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The GW law school acceptance rate for the fall 2025 entering class was 27.2 percent: 9,718 completed applications, 2,644 offers of admission, and 612 enrolled students, per GW's 2025 ABA 509 report. Roughly one applicant in four got in. Here is what that single number hides.
Every figure below comes from the 2025 Standard 509 Information Report that GW filed with the ABA in December 2025. This is the disclosure schools are required to publish, so it is the number to trust over any blog estimate.
Fall 2025 entering classNumberCompleted applications9,718Offers of admission2,644Acceptance rate27.2%Enrolled (matriculants)612 (576 full-time, 36 part-time)
Source: GW 2025 ABA 509 report. The acceptance rate is offers divided by completed applications. Nothing here is modeled or estimated.
A 27.2 percent rate puts GW in the selective-but-reachable band. It is not a T14 lottery ticket, and it is not a safety for anyone either.
9,718 people completed applications for a class of 612. That is roughly 16 applications for every seat, which is the more honest way to feel the competition than the acceptance rate alone.
The gap between 2,644 offers and 612 enrollees is yield management at work. GW knows most admits hold competing offers, so it admits far more people than it can seat, which is arithmetic worth remembering when you read about waitlists.
Dividing enrollees by offers gives a yield of about 23 percent (612 of 2,644, our arithmetic from the 509 figures). Yield pressure is exactly why binding early decision exists, and we cover that tradeoff in our GW early decision breakdown.
Honest answer: our verified data layer currently holds one cycle, the 2025 report, so we will not invent a five-year trend line here. Prior-year 509 reports are public, and we are adding them; this page gets refreshed when each new 509 drops in December.
What we can say without guessing is structural. National applicant volume has been elevated in recent cycles, GW sits in a capital city with outsized demand for law credentials, and its class size did not grow to match. None of that softens selectivity.
Treat any site quoting a precise multi-year trend without linking each year's 509 with suspicion. The reports are free and public; there is no excuse for unsourced numbers.
The acceptance rate is an average across every applicant, including people far below and far above GW's medians. Your personal odds live in your numbers, not the class average.
GW's fall 2025 medians were a 168 LSAT and a 3.86 GPA, with the 25th percentiles at 162 and 3.55, all from the same 509 report. Above both medians, your odds are far better than 27 percent; below both, far worse.
The full band-by-band breakdown, including the splitter math, lives in our GW LSAT and GPA guide. If you want the general framework first, start with our pillar on what your numbers actually get you.
DC applicants almost never apply to GW alone. Here is the same 509-verified figure for the three schools most often on the same list.
School (fall 2025)ApplicationsOffersAcceptance rateGeorgetown13,9242,19315.75%GW9,7182,64427.2%American5,9521,98133.3%
Source: each school's 2025 ABA 509 report, verified July 26, 2026. GW sits squarely between Georgetown's near-T14 selectivity and American's broader admit band.
If you are choosing between the latter two, our GW vs American head-to-head settles it category by category. For the wider strategy of building a school list around your numbers, see the data-driven admissions guide.
Three things hide inside any admit rate. First, timing: GW reviews on a rolling basis with posted deadlines, and a file complete in September competes against an emptier room than the identical file in February.
Second, the part-time channel: 36 of GW's 612 matriculants enrolled part-time, and part-time pools historically carry different competitive dynamics than the full-time pool, though GW discloses one combined rate. Third, the waitlist, which converts some spring denials-in-waiting into summer admits and is invisible in the headline number.
None of this changes the arithmetic; it changes what you do with it. Apply early, pick your program deliberately, and treat the waitlist as a live phase rather than a consolation, per the GW waitlist playbook.
Every figure on this page traces to GW's 2025 Standard 509 Information Report, a two-page PDF the ABA requires each December. The admissions block sits on page one: completed applications, offers, and the enrolled class with its LSAT and GPA percentiles.
Pull the report from GW's required-disclosures page and check us. We publish the source link on every data page precisely so you never have to take a percentage on faith, here or anywhere else.
When the 2026 report drops in December, this page gets re-verified against it, and the trend table gets its second real data point. Bookmark accordingly.
27.2 percent for the fall 2025 entering class: 2,644 offers from 9,718 completed applications, per GW's 2025 ABA 509 report.
9,718 people completed applications for the fall 2025 class of 612, roughly 16 applicants per seat.
Selective but reachable. Nearly three in four applicants are denied, and the enrolled medians were a 168 LSAT and 3.86 GPA, so strong numbers matter more than the average rate.
The 2025 cycle numbers are the verified baseline here; we refresh this page each December when the new 509 drops rather than quoting unsourced trend lines.
Written by Ali, Georgetown Law, founder of Lovare Institut.
July 30, 2026
July 30, 2026