The 2026–2027 Common App essay prompts
We are happy to announce that the Common App essay prompts will remain the same for 2026–2027 🎉.
Based on positive feedback from students, counselors, teachers, and colleges, we are keeping the essay prompts unchanged.
During the 2025-2026 application year, we’ve observed the following trends in prompt selection by students. The most popular essay prompt was ‘Topic of your choice’ (28%), followed by ‘Facing adversity’ (23%). Here’s the full breakdown:
- Topic of your choice: 28%
- Facing adversity: 23%
- Personal growth: 20%
- Background, identify, interest, or talent: 18%
- Intellectual curiosity: 5%
- Gratitude: 3%
- Challenging an idea: 3%
Here is the full set of (The 2026–2027 Common App essay prompts) essay prompts for 2026–2027. The 2026–2027 Common App essay prompts, write your essays!
- Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
- The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
- Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
- Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?
- Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
- Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?
- Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design
By releasing the prompts early, we hope to give students ample time for reflection and brainstorming. We recognize that some schools and organizations are beginning discussions with juniors and transfer students about college options.
Students who wish to start exploring the application can create their account anytime. With account rollover, Common App will retain students’ responses to questions in ‘My Common Application’, including the personal essay, when the 2026-2027 application opens on August 1.
The 2026–2027 Common App essay prompts
All Applications Must Be Submitted in August or September. (The exception is the University of California schools and the California State colleges as those applications open in October. UCs and Cal States must be submitted by November 6th.)
Getting your applications submitted in August or September beats all deadlines plus it increases your chances of admission and scholarships.
Admissions Officers Like Storytellers
Making your college essay come alive Virtually all colleges will ask you to write at least one essay as part of your application package. After poring over hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of class ranks, SAT scores, transcripts, and teacher recommendations, admissions officers want to read something that stands out from the masses. The admissions office views the essay as a little window into your personality, and they see it as evidence of how well you write. The essay is the only place where they can hear your voice, just as you want it, all the while, really get a sense of who you are.
You are after the most natural style and tone possible – if read aloud, your essay should sound like a good conversation. Write about something you really care about. Keep in mind who your audience is, and choose a topic you want to write about – not one that you think you ought to write about.
A personal anecdote (story) can be used in your essay in various ways:
- As the introduction and take-off point for the whole essay
- As a final note, a story that sums up or crystallizes what you have been saying and leaves the reader with the tone of the whole
- As a detail in the body of the essay
- As a big story that runs throughout the essay and shapes the whole
One key factor to prevent your story from becoming a sweeping generalization is the ability to utilize detail. Write to help admissions officers see what you saw, hear what you heard, and taste what you tasted. Rather than tell what you learned from photography, show what it looks and feels and even sounds like in a darkroom as your picture emerges, the smell of the chemicals, the red bulb glowing in the darkness, the stillness in the darkroom. Rather than describe how disciplined you have become as a result of your music lessons, talk about your violin, the texture and feel of it, the smell of the wood – no one ever thinks of the sense of smell in connection with a violin – details that take your reader through your practice routine with you. Use sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, in other words, SHOW what you know.
A creative metaphor can also be used to make your essay come alive. Writers continually see one thing in terms of something else; the result is metaphor, the language of comparison.
Sometimes the sheer wit and power of metaphors can carry a piece of writing and make it entertaining and fresh. Learning to think “metaphorically” is perhaps the most fun part of writing. Metaphors are all around you, but through time and use, some of them have lost their ability to startle: leg of a chair, face of a clock, eye of a needle. Still others are on their way to the metaphor graveyard, but are not quite buried yet. Using them is not the sign of a dead metaphor but of a dead mind: white as snow, big as a mountain, high as a kite, smooth as glass. To be an entertaining writer you must hammer out your own metaphor from materials you know and understand. A good rule of thumb, suggested by writer George Orwell is, never to use a comparison you have heard before.
The 2026–2027 Common App essay prompts, get it done!
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The 2026–2027 Common App essay prompts