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Law schools with binding early decision: 24 of these 31 offer one, and 7 do not. Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Notre Dame, UNC, BYU and Wake Forest are the exceptions worth knowing. Deadlines run from November 1 to March 1, and every one of them costs you your negotiating leverage.
Each school name links to its full early decision page, where the mechanics, deposit rules and aid interaction live. This table aggregates and compares rather than restating them.
#SchoolEarly decision programAcceptance rateGrant recipients1PennBinding, Nov 15 and Jan 7 rounds8.1%59%2Boston CollegeBinding, Dec 1 and Jan 15 rounds8.5%89%3MichiganBinding, Nov 158.6%91%4UChicagoBinding, Dec 19.7%78%5UVABinding Expedited Decision, Mar 110.2%66%6USCBinding, Nov 1511.2%95%7ColumbiaBinding, Nov 1511.8%54%8BUBinding, Nov 9 and Feb 1 tracks12.1%91%9UCLABinding, Nov 1612.1%83%10Texas A&MBinding Decision, Feb 112.1%95%11NorthwesternBinding, Nov 112.3%76%12GeorgiaBinding, Dec 112.7%84%13DukeBinding, Nov 1 and Jan 3 rounds12.9%94%14VanderbiltBinding, Nov 113.3%90%15NYUBinding, Nov 1513.4%66%16TexasBinding, Nov 114.0%94%17BerkeleyBinding, Nov 1414.8%86%18GeorgetownBinding, rolling with Mar 2 recommended15.8%61%19CornellBinding, Jan 118.2%91%20WashUOffered, no posted deadline19.0%94%21WisconsinBinding, Nov 2819.1%94%22Ohio StateBinding, Nov 1824.6%90%23Wake ForestBinding, rolling from Sep 124.6%76%24MinnesotaBinding, Dec 3126.7%94%25GWBinding, Feb 127.2%77%26YaleNone offered4.1%63%27StanfordNone offered6.1%50%28HarvardNone offered9.2%38%29UNCNone offered11.2%95%30Notre DameNone offered16.1%92%31BYUNone offered22.8%98%
Early decision terms verified from each school's own admissions pages, July 26, 2026, and reflect the most recently posted cycle. Most schools had not posted 2026-27 dates. Re-verify every date in September. Other columns from each school's 2025 ABA 509 report and class of 2025 ABA Employment Summary, verified July 26, 2026.
Nearly all of them. Among the 24 with a program, the deadlines cluster hard in November: Northwestern, Duke, Texas and Vanderbilt on November 1, Berkeley on November 14, Columbia, NYU, Penn, Michigan and USC on November 15, UCLA on November 16, Ohio State on November 18.
A second cluster falls in December and January: UChicago, Boston College and Georgia on December 1, Minnesota on December 31, Cornell and Penn's second round on January 1 and 7.
The late outliers are worth naming because they change strategy. GW's is February 1, Texas A&M's is February 1, and Georgetown's runs rolling with a March 2 recommendation, which means you can hold a genuine comparison much longer before committing.
Two structural oddities: UVA offers a Binding Expedited Decision rather than a traditional ED, and WashU offers ED with no posted deadline and does not state on its site whether it is binding, which is worth confirming directly.
No school in this set publishes an ED-specific admit rate, so no honest page can quote you a boost. Anyone who does is inventing it.
What is verifiable is the structural incentive. Schools manage yield, and a binding commitment removes yield risk entirely, which plausibly helps at the margin for a competitive file.
Look at the acceptance column beside the ED column, though, and note what ED does not do. Columbia at 11.8 percent and Michigan at 8.6 percent are not schools where a binding promise substitutes for numbers below their bands.
Binding commitment removes competing offers, and competing offers are the mechanism scholarship negotiation runs on. That is the real price of ED, and it is measurable.
Read the grant recipients column. At schools discounting 90 percent or more of the class, such as Duke, Cornell, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Notre Dame, BU, Vanderbilt and BYU, the question was never whether you get a discount, only how large.
Committing before that conversation begins forfeits it. Several schools attach scholarship tracks to ED specifically, including Boston College's Dean's Scholars at $40,000 to $55,000 a year and BU's Distinguished Scholar full-tuition track, which is the counterargument worth taking seriously.
The general mechanics are in our negotiation playbook; the per-school ED pages linked in the table cover each school's own aid interaction.
Three conditions must all hold. The school is your clear first choice at any realistic price. Your numbers sit at or above its medians. And you can finance the outcome at that school's median grant without seeing another offer.
Since July 1, 2026 that third condition is stricter, because federal borrowing for professional programs is capped at $50,000 a year with Grad PLUS eliminated (https://www.accesslex.org/blog/how-obbbas-student-loan-caps-could-reshape-law-school-affordability-and-access). An ED admit at sticker is a materially riskier commitment than it was a year ago. The caps come from the Reimagining and Improving Student Education final rule, published May 1, 2026 and effective July 1, 2026, which attributes them to the Working Families Tax Cuts Act (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/01/2026-08556/reimagining-and-improving-student-education-federal-student-loan-program-final-regulations).
If any condition fails, apply early in regular decision instead. You capture most of the timing benefit and keep every option.
Yale, Harvard and Stanford run no binding early program of any kind, which is worth noting because these are the three least likely to face yield risk. Schools that do not need the tool do not use it.
Notre Dame eliminated its binding ED in 2022 and now uses a why-Notre Dame statement to gauge interest instead, which is a deliberate substitution rather than an omission.
UNC and BYU run no ED program. Wake Forest offers binding scholarship tracks rather than a conventional ED with a fixed deadline, applying on a rolling basis from September 1.
For an applicant, the absence is useful information: at these schools there is no way to trade leverage for signal, so everyone competes on the same terms and the only timing lever is applying early in regular decision.
Several schools attach dedicated money to ED, which is the strongest counterargument to the leverage objection. Boston College runs Dean's Scholars at $40,000 to $55,000 a year and BC Scholars at $20,000 to $35,000, both inside its binding ED.
BU runs a Distinguished Scholar Binding Early Decision carrying a full-tuition three-year scholarship with a November 9 deadline, alongside a separate BU Bound binding track with no merit consideration and a February 1 deadline.
Texas gives ED admits an automatic competitive three-year scholarship and, notably, resident tuition rates for nonresidents, which is the single largest ED benefit we found in this set.
GW runs a binding Presidential Merit Scholarship application alongside its ED, also on February 1. Where a named full or near-full award is attached, the leverage calculation genuinely changes.
Every number in the table comes from a primary disclosure: each school's 2025 ABA Standard 509 Information Report for admissions, cost and aid, and its class of 2025 ABA Employment Summary for outcomes. Both are filed annually and both are free to read.
We did not use rankings, surveys or reputation. Where a figure required arithmetic, such as a percentage or a net cost, we state that it is our arithmetic and give the inputs so you can check it.
Where we could not verify something, the table says so rather than filling the gap with an estimate. That is why some rows read not published or not verified instead of carrying a number that would look more complete and mean less.
It cannot tell you your outcome. Every figure here describes a class of several hundred people, and your position inside that distribution is set by first-year grades that have not happened yet.
It cannot price your offer, because aid depends on where your numbers sit against each school's medians rather than on the median award. Half of every school's grant recipients got less than the figure shown.
And it cannot capture fit, culture, or whether you will do your best work in that building for three years. Those are discoverable only by visiting and asking current students specific questions, which is worth more than any table on this site.
Would I attend this school at its median grant against its full cost of attendance, without seeing another offer? If no, stop here.
Are my numbers at or above its medians, so that certainty supplements a competitive file rather than substituting for one?
Have I priced the alternative, meaning the offers I might realistically hold by March if I waited?
And is my financing plan sound if the aid outcome disappoints, given that federal borrowing now caps at $50,000 a year? Four yes answers make ED defensible; any no is the answer.
24 of these 31 offer one. The seven without a program are Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Notre Dame, UNC, BYU and Wake Forest, though Wake Forest does run binding scholarship tracks.
No school in this set publishes an ED-specific admit rate, so no percentage boost can be honestly quoted. Binding certainty plausibly helps at the margin because schools manage yield, but it does not rescue numbers below a school's bands.
Most cluster in November: November 1 at Northwestern, Duke, Texas and Vanderbilt, November 15 at Columbia, NYU, Penn, Michigan and USC. Later options include GW and Texas A&M on February 1 and Georgetown rolling to March 2.
It removes competing offers, which are the main tool for negotiating aid. That matters most at the many schools here that discount 90 percent or more of the class. Some schools attach dedicated scholarship tracks to ED, which is the counterargument.
Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Notre Dame, UNC and BYU run no ED program. Notre Dame eliminated its binding ED in 2022 and now uses a why-this-school statement to gauge interest instead.
Written by Ali, Georgetown Law, founder of Lovare Institut.
July 30, 2026
July 30, 2026