WJEC A level grade boundaries 2026: the marks for every grade

WJEC A level grade boundaries June 2026

WJEC's A level in Wales is unitised, so there is no single table of raw marks for the whole qualification. Its overall UMS document gives the totals below, and its grade boundaries page says UMS boundaries remain the same every year. The AS units count towards the A level in Wales, so one scale covers both.

Grade A* is only awarded at A level. It needs an overall A and at least 90% of the uniform marks on the A2 units, according to WJEC's grading rules. That is 270 uniform marks in a 500-mark subject and 324 in Maths and Further Maths, as the Further Maths specification confirms. AS has no A*.

Unit raw mark boundaries 2026

This is the part that changes with the paper. WJEC publishes each unit's raw mark for grades a to e in its grade converter, and the table below copies the 2026 figures for our six subjects. Max UMS is the most a unit can contribute, and the right-hand column shows how the raw mark for an A compares with 2025.

How 2026 compares with 2025

The biggest drops in the raw mark for an A were in A2 Physics, where Unit 3 fell from 74 to 63 and Unit 4 from 71 to 63, and in A2 Chemistry Unit 3, down from 49 to 39. The biggest rises were in Maths Unit 3, up from 65 to 75, and in the first two Computer Science units, each up 6. A few units did not move at all: Biology Unit 5 stayed at 35, Computer Science Unit 5 at 70 and Physics Unit 2 at 49. These numbers do not say a grade got easier or harder. They say that a given standard took a different raw mark on a different paper.

How marks become a grade

Take a Chemistry candidate with raw marks of 40, 38, 30, 40 and 33 on Units 1 to 5. The 2026 converter turns those into 68, 68, 84, 83, 33 uniform marks. They add up to 336. That is above the C boundary of 300 and below the B boundary of 350, so the overall grade is a C, 14 uniform marks short of a B. Because the total is below 400, the A* rule never comes into play.

Unit results appear on the slip as lower-case letters a to e, and the overall A level grade appears only once you have cashed in the qualification. A total that equals a boundary earns that grade.

What the 2026 results looked like in Wales

Senedd Research reports, from provisional JCQ data, that 29.6% of Welsh A level grades in 2026 were A* or A, 77.6% were A* to C and 97.7% were A* to E, with 32,633 A level grades awarded. At AS, 90.7% were A to E and 22.5% were A. Entries rose in Maths by 202 (5.3%) and in Chemistry by 131 (5.6%), and fell in Computing by 71 (14.5%).

What the boundaries mean for you

• Plan in uniform marks. Aiming for 400 means an average of 80% of each unit's UMS, whatever the paper.
• Know which units carry weight. In Maths, A2 Unit 3 is worth 210 of the 600 marks. A weak unit there costs more than a weak AS unit.
• A* needs a strong A2. A candidate with 405 uniform marks but 250 on the A2 units gets an A, not an A*.
• Cash in to get the grade. Unit results appear as you go, but the overall A level grade appears only once your centre has made a cash-in entry.

Use today's paper to check your level

Our A level papers are short, 8 questions of 25 to 35 marks, and they are ours, not WJEC's. Score one and turn it into a share: 21 out of 30 is 70%. The UMS scale puts the grades at 80%, 70%, 60%, 50% and 40% of the total for A to E, so 70% points at B-level work. A real unit converts raw marks differently, so take it as a pointer, and look at a fortnight of papers, not one day.

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