How to Reschedule the MCAT: Fees and Dated Deadlines

By MCAT Study Planner Team • Updated 10/10/2026

Short answer: moving your MCAT date costs $55 if you are 60 or more days out, $110 at 30 to 59 days, and $210 at 10 to 29 days, read from the AAMC scheduling fees page on October 10, 2026. Inside 10 days nothing can be changed at any price.

Every ranking page publishes those three numbers. None of them publishes the one thing you actually need, which is the date each tier ends for your exam.

The AAMC does publish those dates. They just live on a different page, in a 35-row calendar nobody joins to the fee table. This guide does the join, and then does the arithmetic that matters more than the fee: what the weeks you just bought are worth.

In this guide

• What a reschedule costs, standard and with fee assistance
• Your three deadlines as real dates, for every 2027 exam
• The 30 day deadline is a refund cliff, not a fee step
• Rescheduling beats cancelling in every window
• How to actually change the date
• What the move does to your study plan
• How many times you can reschedule
• Three traps in the fine print
• When you cannot reschedule: the emergency refund request
• What the ranking pages get wrong
• Every number on one page

What a Reschedule Costs, Standard and With Fee Assistance

These are the published figures on the AAMC MCAT scheduling fees page, which states that it covers scheduling fees for all 2027 testing dates. We read it on October 10, 2026, and the same tables appear inside The MCAT Essentials for Testing Year 2027.

One registration costs $360 standard and $145 with Fee Assistance Program approval. Testing outside the United States, Canada or US territories adds a $130 international fee, and the AAMC states that international fees are nonrefundable.

Two things about that table are worth saying out loud, because the fee pages do not.

The price is set by your proximity to test day, not by how far you move. Moving two weeks and moving two months cost exactly the same. That single fact is the whole decision, and we come back to it below.

And the fee is charged on top of your registration. It buys you nothing except a different date.

Your Three Deadlines as Real Dates, for Every 2027 Exam

The fee tiers are written in days. Your calendar is written in dates. The AAMC publishes the conversion on its US testing calendar page, as a 60 day, 30 day and 10 day deadline column for each of the 35 test dates in 2027. We read that calendar on October 10, 2026.

Join the two pages and each test date gets three dated prices. This is our arithmetic on the AAMC’s own two tables, and it assumes what the Essentials states directly, that the three change deadlines are counted as 60, 30 and 10 days from the exam date.

Every deadline below falls at 11:59 p.m. local test center time on the day shown. Dates without a year are in 2027.

One oddity, flagged rather than silently corrected: the AAMC calendar prints the 30 day deadline for the July 10, 2027 exam as “June 110”. Every other row on that calendar is arithmetically exact, so the intended date is June 10, 2027. Our full 2027 MCAT calendar carries the same 35 rows with their score release dates, and notes the same typo.

The 30 Day Deadline Is a Refund Cliff, Not a Fee Step

Look again at the middle column above. It carries two things at once.

It is the last day a move costs $110 instead of $210. It is also the last day a cancellation returns $180 instead of nothing. The AAMC publishes the $180 refund for “60 or more days” and for “30 to 59 days”, which means its last day is the 30 day deadline, the same dated day.

So the step from the middle column to the right column is not a $100 fee increase. It is a $100 fee increase and a $180 refund disappearing on the same midnight, a $280 swing on one date.

If you are inside 60 days and you suspect you are not ready, that date is the one to put in your phone. Not test day.

Rescheduling Beats Cancelling in Every Window

A lot of people reach for cancel when they mean postpone. If you still intend to sit the MCAT this cycle, that is the expensive instinct.

Here is the arithmetic, ours, on the AAMC’s two tables. It assumes a new standard registration costs $360, which is what the fee page publishes, and that you will in fact test later.

Note the shape. The gap narrows in the middle window and then jumps to its widest in the last one, because by then the refund has gone to zero while a $210 move is still on the table.

With Fee Assistance Program pricing the same comparison runs on $145 registrations and $75 refunds, and rescheduling still wins by $45, $25 and $60.

Cancelling only makes sense if you are stepping out of the cycle entirely. In that case, cancel on or before your 30 day deadline and take the $180 back.

How to Actually Change the Date

All of it happens in the MCAT Registration System, in your AAMC account. The Essentials describe the process in plain terms, and these are the parts that catch people out.

1. Open your existing registration and choose to change the date, the test center, or both. The two cost the same fee.
2. Pick from live seat availability. Seats are first come, first served, and popular dates go early, so have two or three acceptable alternatives ready before you start.
3. Pay the fee for your window. The AAMC accepts American Express, VISA, Discover and MasterCard, including debit cards carrying the VISA or MasterCard logo, and no other form of payment.
4. Wait for the confirmation email. This is the step people skip. The Essentials state that if no confirmation arrives within 24 hours, the appointment was not scheduled and you have to do it again.

If the date and center you want shows none available, Pearson offers an email waitlist through the “Notify me” option on that date and location. It is not a hold, but it costs nothing.

What the Move Does to Your Study Plan

This is the part the fee pages cannot help with, and it is the actual question.

Because the fee is priced by proximity and not by distance, the weeks are effectively free once you have paid. Two weeks and eight weeks cost the same $55 at 60 days out. So the real calculation is the fee divided by the study hours those weeks add.

Hold yourself at 20 hours a week, which sits in the middle of the weekly loads our own timeline plans use, and the arithmetic is this.

That table is our arithmetic, and it carries one assumption worth stating: that you actually keep studying 20 hours a week after the move. A reschedule that stretches the timeline without changing the weekly plan buys nothing.

Two more things follow from it.

A two week move is almost never worth making late. At $5.25 a study hour it is the most expensive prep you will ever buy, and two weeks rarely changes a full length average. If you are moving at all inside 30 days, move far.

And the move puts you in a different plan, not a longer version of the same one. Count the weeks from today to your new date and switch:

One caveat that the prep-company pages about postponing never mention. Moving four weeks when you are six weeks into a 12 week plan does not give you a fresh 16 weeks. It gives you a 16 week plan with six weeks already spent, and those six weeks were spent on the old sequence. The practice exams are usually what needs re-placing first, and our guide to when to take MCAT full lengths sets out where they go in each window.

Both inputs here are the same two the planner takes, a test date and your honest weekly hours. Put your new date into the free MCAT study schedule generator and it rebuilds the calendar around it, so you can see what the extra weeks are actually made of rather than assuming they are study time. If you are still choosing between candidate dates, our guide to picking an MCAT test date works through which 2027 windows fit which situations.

For the hours side of it, our analysis of 43 real study-hour reports found a median of 475 total hours with the middle half between 300 and 600. Those are self-reported and self-selected, so treat them as a spread rather than a target, but they are a useful check on whether the weeks you are buying close the gap you have.

How Many Times You Can Reschedule

The MCAT Essentials for Testing Year 2027 sets no cap on the number of appointment changes. We read both the scheduling chapter and the attempt-limits chapter on October 10, 2026, and neither mentions one.

The limits that do exist are different limits, and people confuse them with this one:

• You may hold only one MCAT exam appointment at a time.
• You may attempt the exam no more than three times in a testing year.
• You may attempt the exam no more than four times over two consecutive testing years.
• You may attempt the exam no more than seven times in your lifetime, counting from the April 2015 dates.

A reschedule is not an attempt. Sitting the exam is, voiding is, and not showing up is: the AAMC’s repeat-policies document states that not showing up counts as an attempt toward the lifetime limit, and so does a voided score. Our guide to retaking the MCAT covers what those attempts cost you on the application side.

So the honest answer to “how many times can I move it” is: as often as you want, at the current window price each time, as long as you never let an appointment lapse into a no-show. The question has sat unanswered on this search for a long time. A Student Doctor Network thread asking exactly this, opened in 2010 by someone on their second reschedule, never got an answer from anyone in it. The registration system in that thread no longer exists, but the gap in the published guidance does.

Three Traps in the Fine Print

The “to be determined” test center, which lands on the cliff. Pearson lists some sites with a metropolitan area instead of an address, labelled as to be determined, to put more seats on sale. The Essentials state that you get the real address no fewer than 30 days before your exam, and that examinees who booked one of those sites are not eligible for a free reschedule once they learn where it is. Read those two sentences together. The address can arrive at roughly the moment a move starts costing $210 and a cancellation returns nothing. Only pick one of these sites if you can travel up to 40 miles inside that metro area.

Accommodations move the wall from 10 days to 15. If you are approved for testing accommodations, the Essentials state that your scheduling request has to be with Pearson no later than 15 days before your test date. They also state that if no decision has arrived by 15 days out, or the request is denied, you may test under standard conditions or reschedule, with the normal rescheduling fees applying. Plan around 15 days, not 10.

Weather is not a reason. Test centers stay open in bad weather unless you are told otherwise, and the AAMC states it will not refund fees if you are delayed or cannot reach the center, even when the cause is outside your control. The Essentials also warn about time zones, which matters because every deadline is 11:59 p.m. local test center time, not your time.

When You Cannot Reschedule: The Emergency Refund Request

Past the 10 day deadline the appointment is frozen. The one remaining route is an emergency refund request, filed through the Service Requests section of the MCAT Registration System, and it is narrower than most people assume.

The AAMC lists the qualifying events and the documentation window for each: an acute medical emergency within 30 days before the exam, a death in the immediate family where the death or service fell within 10 days before, primary caregiver duties for an illness no more than 10 days before, an unexpected call to military service or to catastrophic-event health care duties requested within 30 days and dated before the exam, and displacement by a natural disaster or an official shelter-in-place or evacuation recommendation no more than 10 days before. Other events are considered at the AAMC’s discretion.

Five rules decide whether it is worth filing:

1. The maximum refund is the 30 day cancellation amount, which is $180 standard and $75 with fee assistance. It is not the $360 registration.
2. It does not cancel your exam. The appointment goes to no-show status, and the testing attempt is returned only if the request is approved.
3. Complete documentation has to reach the AAMC no later than 10 days after your scheduled exam date.
4. The AAMC approves only one per calendar year, and the request is not reversible. Do not file one and then go to the test center.
5. A decision is emailed within two weeks of receipt, and refunds are not guaranteed.

What the Ranking Pages Get Wrong

We read the pages Google currently ranks for this search on October 10, 2026. Two patterns are worth knowing about before you trust a number you find elsewhere.

The numbers go stale quietly. The page sitting fourth publishes $345 registration, a $120 international fee, reschedule fees of $50, $100 and $200, a $170 refund and $140 fee assistance. Every one of those is one cycle behind the AAMC’s current figures of $360, $130, $55, $110, $210, $180 and $145, and the page links to the AAMC fee page directly underneath them. The strongest of the dedicated pages, at seventh, has the reschedule tiers right but still lists the refund as $175.

And the authority result is the wrong page. The AAMC result Google ranks fifth is titled “Changing the MCAT Exam”. It is about the April 2015 redesign of the test itself, not about changing your appointment, and it contains no scheduling rules at all. That mismatch is why one of the questions Google shows alongside this search is “How did the MCAT change?“. The pages you want are the MCAT scheduling fees page and The MCAT Essentials for Testing Year 2027.

Google’s own AI summary now gets the three reschedule tiers right. It still names no dated deadline, no refund amount, no registration fee, and nothing about what a move does to your plan.

Every Number on One Page

Read from students-residents.aamc.org on October 10, 2026, unless marked as our arithmetic.

Registration for the whole 2027 season opens October 20 to 22, 2026, by testing center location, so most of the dated deadlines in this guide are still ahead of the seats they apply to.

A new date on its own does not fix anything. The MCAT study planner takes your new test date, the hours you can genuinely give it each week and the resources you already own, and lays the weeks out as a calendar with the practice exams placed around them. That is the part the $55 was actually for.