There is no official ranking of the Cambridge colleges. The University doesn’t publish one, and it doesn’t endorse the one everybody quotes, which is the Tompkins Table. That ranks the colleges by how well their undergraduates do in their exams, and it goes back to 1981, when Peter Tompkins started it as a third-year maths student at Trinity.
Below are the 2026 results that have been published so far, the full 2025 table with scores, and each college’s position in 2024 and 2022. Two colleges are missing: Darwin and Clare Hall only take graduate students, so they have no undergraduate results to count.
If you want the colleges sorted another way, we also have them ranked by wealth, listed by founding date and listed alphabetically.
The 2026 table
Trinity came top again in 2026, for the third year running, 1.26 percentage points ahead of Christ’s. Selwyn was third, 0.08 points behind Christ’s, and Queens’ and Gonville & Caius (pronounced keys, in case you were wondering) made up the top five. Pembroke climbed nine places from 16th to 7th, while Downing and Peterhouse both dropped nine, to 15th and 19th. Murray Edwards, Girton and Homerton were the bottom three.
That is all Varsity, the student newspaper that publishes the table, gave in its report on 2 October 2026. It did not print the full order or the scores, so the 2026 column below only shows the positions that are known.
The full table
| College | 2026 | 2025 | 2025 score | 2024 | 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trinity | 1 | 1 | 74.58% | 1 | 2 |
| Christ’s | 2 | 2 | 72.96% | 2 | 1 |
| Selwyn | 3 | 3 | 72.78% | 5 | 14 |
| Churchill | 4 | 72.43% | 6 | 8 | |
| Queens’ | 4 or 5 | 5 | 71.48% | 7 | 10 |
| Downing | 15 | 6 | 71.04% | 11 | 13 |
| Emmanuel | 7 | 71.01% | 9 | 11 | |
| St John’s | 8 | 70.34% | 14 | 6 | |
| Clare | 9 | 70.20% | 12 | 12 | |
| Peterhouse | 19 | 10 | 70.16% | 15 | 15 |
| Gonville & Caius | 4 or 5 | 11 | 70.13% | 10 | 7 |
| St Catharine’s | 12 | 69.69% | 8 | 3 | |
| Wolfson | 13 | 69.68% | 22 | 21 | |
| Jesus | 14 | 69.36% | 18 | 4 | |
| Corpus Christi | 15 | 69.28% | 3 | 9 | |
| Pembroke | 7 | 16 | 69.15% | 4 | 5 |
| Magdalene | 17 | 68.82% | 16 | 18 | |
| Sidney Sussex | 18 | 68.55% | 20 | 16 | |
| Trinity Hall | 19 | 67.65% | 19 | 19 | |
| Robinson | 20 | 66.65% | 17 | 17 | |
| Fitzwilliam | 21 | 66.59% | 21 | 20 | |
| Lucy Cavendish | 22 | 66.42% | 23 | 29 | |
| Hughes Hall | 23 | 66.19% | 29 | 23 | |
| St Edmund’s | 24 | 65.98% | 13 | 28 | |
| Newnham | 25 | 65.63% | 27 | 24 | |
| Murray Edwards | 27 to 29 | 26 | 64.72% | 26 | 27 |
| King’s | 27 | 64.72% | 24 | 22 | |
| Girton | 27 to 29 | 28 | 64.21% | 28 | 25 |
| Homerton | 27 to 29 | 29 | 62.28% | 25 | 26 |
Ordered by 2025 position. Scores are the percentage of available points each college’s students earned. A blank 2026 cell means that college’s position has not been published.
The scores are close. In 2025 there was less than a point between 10th-placed Peterhouse (70.16%) and 14th-placed Jesus (69.36%), and Murray Edwards and King’s both scored 64.72%. A few results either way can move a college several places, which is why some of them jump around from one year to the next. Corpus Christi went from 3rd in 2024 to 15th in 2025, and Pembroke from 4th to 16th and then back up to 7th in 2026. As one Peterhouse student told Varsity this year, “Peterhouse is a small college so we will be more statistically volatile year on year than most.”
So which is the best college at Cambridge?
On exam results, Trinity, and it isn’t a recent thing. It came top every year from 2011 to 2017, and again in 2024, 2025 and 2026. The only other college to beat it in that time is Christ’s, which came top in 2018, 2019 and 2022. That is ten wins out of the last thirteen tables for Trinity, and three for Christ’s.
Whether that makes Trinity the best college for you is another matter. The table measures the results of students who are already there. It tells you nothing about how hard a college is to get into, what the rooms are like or how far it is from your lectures. Trinity is also by far the richest college, with more than twice the net assets of St John’s in second place.
How the Tompkins Table is worked out
Every undergraduate exam result counts, from every year of the course, not just finals. Each class of result earns points:
- First: 5 points
- Upper second (2:1): 3 points
- Second undivided: 2.5 points
- Lower second (2:2): 2 points
- Third: 1 point
The scores in each subject are weighted to a common average, so a college with lots of students in subjects that hand out more Firsts doesn’t get an easy lift. Each college’s total is then shown as a percentage of the points it could have earned if every student got a First. Students who aren’t candidates for an honours degree, and anyone who fails, are left out.
The table hasn’t appeared every year. There wasn’t one in 2020 or 2021, when Covid disrupted the exams, and there wasn’t one in 2023 either.
The bottom of the table
St Edmund’s, Hughes Hall and Wolfson have far more graduate students than undergraduates, so their position in the table is based on a small part of the college. Wolfson’s 13th place in 2025 was its best in the three full tables shown here.
Girton, Homerton, Murray Edwards and Newnham finished in the bottom eight in 2022, 2024 and 2025, and three of them were the bottom three again in 2026. King’s has slipped from 22nd to 27th over the same three tables. Lucy Cavendish has gone the other way, from last in 2022 to 22nd in 2025.
Is there an official league table?
No. Some colleges commission internal rankings, known as Baxter Tables, but the full tables aren’t made public. Oxford had an official equivalent, the Norrington Table, until it scrapped it in 2024.