166,339 Candidates Sit National Secondary-School Exams From 16-26 June Across 340,382 Papers and 25 Disciplines — Portuguese 12th-Year and Economics A 11th-Year Headline Day One as 93,596 Aim for 20 July Higher-Education Competition
Eleven working days, 25 disciplines, 340,382 papers — the 2026 National Secondary-School Exams open 09:30 Monday with Portuguese 12th-year as 166,339 candidates sit the first phase, 93,596 of them aiming at the 20 July National Higher-Education Access Competition.
The 2026 cycle of the Exames Nacionais do Ensino Secundário (National Secondary-School Exams) opens on Monday 16 June and runs across eleven working days through 26 June, with the Instituto de Avaliação Educativa (IAVE — Institute of Educational Assessment) confirming a record 166,339 candidates entered for the first phase against 340,382 individual exam papers.
That is an average of 2.05 papers per candidate. Two trends sit behind the number. First, the recovery of the dual 11th-grade-plus-12th-grade exam load after the pandemic-era cycle compressed the calendar in 2020–2021. Second, the migration of access-route students toward higher-credit weightings as the public universities raise the minimum-classification thresholds for medical, dental and engineering courses.
Of the total candidate pool, 93,596 — 56.3% — have signalled an intent to apply for higher education through the Concurso Nacional de Acesso ao Ensino Superior (National Higher-Education Access Competition), the centralised competition operated by the Direção-Geral do Ensino Superior (DGES — Directorate-General for Higher Education). The window opens on 20 July. The DGES has pre-published 56,790 public-system seats for the 2026/27 academic year. Subtracting that from the 93,596 higher-education bidders leaves the residual cohort competing for private-system seats or queuing for the September second-phase round.
The opening day carries the heaviest single load of the calendar. The Português 12.º (Portuguese-language 12th-year) paper sits at 09:30 nationwide — the only mandatory exam for every 12th-year candidate — while Economia A 11.º (Economics A 11th-year) goes at 14:00, both with three-hour time envelopes. That pairing typically draws the largest single-day crowd of any exam window in the Portuguese system.
Across the eleven working days that follow, 25 disciplines are distributed over two daily shifts starting at 09:30 and 14:00. The combination of Matemática A (Mathematics A), Filosofia (Philosophy), Biologia e Geologia (Biology and Geology), Física e Química A (Physics and Chemistry A) and Geografia A (Geography A) sets the heaviest single-day clusters after the opening pair. The second phase — for second-attempt candidates and those filing improvement bids — opens 16 July and closes 22 July.
The 2026 cycle sits inside the revised exam architecture published by IAVE in February, which holds the schedule, weighting and calculator-policy mechanics in place from the 2025 edition. The historical political lightning rods — paper difficulty, ranking-algorithm validation, second-phase classification windows — usually only flare after the score sheets release.
For 93,596 18-year-olds, the next six weeks run from a 09:30 Portuguese paper to a higher-education ranking that decides the next four years. For the system, this is the highest-stakes window of the academic calendar.
