When Should You Start Studying for the Leaving Cert?
When to start studying for the Leaving Cert, phase by phase: 5th year, September, Christmas tests, February mocks, orals in March, and the June exams.
ExamAI Team8 min read 
Study that keeps pace with class suits any point from the first term of 5th year on, and topic-by-topic past exam questions can begin as soon as a topic finishes in class. There is no national start date beyond that. What the calendar does fix is the shape of the 2026/27 school year, and different kinds of work suit different parts of it.
Two documents set almost everything below. Circular 0018/2026 from the Department of Education and Youth fixes the school breaks. The State Examinations Commission (the SEC, which sets and marks the state exams) publishes a provisional schedule of examination and completion dates for 2026/27 covering orals, practicals and coursework. The SEC marks that schedule provisional and says the dates can change, so check it again in the new year.
What is fixed and what your school decides
The Department of Education fixes the Christmas, February and Easter breaks. The SEC fixes the oral exams, the practical exams, the coursework deadlines and the June written exams.
Your school decides the day you go back, your Christmas tests and your mocks.
There is no national mock date. Mocks are house exams that your school arranges, and the week they fall in is a school decision. Circular 0018/2026 lists "reducing where possible the length of mock/house examinations" as one of the things a school authority may do to make up teaching time lost to closures, which shows where that decision sits. Any article that gives you a single mock date for the country is guessing. Ask your year head for the school calendar in September and write your own dates down.
Going back in late August
The return date is not standardised either. Circular 0018/2026 says the school year "will normally commence during the week in which the 1st of September falls", and lets a school start the week before where it could not otherwise fit in the required number of days. The 1st of September 2026 is a Tuesday, so that week begins on Monday 31 August 2026. Your own date is on your school's calendar, which every school has to publish on its website.
Post-primary schools must be open for all year groups for a minimum of 166 school days. Every date below sits inside that.
September to Christmas: cover ground, and watch the coursework
The first term is when the course gets taught. For 6th years it is also when the earliest state exam deadlines fall, months before anything that looks like an exam.
From the SEC's provisional schedule, these completion dates fall before the Christmas break:
- Home Economics Food Studies coursework: Monday 2 November 2026
- Latin and Ancient Greek research study reports: Friday 27 November 2026
- Physics in Practice investigation: Friday 11 December 2026
- Physical Education physical activity report and the Economics research study: Friday 18 December 2026
If you take one of those subjects, part of your grade is settled in the autumn. Put those dates in front of you in September.
For the rest of the term, the useful study is the kind that keeps pace with class. When a topic finishes in class, do that topic's past exam questions while it is fresh. The Leaving Cert subject pages group questions by topic for that reason, so you can work through algebra or genetics without hunting through whole papers for the relevant parts. Full papers are hard to use this early, because most of the paper covers material you have not met.
Christmas tests
Schools close on Tuesday 22 December 2026 and reopen on Wednesday 6 January 2027, so the Christmas tests come before that. Your school sets them.
For many students this is the first sitting of the year that runs to a clock in an exam hall. The useful output is the detail underneath the mark. What ran out of time, what you left blank, and what you half remembered are all things you can act on in January.
January to the mocks
Schools reopen on Wednesday 6 January 2027, and the post-primary February mid-term break runs from Monday 15 February to Friday 19 February 2027. Your mocks fall somewhere in this stretch, on a date your school sets and publishes in its calendar.
A mock is a full paper sat under supervision, so the way to get value out of it is the way you get value out of any past paper. Mark it against the marking scheme, and write down what cost you marks rather than what you scored. Our post on studying with past papers covers that in detail.
March and April: orals, practicals and project deadlines
For a lot of subjects the exams begin well before June. Spring is when those subjects are decided.
The Easter break runs from the close of school on Friday 19 March 2027 to reopening on Monday 5 April 2027. The oral exams sit inside it.
The SEC's provisional schedule puts the oral examinations from Saturday 20 March to Thursday 25 March 2027, the music, art, construction and engineering practicals through April and early May, and the Computer Science written exam on Wednesday 19 May 2027. The full list of spring dates, with session times, is in our post on when the Leaving Cert is on.
A block of coursework deadlines lands here too, including the Computer Science coursework project on Tuesday 16 March 2027, the Chemistry in Practice investigation on Friday 23 April 2027, and the History research study report and the Geographical Investigation report, both on Friday 30 April 2027.
If you take a language, look at where those oral dates sit. The weeks before late March are also the weeks that hold your mocks. Spreading oral practice across the winter is the way to keep both off the same fortnight.
May and the run-in
Once the orals and practicals are behind you, the remaining marks are in written papers, and past papers become the main thing you work on. At this point you have covered the course, so a full paper under timed conditions measures something real.
Mark every paper you sit. A paper you attempt and never mark leaves you with a feeling about how it went and no list of things to change. If a marking scheme awards marks for a step you did not know was required, that is exactly the kind of gap worth finding in May. Where you cannot see why the scheme wants what it wants, our tutor works through the question with you rather than handing over the answer.
Sixth year classes stop before the exams begin. The June 2027 bank holiday is Monday 7 June (Citizens Information), and under the school-year circular tuition ends by Friday 4 June 2027 at the latest.
The written exams then run through June. The SEC had not published the 2027 written timetable when this post was written in August 2026, so take the exact days from examinations.ie once it appears.
If you are going into 5th year
Everything in the March and April section belongs to 6th year. In 5th year you meet the material for the first time with none of those deadlines on top of it. That is the advantage, and it is a real one.
Use it on the things that take a long time and cannot be rushed at the end. Speaking a language is one. Getting comfortable enough with maths questions that you can read one without freezing is another. A question you cannot answer is more useful to find in 5th year than in the spring of 6th, because you still have a year to do something about it. The same logic applies while you are choosing subjects, where one real past paper shows you more about a subject than a course description does.
If you are starting late
The fixed points do not move, so what changes when you start late is which of them are still in front of you. Starting in January still leaves the mocks, the orals, the practicals, the April coursework deadlines and every written paper ahead.
What does change is the order of operations. A late start makes it harder to do the slow work and the exam practice in sequence, so they have to happen together. Take the subjects with fixed spring deadlines first, because those dates are the ones you cannot move.
Nobody can tell you how many hours that takes. Neither the Department of Education nor the SEC publishes a study-hours figure, and the numbers quoted online, of the three-and-a-half-hours-a-day kind, arrive without a stated basis. A marked past paper gives you something you can actually check, because it shows what you can do under exam conditions today.
FAQ
When should I start studying for the Leaving Cert? Work that keeps pace with class suits the first term of 5th year onwards. The date that matters more is when you start using past papers, and that can begin as soon as you finish a topic in class.
When are the 2027 mock exams? Your school sets them, and there is no national mock date. They land in the stretch between the January return and the spring orals. The post-primary February mid-term break, a fixed marker in that stretch, runs from Monday 15 to Friday 19 February 2027.
When are the 2027 Leaving Cert oral exams? The SEC's provisional schedule gives Saturday 20 March to Thursday 25 March 2027 for the Leaving Cert oral examinations. The dates are provisional and can change.
When do the 2027 Leaving Cert exams start? The SEC has not yet published the 2027 written timetable. The exams run in June, and school tuition ends by Friday 4 June 2027 at the latest.
When should I start doing past papers? Individual questions are usable as soon as the topic is covered in class. Full papers under timed conditions need the course mostly finished, which for most subjects is the spring of 6th year.
Is it too late if I have not started? The work that remains depends on the date, and the fixed points ahead of you are listed above. Start with whichever deadline is closest.
Every Leaving Cert past paper and marking scheme is free from the SEC. The ExamAI past paper finder gets you a specific paper in one search, and the subject pages group past questions by topic so you can work on one thing at a time.