This guide to Medical School rankings helps you to understand how the scoring works. We’ve collated two of the biggest rankings into one Medicine league table, so you can easily see which universities are best for Medicine – and think about which ones you want to apply to.
This guide has been updated to reflect the very latest scores for 2021 entry, and we’ve included more detail on international Medical Schools at the bottom of this page, too.
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Compare different UK medical schoolsThere are a number of different Medical School rankings available, which means it can be hard to work out which university is the best for Medicine or compare Med Schools.
The Complete University Guide’s Medical School rankings are very comprehensive, and take into account a number of different sources to calculate an overall ranking. It uses data from the National Student Survey to form its student satisfaction scores and gets its graduate prospects information from the Higher Education Statistics Agency.
The Guardian University Guide looks at similar areas but doesn’t include research because that only impacts a handful of students. Instead, it focuses on how much students enjoy their courses and how likely they are to get a job after graduation.
We’ve collated both these types of rankings into one Medicine league table, so it’s easy to see which Medical Schools rank the highest.
The table below breaks down Medical School league rankings into four columns, highlighting the overall Complete University score and its scores for student satisfaction and graduate prospects. It also shows the Guardian’s overall score for each university.
You can sort the table by each element, allowing you to see which schools have the highest student satisfaction, for example.
| Medical School | Complete University Guide Overall Score (out of 100) | Student Satisfaction (out of 5 - Complete University Guide) | Graduate Prospects (out of 100 - Complete University Guide) | Guardian Score (out of 100) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dundee | 100 | 4.23 | 100 | 100 |
| Glasgow | 100 | 4.10 | 100 | 82.4 |
| Oxford | 99.8 | 4.42 | 97 | 97.8 |
| Aberdeen | 99.7 | 4.28 | 99 | 99.3 |
| Edinburgh | 99.6 | 4.03 | 99 | 99.3 |
| Queen Mary (Barts) | 99.4 | 4.29 | 99 | 83.0 |
| Cambridge | 99.2 | 3.91 | 99 | 91.5 |
| St. Andrews | 98.9 | 4.51 | 98 | 86.3 |
| Imperial | 98.7 | 4.06 | 99 | 74.9 |
| Swansea | 98.5 | 3.71 | 100 | 90.1 |
| UCL | 98.5 | 3.83 | 99 | 70.0 |
| Bristol | 98.4 | 4.06 | 100 | 75.4 |
| Newcastle | 98.3 | 4.17 | 100 | 78.5 |
| Queen's University, Belfast | 98.2 | 4.26 | 100 | 74.7 |
| Keele | 98.2 | 4.39 | 100 | 89.6 |
| Exeter | 98.2 | 4.03 | 99 | 65.7 |
| Warwick | 98.1 | 3.80 | 100 | 62.9 |
| Cardiff | 98.1 | 4.00 | 100 | 70.3 |
| Brighton & Sussex | 98.0 | 4.51 | 100 | 96.9 |
| Sheffield | 97.9 | 4.24 | 100 | 67.2 |
| Lancaster | 97.8 | 4.06 | 100 | 65.3 |
| Birmingham | 97.8 | 4.15 | 100 | 68.4 |
| Leeds | 97.7 | 4.24 | 100 | 85.3 |
| Leicester | 97.7 | 4.18 | 99 | 58.3 |
| King's College London | 97.7 | 3.84 | 99 | 58.2 |
| Nottingham | 97.4 | 3.80 | 100 | 59.5 |
| Southampton | 97.3 | 3.74 | 100 | 62.4 |
| Plymouth | 97.3 | 4.34 | 99 | 68.8 |
| East Anglia (UEA) | 97.3 | 4.16 | 99 | 65.9 |
| St. George's | 97.1 | 4.02 | 100 | 42.5 |
| Manchester | 97.0 | 3.68 | 100 | 57.8 |
| Liverpool | 96.8 | 3.76 | 100 | 62.1 |
| Hull-York | 96.7 | 3.78 | 100 | 55.0 |
| Buckingham | 94.0 | 4.13 | N/A | 36.7 |
| Central Lancashire | 91.9 | 3.80 | N/A | 66.0 |
When it comes to Medical School rankings for universities abroad, the QS World University Rankings is the best overall guide. It breaks down rankings into subjects, so you can see which ones are the best for Medicine. It does this by surveying academics and employers.
The table below outlines each Medical School’s overall rankings, followed by its Medicine rankings and graduate employability ranking.
| Medical School | Overall Score | Medicine Ranking | Graduate Employability Ranking |
|---|---|---|---|
| Harvard (USA) | 99.1 | 1 | 5 |
| Stanford (USA) | 95 | 4 | 2 |
| John Hopkins (USA) | 93.6 | 5 | 46 |
| Karolinska Institute (Sweden) | 93.6 | 5 | 251 |
| University of Los Angeles, California - UCLA (USA) | 92.7 | 7 | 3 |
| Yale (USA) | 91.9 | 9 | 13 |
| University of California, San Fransico (USA) | 91.3 | 10 | N/A |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (USA) | 91.2 | 12 | 1 |
| University of Columbia (USA) | 90.5 | 13 | 21 |
| University of Toronto (Canada) | 90.5 | 13 | 16 |
| University of Pennsylvania (USA) | 90 | 15 | 20 |
| University of Duke (USA) | 88.5 | 16 | 30 |
| University of Melbourne (Australia) | 88.5 | 16 | 7 |
| University of Sydney (Australia) | 87.8 | 18 | 4 |
| McGill University (Canada) | 79.4 | 21 | N/A |
| National University of Singapore (Singapore) | 86.6 | 21 | 24 |
| University of California, San Diego (USA) | 72.5 | 23 | 121-130 |
| University of Washington (USA) | 67.4 | 23 | 60 |
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