Emergency medicine is a week ahead of last year: 85% of programs have sent interview invites

Twenty days into last cycle (Oct 14, 2025), 45% of emergency medicine programs had sent at least one invite. Twenty days into this one, 85% have. Even before today’s wave, EM was ahead: 60% of programs had sent by the end of Oct 12, compared with 42% at the same point last cycle, an 18-point gap.

The difference comes down to timing. Last cycle, emergency medicine’s single biggest day for first invites was Tuesday, Oct 21, when 70 programs sent their first. This cycle it was Tuesday, Oct 13: 73 programs, about 1 in 4 EM programs, sent their first invite today. Today’s count is still coming in.

Med-peds moved even more. 92% of med-peds programs have sent an invite, compared with 42% at this point last cycle. Last year the specialty didn’t reach today’s level until late November. This year, 62% of med-peds programs sent their first invites on a single day, Oct 6, one day after pediatrics’ biggest day (Oct 5, when more than half of pediatrics programs sent their first).

The other specialties in the chart are keeping last year’s schedule. Pediatrics, diagnostic radiology, PM&R, anesthesiology and child neurology are each within about 6 points of where they stood at this point last cycle.

Family medicine and internal medicine look far ahead too: 67% and 53% of programs have sent, vs 37% and 23% at this point last cycle. But last cycle’s invite reports only ever reached about 4 in 10 programs in those specialties, so we can’t tell faster programs from better reporting. We left them out of the comparison.

Ophthalmology programs send invites on two set days this season, Oct 13 and Oct 20, and today was the first. As a share of a specialty’s programs, it was the second-largest one-day release of the season so far, behind child neurology on Oct 5, when 81% of its programs sent their first invites. Today’s count is still coming in, so the share will rise.

If you applied in ophthalmology and haven’t heard from a program that sent today, check your email, spam folder and the SF Match portal. A program that sent today may still send more invites later, and the programs that announced Oct 20 haven’t sent yet. We can’t compare with last cycle: last year’s reports covered too few ophthalmology programs.

Across these 15 specialties, about 6 in 10 programs have sent at least one invite. In 12 of the 15, more than half have.

General surgery is the exception at 11%, but if it follows last cycle, its big day is still ahead. Last year, 40% of general surgery programs sent their first invites on a single day, Oct 22.

Dermatology and OB-GYN have barely started, as at this point last year. Dermatology programs have announced release dates in November.

Pathology looks behind but isn’t. Its programs release invites together on Thursday, Oct 15, at 4 PM Eastern, so only 5% have sent so far, the few that went early. Last cycle’s release day, Oct 15, 2025, brought 83 programs’ first invites in a single day, taking pathology from 16% of programs to 74%. Before that day, 16% had gone early; this season fewer have, or fewer early invites have been reported.

Programs send on weekdays. About 2 in 100 program invite days so far fell on a Saturday or Sunday, and Mondays and Tuesdays account for nearly half. The two busiest days of the season were Monday, Oct 5 and today, each with invites from about 460 programs. Most programs that have sent have done so on just one or two days so far; many will send more waves.

In psychiatry, about 1 in 6 applications this season carried a signal, but just over half of reported invites (57%) went to applicants who had signaled the program. Neurology looks the same: 16% of applications, about half of invites. In internal medicine, 26% of applications and 72% of invites.

In 6 of the 7 specialties where we know how many applications carried a signal, signalers got a clearly bigger share of invites than their share of applications. In med-peds the shares are close (25% of invites, 23% of applications), too close to tell apart.

These shares closely track last year. Applicant outcome records from last cycle, which cover the whole season, give a share within 6 points of this season’s in all seven specialties we could compare: 53% in psychiatry last cycle vs 57% now, and 17% vs 20% in emergency medicine. Use the switch above the chart to see them.

The same records show how much more often signaled applications drew an offer. In psychiatry last cycle, 69 in 100 signaled applications turned into an interview offer, compared with 15 in 100 unsignaled ones, about 4.6 times as often. In anesthesiology it was 67 vs 11 in 100 (about 6 times); in internal medicine, 67 vs 22 (about 3 times). In family medicine (87 vs 68) and pediatrics (86 vs 65), a signal helped much less. Those records lean toward US MD and DO applicants who matched, so both rates run higher than for the average applicant. They also show association, not cause: applicants tend to signal programs where they are already competitive.

Treat anesthesiology’s figure as the upper end: the way signal status gets recorded in that specialty’s reports may undercount applicants who didn’t signal.

Among applicants who track their interviews with Rezumab, the 20% with the most invites hold about half of all invites logged so far (52%). The top 10% hold 32%. The median applicant has 4 invites; about 1 in 10 has 16 or more. If invites were spread evenly, the top fifth would hold a fifth.

Over a full past season, invites were much more even. In applicant outcome records from last cycle, the top fifth of applicants held 35% of interview offers and the top 10% held 20%, and the median applicant had 14 offers. The previous two cycles look almost identical.

The early-season gap holds within specialties too. In each of the six largest specialties we checked (emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry and anesthesiology), invites so far are more lopsided than in last cycle’s full-season records. On Sep 30 the top fifth also held about half, though fewer applicants were tracking then.

Neither number is the true figure for all applicants, and the biases run both ways. This season’s data leaves out applicants with no invites yet, which makes invites look more even than they are. The most active applicants may also log more completely, which makes them look more lopsided. The past records leave out most applicants who got few or no offers, which makes the full season look more even than it was. And the season isn’t over: with only a few invites each so far, counts look more uneven than they will by the end, though that explains only a small part of the gap.