TJ Acceptance Rate by Middle School

What a Middle School’s TJ Acceptance Rate Means

A school’s rate is the share of its TJHSST applicants who received an offer in one admissions cycle. It comes from aggregate FCPS records, the same data behind our TJ admissions data page. For the Class of 2029, FCPS made 550 initial offers from 2,605 evaluated applications, an overall rate of 21.1%.

Class year

The year the student graduates from TJ. The Class of 2029 applied as 8th graders during the 2024-25 school year.

Latest rate

The most recent class year FCPS published for that school. For most schools this is the Class of 2029.

2025-28 combined

All four classes from 2025 to 2028 pooled into one rate. We show it only when FCPS published a rate for the school in every one of those years.

Not published

FCPS suppresses small counts to protect student privacy. A missing year means the rate was not released, not that no one was offered a seat.

Offer rates vary about three to one across middle schools, and they do not sort neatly by feeder status. Rates also move year to year as each school’s applicant pool changes, which is why the lookup shows every class year instead of a single ranking.

How the 1.5% Allocation Works

TJ offers about 550 freshman seats. FCPS fills them in two pools, and a student’s middle school decides which pool they are considered in first.

1. Allocated seats. Each participating public middle school is presumptively allocated seats equal to 1.5% of its 8th grade population. Eligible applicants from that school are compared with each other, and the strongest evaluated applications are offered those seats.
2. Unfilled seats roll over. If a school has fewer eligible applicants than its allocation, the unfilled seats move to the unallocated pool.
3. Unallocated seats. The remaining seats go to the highest-evaluated applicants among everyone not yet offered a seat: public school applicants who did not receive an allocated seat, plus private school and homeschool applicants, who compete only for these seats.

The 1.5% is tied to a school’s whole 8th grade class, not to how many students apply, and it is a starting pathway, not a cap. FCPS does not publish how many seats each school receives, how the 1.5% is rounded, or how the 550 seats split between the two pools. Any per-school seat count you see online is someone’s estimate. Our guide to the 1.5% rule walks through the details.

Why Your School’s Rate Is Not Your Student’s Odds

A school rate describes what happened to one group of applicants in one year. The 1.5% rule sets each school’s share against its own 8th grade, so a school’s rate mostly reflects how strong its own applicant pool was that year. Attending a lower-profile school is not a shortcut, and attending a feeder is not a penalty.

Every offer still depends on the evaluated application: core GPA, the Student Portrait Sheet (SPS), the Problem-Solving Essay (PSE), and experience factors FCPS considers as context. Your student can’t change their school’s rate. They can change how strong their SPS and PSE are. If you haven’t confirmed eligibility yet, start with our TJ GPA calculator.

Rates Before the 2020 Admissions Change

These are average offer rates for the Classes of 2017 to 2021, from before FCPS changed TJ admissions in fall 2020. The old process included an admissions test and had no school allocation, so compare these with current rates carefully.