How the SACE ATAR is calculated (SA, 2026)

Your university aggregate is the sum of the scaled scores from your best 90 credits of Stage 2 study. Under SATAC's rules that is your three best 20-credit Tertiary Admission Subjects (TAS) — 60 credits — plus a 30-credit flexible option. The flexible option can be made up of additional 10- or 20-credit TAS and/or up to 20 credits of Recognised Studies.

Scaled scores are reported out of 20 for a 20-credit subject and out of 10 for a 10-credit subject, so the maximum possible aggregate is 90. You must also complete the SACE (or NTCET) itself and meet any course prerequisites to be eligible for university.

SATAC ranks every SACE and NTCET student by university aggregate and publishes an official aggregate-to-ATAR conversion table each year that maps a minimum aggregate to each ATAR (a maximum aggregate of 90.00 corresponds to an ATAR of 99.95). Because the table is rebuilt against each year's cohort, the same aggregate can map to a slightly different ATAR from one year to the next. The ATAR is a rank from 0.00 to 99.95, not a mark.

SATAC scales every Stage 2 subject so results from different subjects can be compared fairly, but — unlike UAC in NSW, QTAC in QLD and TISC in WA — it does not publish per-subject scaled scores. Its own FAQ answers “Can SATAC tell me the scaled scores for a particular subject?” with “No. Scaled scores for individual subjects are not publicly available.”

You do see your own scaled scores — for each of your Stage 2 subjects — on your Tertiary Entrance Statement after results come out. We explain what this means for picking subjects on the SACE scaling page.

Yes. Northern Territory students complete the NTCET, which uses the same SACE subjects and the same external exams, and SATAC calculates the NT ATAR the same way — the aggregate-to-ATAR table is explicitly for “SACE/NTCET” and ranks SA and NT students together. See the NTCET guide for the NT specifics.