Registration closed on Friday, October 30, 2026. Test dates: weekend administration Saturday/Sunday, November 14/15, 2026; School Day Wednesday, November 18, 2026; last weekend date Saturday, November 21, 2026.
SHSAT preparation
1 week to the SHSAT
The first test dates are Saturday/Sunday, November 14/15, 2026. School Day testing is Wednesday, November 18, 2026, and the last weekend date is Saturday, November 21, 2026.
Source: NYC Public Schools, checked October 25, 2026.
What fits in that time
- A diagnostic first ($150, one-time, 1.5 hours). It shows where your child stands on the SHSAT and which topics cost the most points, so no session goes to something already solid.
- Then sessions at $125 each, paid one at a time. With one week left, the sessions go to the one or two topics that cost the most points, and to test-day timing. No package to buy: after the diagnostic you get a written plan with the number of sessions it calls for, and you decide from there.
SHSAT registration
Registration opens Tuesday, October 6, 2026 and closes Friday, October 30, 2026. There is no second window.
Source: NYC Public Schools, checked October 25, 2026.
SHSAT Test Dates 2026 — test Nov 14, 15, 18 & 21
Dates checked against NYC Public Schools on .
Which SHSAT date is your child’s?
8th grade at a public middle school that ends in 8th grade: Wednesday, November 18, at their own school. 8th grade at a 6-12 or K-12, charter, private, parochial or independent school, or homeschooled: Saturday, November 14 or Sunday, November 15. All 9th graders: Saturday, November 21. Weekend testers go to the central site of their school’s district — find yours below. Registration closes Friday, October 30, 2026 in MySchools; the test ticket confirms the day and site.
This page is the calendar. It carries every SHSAT date for this cycle — the registration window, the School Day, the weekend sittings, results, and last year’s qualifying scores. If what you need is the procedure instead — who is eligible, the MySchools path, how to rank the eight schools — that lives on how to register for the SHSAT.
SHSAT School Day
Wed, Nov 18, 2026
NYC public middle schools ending in grade 8.
Both dates are taken directly from the NYC Public Schools Specialized High Schools page, read October 19, 2026, as are the weekend sittings and the weekend test site for each district. Anything it has not published is listed below as unannounced rather than guessed — a wrong test date is worse than no page at all. Most eighth-graders sitting the SHSAT are also registering for something else this autumn; our test registration planner takes an exam and a date and returns the window that is still open, the day it closes and what it costs, for the SSAT, ISEE, SAT, ACT and PSAT as well as this one. Wondering what the score buys? All eight specialized high schools, their offers and their lowest qualifying scores for 9th and 10th grade. And for the exam itself: 50 questions a section, 180 minutes, adaptive.
Test is November 18. Where does your child stand today?
The full calendar
Every SHSAT date for the Fall 2026 administration
Green means the DOE has published it. Amber means the DOE has said it is coming and has not published it yet — so neither have we.
Registration opens
Tuesday, October 6, 2026
The window opens the same day for every eligible student, whatever kind of school they attend. It runs 25 days and it does not reopen — see our registration guide for who registers and how.
Registration closes
Friday, October 30, 2026
A hard close. A student who is not registered by this date does not sit the SHSAT this cycle — there is no second registration window.
SHSAT School Day
Wednesday, November 18, 2026
For all NYC public school students in middle schools that terminate in the eighth grade. They test at their own school, during the school day.
SHSAT Weekend Administration
Saturday/Sunday, November 14/15, 2026
For registered 8th graders at 6-12 or K-12 schools, charter, private, parochial or independent schools, and homeschooled students. They test at a central NYCPS site set by the district of their school — see the weekend sites by district below. The test ticket confirms the day and the site.
Last SHSAT weekend test date
Saturday, November 21, 2026
The day all registered 9th graders test, at a central NYCPS site. A student who cannot test on a Saturday is given an alternate date. Your child’s test ticket, not this page, confirms the day.
Ninth-grade testing
Saturday, November 21, 2026
First-time ninth graders applying for tenth-grade entry register in the same October 6–30 window. The DOE page states that all registered ninth graders test at a central NYCPS location on Saturday, November 21, and that a student who cannot test on a Saturday is given an alternate date. The test ticket confirms the date and site.
Test tickets available
After registration closes (October 30)
The ticket names the date, time, location and any approved testing accommodations. Read it the day it arrives — it is the only document that tells you where your child is actually testing.
Results released
Expected in early March 2027
Awaiting the DOEThe DOE has not published a Fall 2026 results date. For reference, results from the Fall 2025 administration were released in MySchools on March 5, 2026. Treat early March as a planning assumption, not a promise.
Weekend test sites by district (November 14, 15 and 21)
The site depends on the district of the school your child attends, as published by NYC Public Schools on October 19, 2026. The test ticket has the final word.
- Districts 1, 2, 3, 4 → Stuyvesant High School, 345 Chambers St, New York, NY 10280
- Districts 5, 6 → Mirabal Campus, 21 Jumel Place, Manhattan, NY 10032
- Districts 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 → The Bronx High School of Science, 75 W 205th St, Bronx, NY 10468
- Districts 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 23, 32 → Brooklyn Technical High School, 29 Fort Greene Pl, Brooklyn, NY 11217
- Districts 17, 18, 20, 21, 22 → James Madison High School, 3787 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11229
- Districts 24, 30 → Long Island City High School, 14-30 Broadway, Queens, NY 11106
- Districts 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 → Hillcrest High School, 160-05 Highland Ave, Queens, NY 11432
- District 31 → Staten Island Technical High School, 485 Clawson St, Staten Island, NY 10306
The deadline nobody puts on a calendar
If your child has a 504 Plan, or attends a charter or non-public school with a similar accommodation plan, the DOE requires all supporting documentation at least three weeks before the registration deadline — which for this cycle means on or before Friday, October 9, 2026. Documentation that arrives later may not be reviewed in time for your child's test date. Approved accommodations appear on the test ticket; work through your school counselor.
Applying to Catholic high schools as well? They use a separate exam with its own registration (deadline: Wednesday, October 28, 2026): TACHS test dates and registration.
Want every date on this page in your own calendar, with the ISEE, SSAT, TACHS, Hunter and Regents dates? Subscribe to the NYC admissions calendar in Google, Apple or Outlook. It is free and changes when a date changes.
What the date is worth
Last year's lowest qualifying scores
These are the DOE's published lowest qualifying SHSAT scores for 2026 ninth-grade admissions: the lowest score that actually received an offer at each school. They are not targets, not guarantees, and not the 2027 cutoffs, which will only exist once the offers are made. They are the best available calibration.
| School | DBN | Lowest qualifying score, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Stuyvesant High School | 02M475 | 561 |
| High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering at City College | 05M692 | 539 |
| Queens High School for the Sciences at York College | 28Q687 | 531 |
| The Bronx High School of Science | 10X445 | 525 |
| Staten Island Technical High School | 31R605 | 517 |
| High School of American Studies at Lehman College | 10X696 | 507 |
| Brooklyn Technical High School | 13K430 | 506 |
| The Brooklyn Latin School | 14K449 | 495 |
Applying for tenth-grade entry as a first-time ninth grader is materially harder: the2026 tenth-grade cutoffs reached 652 at both Bronx Science and Brooklyn Latin, against 525 and 495 for ninth-grade entry at the same two schools. If that is your child's route, plan the prep on those numbers, not on the table above; all eight tenth-grade cutoffs, next to the ninth-grade ones, are on our page on the SHSAT for 9th graders. Our SHSAT prep page sets out how we work backwards from a target score.
Those cutoffs are citywide. To see how many students from your child's own middle school sat the test and how many got an offer, look the school up in our SHSAT results by middle school, straight from the Department of Education's counts.
What the day itself looks like
How long the SHSAT is, and what changed this year
Knowing the date is worth little if the exam behind it is not the one your child has been practising for. The Fall 2026 administration is the first computer-adaptive SHSAT, and most of the preparation advice still circulating online describes the paper test it replaces.
2 sections
ELA and Mathematics
Your child chooses which of the two to begin with. ELA is Revising and Editing plus Reading Comprehension; Math runs from ratios and the number system through equations, inequalities, statistics, probability and geometry.
50 questions
per section, for every student
The count is fixed and identical for everyone. Both sections mix multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank and technology-enhanced items, so a child who has only ever practised on bubble sheets will meet question formats they have never seen.
180 minutes
standard testing time
Three hours for the whole exam, with no split imposed between the two sections. English Language Learners and eligible former ELLs receive 360 minutes, with two 15-minute breaks built in after the first 180.
Adaptive
from Fall 2026 onward
This administration is the first computer-adaptive SHSAT. The system re-estimates a score after every answer: a correct response can bring a harder question, an incorrect one an easier question. Everyone still answers the same number of questions on the same standards.
The habit that no longer works
Every older SHSAT guide teaches the same tactic: skip the hard question, mark it, come back at the end with fresh eyes. On the adaptive exam a student must answer each question before moving on, and in Math — and on stand-alone ELA items — cannot return to it afterwards. Within a passage-based ELA set answers can still be revised, but only until the set is submitted. A child rehearsing the old habit is rehearsing for an exam that no longer exists. The city’s own papers are still the right content to work from, and what a practice test still rehearses this year — and what it cannot is set out alongside all four of them.
Counting backwards
The seven-month preparation calendar behind November 18
A test date is really a deadline, and a deadline is only useful read from the far end. Here is the same calendar run in reverse, from the sitting back to the spring before it. Families arriving at this page in September are inside the last stage, not at the beginning of the first — which is itself worth knowing honestly.
Seven to five months out
April – June
Measure before you plan
One 90-minute timed diagnostic, not a packet of sample questions. What you are looking for is the shape of the problem: is the gap in ELA or in Math, is it content or is it pacing, and does performance fall apart as the clock runs down. Everything after this is decided by that answer.
Five to three months out
June – August
Build the foundation while there is time to build it
Summer is the only stretch of the year with uninterrupted hours in it. Math means genuine fluency in fractions, ratios, proportions, expressions, equations, inequalities and geometry. ELA means grammar treated as pattern recognition — subject-verb agreement, parallel structure, transition logic — alongside twenty to thirty minutes a day of hard nonfiction.
Three to one month out
September – October
Practise the way the test actually behaves
Full-length exams under strict timing, on a screen. The adaptive format removes the old safety net: your child must answer each question before advancing, and cannot come back to it in Math or to a stand-alone ELA item. Guessing and moving on is no longer a tactic to be saved for the end — it is a decision to be made calmly, question by question.
The final weeks
Late October – November 21
Trade content for endurance
Three hours of sustained concentration is a physical skill, and it is the one that decays fastest. The last fortnight is for error-pattern review and for full sittings at the hour of day the real exam runs, not for new material. The final few days should be lighter, not heavier: cramming returns almost nothing at that point.
The calendar above is the plan in outline. The September–October block needs material to run on: the four official DOE practice tests, online and as printable PDFs are free and carry the city’s own answer explanations; our answer checker marks a printed test and keeps the result. How we run the calendar for a given child — the diagnostic, the target score worked backwards from a named school, the weekly sessions — is set out on our SHSAT prep page.
Fewer weeks left than this calendar assumes? The free SHSAT study plan, week by week to your child’s test date counts the days that remain, places the four official practice tests where they still fit, and shows the gap to the lowest score that received an offer at the school your child is aiming for. It does not predict a score.
From the test date to the offer date
What happens in the four months between them
Your child sits the test in November and hears in March. Nothing a family does in between changes the outcome, so it is worth knowing exactly what is being computed in those four months.
The one decision a family still controls is the order in which the eight schools are ranked, and that is made during registration, not after. How to build that list — along with eligibility, the MySchools path, and what private, charter and homeschooled families must do differently — is on how to register for the SHSAT.
Score order decides everything in the spring
Offers are computed in descending order of SHSAT score. The highest scorer gets their first choice, then the next, and so on until a school fills. A student whose first choice is full is then considered for their second, and down their list. Nothing about the November sitting can be revisited once it is done — there is no retake and no second administration.
The test is the only criterion
For the eight testing Specialized High Schools, the DOE states that the SHSAT is the only criteria used; grades, attendance and state test scores play no part. LaGuardia is the exception — it admits by audition, not by SHSAT. This is why the calendar above is the whole admissions timeline: one date in November, one result in March.
Questions
SHSAT dates, answered
When is the SHSAT in 2026?
The SHSAT School Day is Wednesday, November 18, 2026, for all NYC public school students in middle schools that terminate in the eighth grade — they test at their own school during the school day. Eighth graders at 6-12 or K-12 schools, charter, private, parochial or independent schools, and homeschooled eighth graders test on Saturday, November 14 or Sunday, November 15, and all ninth graders on Saturday, November 21 — at a central NYCPS site that the DOE assigns by the district of the child’s school.
My child is in private, parochial or charter school, or homeschooled. When do they test?
On Saturday, November 14 or Sunday, November 15, 2026 (8th graders), rather than the November 18 School Day, at a central NYC Public Schools site set by the district of the child’s school — for example Stuyvesant High School for Districts 1 to 4, Brooklyn Tech for Districts 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 23 and 32. The full district list is on this page. Registration runs October 6–30 for every student regardless of school type, and the test ticket, released after registration closes, confirms the exact date and site.
My child is a first-time ninth grader. Is there a separate SHSAT date?
Yes. The DOE page states that all registered 9th grade students test at a central NYCPS location on Saturday, November 21, and that students who cannot test on a Saturday are given an alternate test date. The test ticket, released after registration closes, confirms the date and site. Note also that tenth-grade entry is far more competitive: the lowest qualifying scores for tenth-grade seats in 2026 admissions ran well above the ninth-grade figures at several schools, reaching 652 at both Bronx Science and Brooklyn Latin, against 525 and 495 for ninth-grade entry.
When do SHSAT results come out?
The DOE has not announced a results date for the Fall 2026 administration. As a planning reference, results from the Fall 2025 administration were released in MySchools on March 5, 2026, so early March is a reasonable expectation — but treat it as an assumption rather than a published date. Results include your child’s score and up to one offer to a testing Specialized High School.
What score does my child need?
There is no published target. The cutoff is whatever the lowest admitted score turns out to be that year, and it moves with the size and strength of the applicant pool. The last published figures, for 2026 ninth-grade admissions, were 561 at Stuyvesant, 539 at HSMSE at City College, 531 at Queens Sciences at York, 525 at Bronx Science, 517 at Staten Island Tech, 507 at American Studies at Lehman, 506 at Brooklyn Tech and 495 at Brooklyn Latin. Use them to calibrate, never as a guarantee for 2027.
When is the deadline for testing accommodations?
Earlier than most families expect. If your child has a 504 Plan, or attends a charter or non-public school with a similar school-based accommodation plan, all documentation must reach the DOE for review at least three weeks before the registration deadline — so on or before October 9, 2026 for this cycle. Documentation received later may not be reviewed in time for your child’s test date. Approved accommodations appear on the test ticket. For students with IEPs or 504 Plans, existing accommodations carry over; work through your school counselor, not directly with the schools.
How long is the SHSAT, and how many questions is it?
Standard administration time is 180 minutes, with 50 questions in English Language Arts and 50 in Mathematics — the same count for every student. There is no imposed split of the three hours between the two sections, and your child chooses which section to begin with. Beginning with this Fall 2026 administration the SHSAT is computer-adaptive: the system re-estimates a score after every response and adjusts the difficulty of what comes next, while every student still answers the same number of questions on the same standards. One practical consequence matters more than the rest: a question must be answered before your child can advance, and in Math, and on stand-alone ELA items, they cannot go back to it.
Is the SHSAT on paper or on a computer?
On a computer, on machines the DOE provides, either at your child’s own school on the November 18 School Day or at a designated weekend testing site. Students may not use their own computers. Paper is reserved for the very small number of students whose IEP or 504 Plan carries an approved accommodation that requires it; otherwise the DOE says every exam is administered on computer without exception, with accommodations delivered in or alongside the digital platform. English Language Learners and eligible former ELLs receive double time — 360 minutes — with two 15-minute breaks built in after the first 180. The DOE has also said it will publish a digital readiness activity later this fall so that public middle school students can practise on the testing platform before the day.
Sources & last verified
Every date, score and rule on this page was read directly from the New York City Public Schools website. Last checked October 19, 2026. Dates the DOE has not published are shown as unannounced, never estimated. The DOE is the only authority on this calendar — confirm before you act:
- NYC Public Schools — Specialized High Schools (registration dates, School Day, offers, cutoff scores)
- NYC Public Schools — Specialized High School Admissions Test
- MySchools — SHSAT registration and test tickets
GeniusPrep is an independent tutoring company and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the New York City Department of Education.
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The SHSAT is one test, once a year.
There is no retake, no superscore and no second sitting. Start with a diagnostic: 90 minutes of timed SHSAT work, a section-by-section breakdown, and a written plan aimed at a specific school.
Take the next step
Registration closes October 30. Prep does not wait for it.
Book a 90-minute diagnostic — timed SHSAT work, a section-by-section breakdown, and a written plan aimed at a specific school.