UCLA Quarter System: A Practical Guide to the 2025-2026 Academic Calendar
UCLA runs on quarters, not semesters. That single fact breaks more students every year than any difficult professor or heavy reading load. If you are coming from a semester-based system, this needs to sink in before you do anything else. A quarter is roughly 10 weeks of instruction followed by finals week. The fall quarter runs from late September through early December. Winter starts in early January and ends mid-March. Spring begins in mid-April and wraps up by early June. Summer is optional and split into sessions. The official calendar lives at ucla.edu/calendar. It gets updated annually, usually in the spring. For 2025-2026, here are the key anchor dates you need to know. Fall Quarter 2025: Classes begin approximately September 29. Add/drop deadline for full refund is around October 10. Last day to add is October 17. Thanksgiving break falls October 9-13. Finals week runs December 8-12. Winter break begins December 13.
Winter Quarter 2026: Classes begin January 5. Add/drop for refund is January 16. Last day to add is January 23. Martin Luther King Jr. Day is January 19. Finals run March 9-13. Spring break begins March 14. Spring Quarter 2026: Classes begin April 1. Add/drop for refund is April 10. Last day to add is April 17. Memorial Day is May 25. Finals run June 8-12. Summer sessions begin shortly after. These dates shift slightly year to year. Always confirm with the Registrar's office once the final calendar drops.
What people get wrong about planning around these dates is not the dates themselves. It is the invisible deadlines hiding between them. Every quarter has a withdrawal deadline, usually around the 7th week of instruction. If you miss that window, you cannot drop a class without a medical or personal emergency petition. I learned this the hard way during my third year when I was juggling three STEM courses with heavy lab components and pulled an all-nighter before the withdrawal form went to my advisor's inbox. The form sat in her queue for four days because she was at a conference. By the time she saw it, I was two days past the deadline. The workaround was filing an incomplete grade petition with my department instead, which required a documented reason and professor approval. It worked, but it took three weeks and I finished that course six weeks later instead of on schedule. Another invisible trap is the unit enrollment limit. Freshmen are typically capped at 16 units per quarter. Upper-division students can go higher with advisor consent. The cap is not negotiable through the normal add/drop process. If you hit it, you need a formal overload petition signed by both your advisor and the department chair. Do this before the last day to add, not after. I watched a classmate get stuck in an intro course he needed to graduate because he waited until the add deadline passed to request an overload. He had to wait an entire quarter to retake it. Here is a counter-intuitive thing about UCLA quarters that nobody warns you about. The pace is brutal in the first two weeks, then it flattens out slightly, then it gets brutal again right before finals. Your actual study load is not evenly distributed. Most professors do not assign major work until the third or fourth week. This means you can coast through week one and two if you are behind, but you will catch up fast. Use that runway. Do not try to be perfect in the first sprint. Identify the courses that will demand the most time by week five, and protect that time slot early.
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The registration window itself is another minefield. UCLA uses a lottery system called RAOP. Your priority date is set by earned units, not GPA. Transfer students often think their advanced standing gives them a better slot. It does not. A senior with 90 units gets the same priority as a junior with 90 units. The system does not distinguish by class level. It only looks at units completed. This catches a lot of people off guard. If you are a transfer student and you need a specific sequence of courses, enroll in everything else you can first. Lock in the hard-to-get courses before they fill. They fill in the first hour, sometimes the first twenty minutes. Grading at UCLA is pass/not pass by default for many general education requirements, but your major courses are almost always letter graded. If you are unsure whether a class counts toward a major requirement or just breadth, check the Departmental Bulletin for that specific major. The Bulletin is updated annually and lists every course that satisfies each requirement. The general catalog is too broad. I have seen students waste a whole quarter taking a course they thought fulfilled a requirement when it actually counted as an elective. The fix was enrolling in a different section that the Bulletin explicitly approved. If you want the official document, go to the UCLA Registrar's page under Academic Calendars. Search for "2025-2026 Academic Year Calendar." The PDF is usually posted by late August. Some departments publish their own micro-calendars with department-specific deadlines. Those matter more than the university-wide dates for course registration, thesis submission, and graduation clearance. Check with your department once you declare.
Summer sessions are not a breather. UCLA runs four summer sessions of varying lengths. Session A is the full term, roughly six weeks. Sessions B through E are shorter blocks. If you are trying to recover lost units or get ahead, pick Session A or B. The compressed format means you meet three days a week for three hours each. It is intense but you finish faster. I took a required physics course in Session A and covered two semesters' worth of material in six weeks. It was the most efficient quarter I ever attended, but I did not socialize for those six weeks. That is the trade-off. One more thing about planning around deadlines. The hold system. Holds block registration, transcripts, and enrollment verification. Financial holds, health center holds, parking holds, library holds. You can clear most of these online through MyUCLA, but some require in-person visits. I had a $40 parking fine from two years ago that I forgot about show up as a hold right before my winter registration opened. I spent two hours on the phone and had to visit the parking office in person to clear it. Set a reminder on your phone two weeks before registration opens to check for holds. It takes five minutes and saves you from panicking at 9 AM on registration day. Graduation planning is where most students fail, not because they do not know the requirements, but because they assume requirements stay the same. They do not. Course prerequisites change. General education requirements get updated. Major declarations can be retroactively changed, and sometimes your old declaration no longer applies to the current curriculum. Run your degree audit every quarter. Use DegreeEval or the equivalent tool your department provides. If it shows something unexpected, ask your academic counselor immediately. Do not wait until your final year to find out you need an extra quarter to graduate because a course you took in your second year no longer counts for your major. That happened to someone I know. She ended up paying out-of-pocket for summer classes she could have avoided if she had audited her degree two years earlier.
The bottom line is that UCLA's academic calendar is a series of tightly packed deadlines with very little margin for error. Plan around the invisible ones. Check the Departmental Bulletin, not just the general catalog. Clear your holds before registration opens. Understand that your priority date is based on units, not status. And do not trust that a requirement you met two years ago still applies today.
