Ninety percent of colleges do not require the SAT. That will not tell you if your child does.

If you have heard that around 90% of colleges do not require the SAT or ACT, that is roughly right and it will not tell you what to do. Whether your child needs to sit the test depends on the schools on their list and the year they would start college. That check takes about ten minutes, and it is the only version of this question that has an answer.

Everything below has a date attached on purpose. The counts move.

The trackers disagree because they are counting different things

FairTest, which campaigns against admissions testing, maintains a running list and updates it as colleges confirm policies. Inside Higher Ed reported on it in late August 2026. Common App publishes its own figure, and in its 2025 to 2026 end-of-season report that figure was 5%.

Those three numbers will not reconcile, and they are not supposed to. Common App is counting the share of its member colleges that require a score to submit an application, which is not the same as what a college wants before it makes a decision. FairTest counts institutions whose policy it has confirmed, and that total changes as confirmations arrive. Different questions, different totals, three different answers.

When we read FairTest's table in early September 2026 it showed around 7% of the four-year colleges it tracks requiring a score. If you read it today you may get a slightly different figure, and that is the tracker working rather than failing.

The average hides the schools most families are asking about

The obvious follow-up is which colleges require a score, and whether the more selective ones are likelier to. We spent a while trying to give you a defensible figure for that and we are not going to print one. The trackers we could reach disagreed with each other, the one we checked twice had moved between readings, and the source we most wanted to quote we could not reach at all.

That is not a gap in this post so much as the answer to it. A number describing thousands of colleges was never going to tell you what your child should do in October, and the difficulty of pinning one down is a reasonable warning about how much weight to put on any figure you are quoted, including a confident one.

Your child is not applying to thousands of colleges. They are applying to a specific list, and that list is short enough to check by hand in an afternoon.

Princeton is test optional this year and required the next

Princeton does not require a score from students applying now, for autumn 2027 entry. It requires one from students entering in autumn 2028.

Two siblings two years apart, same house, same school, same shortlist, get different answers. The school is not the unit. The school and the entry year together are the unit.

What to actually do this month

Take your child's list. For each school, open that school's own admissions page and find the policy for the year your child would enrol. Not this year's policy, theirs.

If the page does not name an entry year, write and ask. It is an easy detail to lose when a policy gets summarised, and it is the one that decides whether your child spends a summer preparing.

If the list is not written down yet, that is the better hour to spend first.

One thing worth knowing about tools like ours: we ask a student whether they have scores, and we do not yet record which schools require them. So a result from us, or from anything similar, is not a substitute for the ten minutes above.