Written on 20 August 2026, before Round One. Read the dated parts as history. Round One issued at 2pm on 26 August 2026, so the passages below about a year whose figures did not exist yet describe the position before that afternoon, and they are marked and written in the past tense rather than deleted: an article about points pages going stale is not improved by pretending this one never did. The 2026 figures are now published, on the 2026 points page and in the averages. What has been brought up to date is the arithmetic: the counts of what this site holds, and the movement figures, are the current ones rather than the ones that were true on 20 August.
CollegeRoute is an independent guide to CAO applications and Leaving Certificate points in Ireland. It holds what the Central Applications Office published, checked against the CAO's own charts, and it says plainly where the published record runs out.
That last part is the whole reason it exists.
The problem with most points pages
Search for the points of any course in August and you will find the number without the year attached to it, the year without the round attached to it, or a figure that was correct in 2021 sitting on a page updated last week.
None of that is malice. Points pages go stale quietly, because a number does not look old.
The CAO's own CourseFinder showed this clearly. In the week this was written it was still displaying 2025 figures, and it switched to 2026 at 2pm on 26 August, the moment Round One offers issued. Every number anybody read beside a course that week was last year's, whether or not the page they read it on told them which year it belonged to. The same is true of the week before every Round One.
What the site actually holds
Seven admission years of published points. 2,421 courses across 43 institutions, 2020 through 2026, with round one and round two figures as the CAO published them. 1,634 of those are Level 8 honours degrees and 787 are Level 6 and 7 programmes, which usually get less attention than they deserve.
A calculator that shows its working. You enter your subjects and it returns your total, which six subjects counted, and what the Higher Level Maths bonus was actually worth to you.
The parts of the system people search for in a panic. Deadlines with the exact time they fall at, how the offer rounds work and what happens between them, and the routes that are not the points race: PLC and QQI, apprenticeships, HEAR and DARE, and mature entry.
The maths bonus, which is where most tools go wrong
Twenty five points are added to Higher Level Maths at H6 or better. The rule that decides what they are worth is where they land.
The bonus attaches to the maths result, and only then are your six highest scores chosen. So it is worth the full 25 only if maths was already going to count. If the bonus is what pulls maths into your six, it is worth less than 25, because the subject it displaced was already counting. And if maths stays outside the six even with the bonus, it is worth nothing at all.
A student with six H1s and a H6 in Higher Level Maths has 600 points. A calculator that adds 25 at the end tells them 625. That is not a rounding error, it is a wrong answer at the top of the scale, delivered at the moment somebody is deciding what to put on their list.
CollegeRoute's points calculator applies the rule in the right order and names which of the three outcomes applies to you.
Where the site says it does not know
A course's points are not a price set in advance. They are wherever the queue was cut once every applicant's total was known, which means the figure depends on who applied that year and how they did. Nobody holds that number before offers issue.
So for most of this cycle the 2026 page carried no 2026 figures at all. It carried the round calendar, a countdown to the moment the figures would exist, and the measured movement of the years before it, which is the only honest guide to a year that has not happened yet. It carries the real 2026 figures now, because Round One has issued.
That movement is worth reading before you set a target. Comparing the 1,180 courses that published a comparable figure in both 2025 and 2026, 631 rose and 459 fell, and the median course moved by 1.5 points. Treating the whole system as rising or falling is the mistake that costs people places.
How figures are checked
Every figure comes from the CAO's published charts, read directly rather than lifted from another site. Completed years are rebuilt from the CAO's annual workbooks. For the newest year, Round One and later-round figures are read from the CAO's live round lists until that year's workbook appears. Each year page links to the source and carries the date it was checked, so you can see how current it is rather than guessing.
Where the CAO never published a figure, the page says so. Where a published figure is a combined score including a portfolio, audition or test, it is marked, because that number is on a different scale and comparing it against a points total is meaningless.
The editorial policy sets out how corrections are handled. If something is wrong, it gets fixed and the check date moves.
What it is not
It is not the CAO. Applications, official information and your final points live at cao.ie, and this site links there rather than standing in for it.
It is not advice about your situation. It explains published rules and does the arithmetic. A guidance counsellor knows you; a website does not.
It is not paid for by anyone with a course to sell. There is no advertising, no affiliate arrangement with any college or grind school and no sponsored placement. If that changes, the about page changes with it.
Where to start
If you have your grades, work out your total with the calculator. If you have a total and want to know what it reaches, use the course matcher. If you want the record for a specific course, the points archive goes back to 2020 and shows the trend rather than a single year.
And if you are reading this in the days before a Round One rather than after one, the thing worth knowing is the one at the top: the figures on display that week are last year's, everywhere, including on the CAO's own site.