly is the direction: we expect to be listing several hundred live Level 6 and Level 7 opportunities by the end of November, drawn from Find an Apprenticeship, UCAS Career Finder, and direct employer career sites, rather than the 158 visible today.
For context on whether that is ambitious: Amazing Apprenticeships' summer 2026 listing covers 950+ higher and degree apprenticeships from over 35 employers, and that is a curated selection rather than the whole market. The ceiling is well above where we are.
Which means someone searching in October sees several times what is visible today. That is the entire job — not persuading anyone that apprenticeships are good, just making the ones that exist findable in one place before they close.
What to actually do in the next fourteen days
Not motivation. A list.
- Build the target list now, not in October. Twenty to forty employers. Sector first, brand second — the well-known names have the worst ratios. Filter live opportunities by level here.
- Write the CV once, properly, before the window opens. In September you will be tailoring, not drafting. Doing it under deadline is how the weak version ships.
- Record the deadlines the day each scheme opens. Employers routinely close early when they have enough applicants. The advertised date is a ceiling, not a promise.
- Get the numerical and situational judgement practice done in August. These are the stages that eliminate people who would have been good at the job, and they are the most improvable part of the whole process.
- Apply in the first two weeks a scheme is open. Rolling assessment is standard. The same application is worth measurably more in week one than in week six.
If you have just had results and want the wider version of this decision, we wrote that up on results day.
The part that matters
A year ago I was the person about to start. The gap between me and the people who did not get a place was not talent, and I want to be careful not to pretend otherwise — some of it was luck. But a large, boring, fixable part of it was that I applied to sixty things and tracked them, badly, in Trello and a Notion page I stopped updating.
Sixty applications with a bad system still beats three with a perfect one.
The window opens in two weeks. The people who get places in autumn 2027 are, disproportionately, the ones who have their list written before it does.
ApprenticeWizard tracks every live apprenticeship and internship in the UK in one place, filterable by level, with a free application tracker so you never lose a deadline. Vacancy counts in this article were taken from our database on 16 August 2026. Start your list here.