When do spring weeks open? UK dates and deadlines

The cycle for a spring week runs a full academic year ahead of the week itself. Applications open in the autumn, mostly from late August through October. The earliest firms, usually the large US banks and a few consultancies, tend to open in the last week of August or the first half of September. UK banks, the Big Four and most asset managers follow through September and October. Law firms' first-year schemes and insight days typically open later, from October into November.

Deadlines cluster between October and January, with many banks closing in October or November and law firms running to January or February. Online tests go out within days of applying at most firms, and interviews or assessment centres run from November through February. Offers follow soon after, and the programmes run during the Easter vacation, in late March and April.

The week ends, at most banks and many consultancies, with an assessment or a conversation about the summer internship. Strong attendees are fast-tracked to the summer internship interview or offered a place outright, which is why the spring week cycle is effectively the first round of the following year's internship cycle.

Most banks, consultancies and tech firms review applications as they arrive. They send online tests and schedule interviews on a rolling basis, and once the programme has enough strong candidates the application form closes, whatever the deadline on the careers page said. In recent cycles some of the most oversubscribed programmes have closed within two or three weeks of opening.

That means the useful date is the day a programme opens, and the useful habit is applying in the first few days. A deadline in January is a ceiling, not a target. Law firms are the main exception: vacation schemes and first-year schemes mostly run to a fixed deadline and review everything together afterwards.

The live spring week tracker lists every UK spring week the tracker can find open at the moment, with the date each was first seen, its deadline where the firm states one, and a link straight to the firm's own application form. New openings are detected within minutes of appearing on the firm's careers system, which is the only reliable way to catch a programme in its first days.

The expected openings page shows, for each firm and programme, when it opened in recent cycles and whether it has opened yet this year. The free alert emails you the moment a programme matching your filters goes live, so you do not need to check the board every day.

Because the first days matter, the application should be ready before the window opens. That means a one-page CV already checked against what the firms look for, a short answer to why this firm and why this division that can be adapted in an hour, and some practice on the online tests the firms send, since those usually arrive within days of applying. The CV rater and the assessment drills on this site are free and built for exactly this.