What is a good ACT score? Percentiles and college benchmarks for 2026

The national average ACT Composite for the class of 2025 was 19.4. A 23 puts you around the 76th percentile, a 28 around the 91st, and a 34 at the 99th. But "good" is set by your college list, not by the national average: a 28 is outstanding at one school and below the middle 50% at another. Look up the score range each of your target schools publishes, then aim at the top of it.

There is a complication nobody mentions when they quote you the average. The ACT changed in 2025, and the Composite score no longer measures the same thing it did when your older sibling took it. Science is optional now, and the Composite is the average of English, math and reading only. So when you read that the average is 19.4, you are reading a number built almost entirely from students who took the old four-section test. It is still the best benchmark available. It is just not quite the same exam.

What is the average ACT score?

For the graduating class of 2025, across 1,380,130 test takers, the average Composite was 19.4. The section averages were English 18.4, math 18.9, reading 20.0 and science 19.6.

The five-year trend is the part worth sitting with: 20.3 in 2021, then 19.8, 19.5, 19.4, and 19.4 again in 2025. Scores fell for four straight years and have now flattened at the bottom of that slide. This matters to you for a practical reason. If the pool has weakened while the top schools have started requiring scores again, a strong score is doing more work in an application than it did five years ago.

ACT score percentiles

A percentile tells you the share of recent test takers who scored at or below your Composite. This is the table to use, based on the norms ACT applies to tests taken between September 2025 and August 2026, built on the 2023, 2024 and 2025 graduating classes.

Notice how compressed the top is. Going from a 19 to a 21 moves you 11 percentile points. Going from a 32 to a 34 moves you 2. The higher you climb, the more work each additional point costs, which is exactly why students who start at a 30 should think hard about whether a retake is the best use of the next two months.

What is a good ACT score for college?

Here is the honest answer: a good ACT score is one at or above the 75th percentile of admitted students at the schools you actually want. Every college publishes a middle 50% range, the scores of the middle half of its admitted class. If a school's range is 29 to 33, then a 33 makes your score an asset, a 31 makes it neutral, and a 28 means the rest of your application has to carry you.

Rough tiers, and treat these as orientation rather than gospel:

• Ivy League and equivalent: generally 33 to 35 for the middle 50%. Below 32 and your score is not helping.
• Highly selective private and top public flagships: roughly 29 to 33.
• Strong state universities: often 24 to 30.
• Most four-year colleges: around 21 to 26.
• Merit scholarships: frequently keyed to a 30 or above, though the threshold varies enormously and is often lower at schools trying to attract you.

That last point deserves more attention than it gets. The score that unlocks money is often lower than the score that unlocks admission, because a school one tier below your reach will pay to bring in a student who raises its profile. A 30 might be a stretch at your dream school and a full-tuition scholarship somewhere excellent an hour away.

Is the ACT Science section still part of the Composite?

No, and this is the biggest change to how ACT scores work in years. Science became optional for national online testing in April 2025 and for all national testing, including paper, from September 2025. State and district school-day testing followed in spring 2026. Your Composite is now the average of English, math and reading, rounded to the nearest whole number.

Science, if you take it, is reported as its own 1 to 36 score. Take Science and math together and you also get a STEM score. Composite scores from tests taken before September 2025 were not recalculated and do not change.

Does dropping Science change your Composite much? ACT's own data says the correlation between the three-section and four-section Composite is 0.99, that 91% to 94% of students land within one point either way, and that roughly 42% to 47% get an identical score. So the honest framing is "usually within a point," not "it makes no difference." If Science was your strongest section, you have lost a place to shine. If it was your weakest, you have quietly gained something. We wrote a full breakdown of whether you should take the optional ACT Science section, because the decision is harder to reverse than it looks.

How many questions are on the ACT?

This is where a lot of prep material misleads people. ACT publishes 50 English, 45 math, 36 reading and 40 science questions. Those totals include embedded field-test items that are not scored and that you cannot identify while you are taking the test. The scored counts are lower.

Both sets of numbers are true. The one that matters on test day is the total, because you have to answer every item at that pace whether it counts or not. The one that matters for understanding your score is the scored count. Math also dropped from five answer choices to four, which moves a blind guess from 20% to 25%. ACT's own research found students answered four-choice items correctly about 53.5% of the time compared with 44.8% for five-choice items, so expect your raw percentage on math practice to look better than it did on old material without your ability having changed at all.

Can you superscore the ACT?

Yes. ACT calculates superscores by taking your best English, math and reading section scores across all your test dates and averaging those. It recalculated superscoring on the new three-section Composite definition, and it will combine your best sections across both legacy and enhanced forms.

The catch: section retesting does not exist. ACT postponed it in 2020 and it has never launched. You cannot retake just the math section. Every retake is the whole test, which means superscoring rewards students who can afford to sit the full exam multiple times. Whether a given college superscores is its own policy, so check each one.

Do colleges still require the ACT?

More than they did two years ago, and the trend has clearly reversed. Test-optional is receding at the top. Harvard reinstated its requirement in April 2024. Dartmouth, Brown, Yale and Penn followed. Cornell requires scores from fall 2026 entry, Caltech reinstated in 2024, and Stanford from fall 2026. In June 2026 Columbia announced it will require the SAT or ACT from the 2027-28 cycle, which makes it the last Ivy to reinstate.

ACT itself offers a blunt observation worth repeating: some schools still prefer test scores even when they say they are test optional. If your score is at or above a school's middle 50%, submitting it is almost always right. If you are well below, test-optional is a real option, provided the school genuinely is.

How to actually raise your ACT score

The score comes from review, not from volume. Students who take six practice tests and review none of them plateau at a 22 and conclude they have hit their ceiling. They have not. They have just never found out what they are getting wrong.

For every question you miss, write down two things: what the question was actually testing, and which wrong answer attracted you and why. The ACT recycles a small set of trap patterns. English rewards concision so consistently that when answer choices differ mainly in length, the shortest grammatical one is usually right. Math rewards substituting your answer back into the original equation, which catches sign errors in about five seconds. Reading punishes anyone who reads all four passages at the same speed.

Timed single sections between full tests are worth more than another full test. A full ACT costs you three hours and tells you a number you mostly already knew. Twenty minutes of nothing but comma splices tells you something you can fix by Thursday. If you are still choosing between the two exams, the practical differences are small enough that the right move is to take one timed practice of each, and our SAT practice test page covers the digital SAT side if you want to compare directly. When you are ready to drill, an ACT practice test built on the enhanced format will at least be testing you on the exam you are going to sit.

One last thing about timelines. Score improvement is not linear in hours studied, it is linear in questions reviewed properly. Two hours a day of careless practice will do less than forty minutes of ruthless review. This is the same reason that when people prepare for anything high-stakes and time-boxed, from a licensing exam to a structured interview where you have to think on your feet, the winning move is rehearsing the specific failure mode rather than doing more reps of what you already do well.

The short version

A 19.4 is average. A 23 is the 76th percentile, a 28 the 91st, a 34 the 99th. None of that decides anything. Open the admissions page for each school on your list, find the middle 50% range, and aim above the top of it. Then go and review your mistakes until you can name the trap before you fall into it.