Corporate governance
We are governed by our Board of Trustees, Committees, and UCAS Council, details of which can be found through these links.
What is UCAS?
UCAS, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service is an independent charity and the UK's shared admissions service for higher education.
UCAS is an independent charity that exists to fulfil our charitable purpose, which is acting as the national shared admissions service for students, universities and colleges. As a charity, our work must be for the “public benefit” and is non-profit.
To support our work as a charity, we have a trading subsidiary, UCAS Media Limited (UCAS Media) which generates income through working with commercial partners to offer a range of products and services which are provided to both our student customers and universities and colleges, as well as businesses and employers. These services include targeted marketing and insight, displaying career opportunities, and information, advice, and guidance on areas that support the education journey, for example, accommodation, travel and bank accounts.
UCAS Media only works with companies which meet commercial activity criteria approved by UCAS.
You can find out more about how our company activites support the charity here.
We generate revenue from:
- application fees paid by applicants
- capitation fees paid by universities and colleges for each student who is accepted
- income generated by our wholly-owned subsidiary, UCAS Media Ltd, which gift-aids its profits to the charity
We don’t get any direct financial support from the government. That's why we have commercial activities to help us deliver our charitable objectives and keep costs down for students and education providers.
Our Board is made up of a balance of Trustees from higher and further education backgrounds, including three heads of providers of higher education and independent Trustees.
What do we do?
In 2024, our undergraduate admissions service handled almost 3 million applications from 752,210 UK, EU, and international students. We’re proud to have helped 564,940 students secure a full-time place at one of over 380 universities and colleges across the UK.
We also help UK conservatoires (UCAS Conservatoires) by providing an information, advice, and admissions service, and advice on connecting the world to UK higher education by providing a single multilingual gateway for international applicants to discover the best of UK undergraduate and postgraduate study under the trusted UCAS brand.
We want to make this process easier for everyone. That's why we publish a growing volume of data and analysis, all of which is freely available to download and re-use from our data and analysis pages. Across the 2024 cycle, in our UCAS Undergraduate applicant releases, end of cycle data resources, and daily Clearing analysis, there were over 8 million data points available to download, covering applicants, provision, and providers.
UCAS’ corporate strategy – our 'Next Chapter'
In 2025, UCAS launched its new corporate strategy – its 'Next Chapter'.
This strategy has been developed in conjunction with the sector, and aims to see all who could benefit from UK higher education doing so.
At its heart is the finding that at least twice as many people come to UCAS each year than go on to take up a university or college place. Understanding and removing, where it is in our remit to do so, the barriers that are preventing these people from applying or accepting places is going to be central to our work henceforth.
In addition, the strategy seeks to deliver even greater value and efficiency to our beneficiary classes. Accordingly, this is reflected as the second driving priority within the new strategy.
The strategy also reaffirms UCAS’ commitment to serving the four nations, being institution and route agnostic, championing the student, and promoting fairness and transparency.
We’ll achieve these through the delivery of four strategic objectives:
- Deliver frictionless and flexible shared admissions services.
- Create personalised pathways to level the playing field.
- Equip supporters to enable dreams.
- Transform raw data into real insights.