Can You Start Medical School in February?

Four universities out of 155. That is the honest scale of it, and it is the first thing to absorb: a February start is a genuine option at a small number of named places, not a general feature of European medical education.

If your plan depends on starting sooner than next September, your shortlist is these four, and it is short enough that you should contact all of them.

This is the most usable of the four, because the university publishes exactly when each category of applicant must apply. For the February 2027 intake, applications open 1 September 2026 and close:

Read that table twice, because it inverts the usual assumption. The applicants who need the most processing time get the earliest deadline, not the latest. A Canadian or American falls into one of the two later categories depending on how Latvia classifies them, and the difference between 1 December and 1 October is two months of your life.

The September 2026 intake runs on the same principle with different dates: applications opened 1 March 2026, closing 1 July for EU and visa-free, 1 May for other non-EU, and 1 April for additional-assessment countries.

Our record notes the mechanism plainly: two intakes, and your citizenship category changes the deadline. That is a rule worth checking for your own passport before you plan around any published date.

European University Cyprus publishes applications open for both an October 2026 and a February 2027 intake, across medicine, dentistry and pharmacy — the widest subject coverage of the four. Its closing arrangement is different in kind: no universal closing date, with files reviewed while places remain.

That cuts both ways and it is worth being clear about. It means there is no cliff-edge date you can miss. It also means the places can be gone before any date you had in mind, and applying late in a rolling process is competing for what is left rather than for the whole class.

Practically, rolling admission rewards being early far more than a fixed deadline does. If February 2027 is your target, the useful action is to apply as soon as the file is complete rather than to work back from a deadline that does not exist.

Cyprus also has a second attraction for this audience — the whole degree is in English and the country is an English-using jurisdiction — and a real cost: European University Cyprus confirmed €23,000 a year for medicine and dentistry in the August 2026 audit, and the University of Nicosia €24,000 for its six-year MD and €25,000 for graduate entry. Those are among the highest confirmed non-UK fees in the catalog. Country detail is in studying medicine in Malta and Cyprus.

The Medical University of Silesia publishes the most precise second-intake calendar of any program in the catalog, and it is worth reproducing because the naming confuses people.

"Winter" and "summer" here name the semester you would start in, not the season you apply in. The winter semester begins in the autumn; the summer semester begins early in the calendar year. So the second window — registering between October and December 2026 — is the one that gets you started in early 2027.

Note the assessment dates run *inside* the registration windows rather than after them, so applying at the end of a window may leave very little runway before you are tested. Silesia is also one of the programs that assesses remotely, with a remote oral subject examination where an applicant does not hold an accepted examination — see entrance exams you can sit from home.

Jan Kochanowski University of Kielce records a spring 2026 intake run through the university's own registration portal calendar, with the final date set in that schedule rather than published as a fixed date. That is a case where you have to read the live portal rather than any summary, including this one.

Before treating a second intake as a free six months, three things are worth weighing.

You may join a smaller cohort. A February intake is usually the smaller of the two, which affects everything from teaching-group size to how many people are on the same timetable as you.

Your visa timeline compresses. The gap between an offer and a February start is often shorter than the September equivalent, while apostilles, translations and a national study visa take the same number of weeks regardless. Applicants who plan a February start on the assumption that the paperwork scales down are the ones who miss it. See student visas and the document set.

Your graduation date moves, and so does everything after it. A February start on a six-year degree graduates mid-year, which can sit awkwardly against residency application cycles that are built around a summer finish. If your plan is to return to North America, check that against the dates in the residency match data.

And the honest alternative: for most people, missing September means applying to the next cycle, and the next cycle opens sooner than they think. Plenty of programs are still open right now, and the UK reopens for the following year within weeks of closing. That is what is already closed and what is not.