Eton College

The Eton List Test explained

What the Eton List Test is, when your son sits it, and what Eton actually publishes about it. Plus the four age bands and the Year 5 registration deadline.

By Richard and Freddie, who joined The Perse in 2019 and left in 2026 after Year 13 to become expert admission tutors.
Last checked 16 August 2026

If you have been searching for the Eton List Test and finding nothing on Eton's own website, there is a reason. Eton has never used the phrase. This guide explains what the test actually is, where it sits in the admissions process, what the school publishes about it, and what everyone else says that the school has not confirmed.

What the Eton List Test actually is

The Eton List Test is the online test boys sit at Eton at Stage 2 of 13+ admissions, alongside an individual interview, between January and May of Year 6. Eton's own admissions pages describe it as "an online predictive test of academic ability and potential on a computer (minimal IT skills required)". They do not call it the List Test anywhere. The two names describe one assessment.

That gap is worth stating plainly, because it causes real confusion. Parents hear "List Test" from their prep school, from other parents and from every tutoring firm in the sector, then go to Eton's site and find no mention of it. Some conclude the test has been scrapped. It has not. The school simply describes it in its own words.

So when this guide says List Test, it means Eton's online predictive test, and vice versa.

Where it sits: Eton's two stages

The test is one part of one stage of a process that runs across three school years.

Stage 1 is the ISEB Common Pre-Tests, and it is a different assessment run by a different organisation. Eton describes it in detail because ISEB publishes the format: multiple choice, covering verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning, English and mathematics, taking about two and a half hours, sat at your son's own school or an agreed centre. Scores are standardised and age-adapted, so a summer-born boy is not penalised for his birthday.

Boys who get through Stage 1 are invited to Eton for Stage 2. That is where the List Test happens.

When your son sits it: the four age bands

Eton assesses Stage 2 in four windows, and which one your son falls into is decided by his date of birth rather than by anything he does. This is the table nobody else publishes in one piece, and it matters because the wait for a decision varies by four months depending on when your son was born.

The first window is not about age. If you are applying for significant financial aid, your son is assessed in mid-January whatever his birthday, because the bursary decision has to run alongside the academic one.

Two practical consequences. An August-born boy sits in late spring and hears in July, which is five months later than a September-born boy going through exactly the same process, so plan the year around your own window rather than around what another family tells you. And an April or May assessment means an extra term of Year 6 to prepare in, which is worth using.

What is on it

This section is deliberately in two halves, because the sourcing is genuinely different and you should be able to tell which is which.

What Eton publishes

One sentence: "The assessment will consist of an individual interview and an online predictive test of academic ability and potential on a computer (minimal IT skills required)."

That is the whole of it. No length, no subjects, no question types, no sample questions, no scoring information. The "minimal IT skills required" clause is the only practical detail, and it is there to reassure rather than to describe.

What is widely reported, and not by Eton

Everything below comes from tutoring firms who have debriefed candidates afterwards. None of it is confirmed by the school. It is consistent enough across sources to be worth knowing and soft enough that you should not build a year of preparation on any single detail.

Keystone Tutors reports that the test was developed with the University of Cambridge's Psychometric Centre, which would distinguish it from the pre-tests written by CEM or GL Assessment. They also report that individual questions carry their own time limits, ranging from about six seconds to about seventy-five, that the whole thing takes about an hour, and that it ends with a short typed writing task of roughly five to ten minutes. Performance is described as a Standardised Age Score, and Eton does not publish a threshold.

Oppidan Education reports that the test is adaptive, getting harder as a boy answers correctly, so no two candidates see the same paper.

On content, both accounts describe much the same ground: proofreading and grammar correction, cloze passages, vocabulary including synonyms, antonyms and analogies, reading comprehension, mental arithmetic word problems, pattern logic, memory matrix tasks, and non-verbal and spatial reasoning.

One thing is certain either way. There are no past papers. Eton publishes neither the questions nor the format, so anything sold as an Eton List Test past paper has been reconstructed or invented.

The interview

Stage 2 is half interview, and it is the half families most often treat as an afterthought.

Reported accounts put it at around fifteen minutes, conducted by a member of Eton staff, covering family, current school, academic and extracurricular interests, why the boy wants to come to Eton, and something from the news. Oppidan describes interviewers looking for academic curiosity, clear communication, genuine engagement in sport or the arts, and readiness for boarding house life.

None of that is examinable, which is exactly why it unsettles people. There is nothing to revise. What helps is a boy who has had the conversation before, in a room that is not his kitchen, often enough that the format is unremarkable and he can spend his attention on what he actually thinks.

Rehearsed answers are the failure mode here. A thirteen-year-old reciting a prepared paragraph about why Eton's academic culture appeals to him is transparently doing that, and it reads worse than a shrug followed by something true.

Registering: the deadline that catches families out

This is the most consequential fact in the guide, and it has nothing to do with the test.

Registration for 13+ entry closes on 31 August at the end of Year 5, the academic year in which your son turns 10. For entry in 2029, that deadline is 31 August 2026. It is a hard deadline, three years before he would start, and roughly a year before he sits anything.

Eton moved it from 30 June, so a guide written before that change gives a date that no longer exists. Check the school's own page rather than trusting any secondary source, including this one, if you are close to the line.

Registration needs the online form, a copy of your son's unabridged birth certificate showing parental details (on a UK certificate this is the version titled "Certified Copy of an Entry"), and a non-refundable fee of £480 including VAT. Eton does not process incomplete applications and reserves the right to discard them after a month.

If you have already missed it, one door stays open: boys applying specifically for a King's Scholarship or a Music Award can apply in Year 8, up to the age of 13.

After Stage 2: the Conditional Place

Doing well at Stage 2 does not get your son a place at Eton. It gets him a Conditional Place, which is confirmed at age 12 or 13, in Year 8, by passing one of three examinations: the King's Scholarship, Common Entrance, or Eton's own Entrance examinations.

That third option matters more than its position in the sentence suggests. Common Entrance is set for boys at prep schools and assumes a prep-school curriculum. Boys applying from state schools sit Eton's own papers instead, so nobody is shut out of the final stage by not having access to Common Entrance. Very few guides say this, and it is the question state-school families most often arrive with.

Accepting a Conditional Place means paying the Acceptance Fee by the end of March in Year 7. Across the first two terms of that year, parents and boys meet a selection of House Masters to find a boarding house.

Some boys are offered a Waiting List Place instead. They are invited back to Eton in the summer term of Year 7 for a further assessment, and Eton accepts a number from the waiting list each year, though it says the number varies.

The King's Scholarship

The King's Scholarship examinations are sat in late April or early May of Year 8. A candidate must be 13 on 1 September of the year of entry, or have turned 14 during the preceding August with Eton's prior agreement.

There are five compulsory papers: English A, English B, Mathematics A, Science and General I. Candidates also take at least three optional papers, chosen from French, Latin, Greek, Mathematics B, General II, and History, Geography and Divinity. Examiners assess the compulsory papers plus the best three optional ones, so a candidate is not punished for a weak fourth choice.

About 14 scholarships are awarded a year, usually tenable for five years, and around 140 scholars are at the school at any one time.

Now the part that is most often got wrong. Eton states that King's Scholarships "do not carry any automatic fee remission". A King's Scholar is not on reduced fees by virtue of the award; help with fees comes from the separate, means-tested bursary process that any family applies to. If your plan for affording Eton is a scholarship, that plan needs checking against this sentence.

The scholarship is also a route in, not only an award. A boy with a Conditional Place who does well confirms it, and one who does badly may be asked to complete Common Entrance in full or in part. A boy without a Conditional Place who does not win a scholarship receives no offer at all.

16+ entry

There are about 20 fee-paying places at sixth form, against a school of roughly 1,350 boys. It is the smallest and steepest of the routes.

Registration for 2027 entry closes on Sunday 4 October 2026, with the same £480 fee. The minimum qualifying standard is six GCSEs at grade 7 or the overseas equivalent, and Eton adds that the level in practice is "likely to be significantly higher", which is the more useful half of that sentence.

Assessment falls in November 2026: an online cognitive test, subject-specific tests, an online pastoral interview for shortlisted candidates, a reference from the current school, and a music audition for boys indicating an interest in an honorary Music Award. Results come in early December.

There is no bursary support on the fee-paying sixth-form route. Read that alongside the Orwell Award, which exists precisely for boys who need one: it is open to boys who have completed Years 9 to 11 in UK state schools, and to boys on substantial financial aid at independent schools with no sixth form. It takes up to 14 boys a year, which is comparable to the fee-paying intake beside it. The MCM Drama Award and a Sixth Form Music Award attach to the same process.

Fees and financial aid

Fees for 2026/27 are £21,891 per Half including VAT. Eton bills three Halves a year, so that is about £65,673 annually, before extras of usually £500 to £1,500 per Half. The acceptance fee is £3,840 for boys joining in Michaelmas 2026, of which £500 comes back when the final bill is settled on leaving.

On financial aid, Eton's own numbers are unusually specific. It budgeted £9.7 million for scholarships and bursaries in 2024/25. In 2023/24, 247 boys received a fee reduction and 99 paid no fees at all, with awards averaging 71% and running from 5% to 100%.

There is no published income threshold. Every application is assessed individually, all parents complete a financial declaration, and families seeking help submit an online bursary application reviewed by the Bursaries Committee. An independent company may carry out a home visit.

If you are applying for significant financial aid, remember that it moves your son into the mid-January Stage 2 window regardless of his birthday.

How to prepare when there are no past papers

Start with the calendar, not the syllabus. The registration deadline at the end of Year 5 is the only part of this process that cannot be recovered, and it arrives before most families have begun thinking about senior schools at all.

For Stage 1, prepare for the ISEB Common Pre-Tests specifically. They have a published format, they are widely practised, and they are the filter that decides whether your son ever sees the List Test. The scores are age-standardised, so the target is a percentile rather than a raw mark.

For Stage 2, accept what the absence of past papers means. There is no format to learn, so drilling one is not available to you and buying one is buying somebody's guess. What is left is genuinely useful: reading accuracy under time pressure, mental arithmetic without a pencil, and comfort working at speed on a screen rather than on paper. If the reported accounts are right about the per-question timers, the habit that helps most is answering promptly and moving on, which is the opposite of what careful children do naturally.

For the interview, get the format familiar and leave the content alone. Practise having the conversation, not memorising answers to it.

On timing: Year 5 is when most families we work with start, which leaves room to build foundations before the pre-tests in the autumn of Year 6 and then to work on Stage 2 through that year. If your son is in a later window, you have an extra term, and it is worth planning for rather than discovering.

Our Eton College page has the shorter version, with the assessment tables and every date on one screen.

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