Do SAT scores expire?

Question

Accepted Answer

The College Board does not expire SAT scores — they can be sent years later, though older ones move to an archive with a retrieval fee, and scores from before 2005 are no longer available at all. What can expire is a college's willingness to accept them: individual schools set their own recency rules, commonly around five years, and selective schools often prefer recent scores. Reports for scores more than five years old go out with a note saying older scores may predict college performance less well. For a student applying to college straight out of high school, this question is almost always moot — a sophomore's or junior's score is comfortably current by the time applications go in. The question matters for a different group: adults returning to school, transfer students, and anyone whose path took a detour. If that is you, the rule is simple and unglamorous: read the admissions page of each school you are applying to, and if it does not say, email admissions and ask. Recency policies are set school by school, they are not published in any central place, and a policy you read on a prep blog is a policy for somebody else's school. The note College Board attaches to older reports is not a rejection — it is a caveat, and colleges read it as one. Some will accept the score as-is. Some will ask for a retake. Some will lean more heavily on the rest of the application. All three are normal outcomes and none of them is decided by the score being 'expired,' because it is not. One thing that has genuinely changed underneath this question: the test itself. A score from the paper SAT is on the same 400–1600 scale but comes from a meaningfully different exam than the current adaptive digital test. That is worth knowing if you are deciding whether an old score still represents you, separate from whether a college will take it.