Application Strategy · 1 min read

When Do Medical School Interview Invites Come Out? MD, DO and MD-PhD

Interview invitations arrive over months, not weeks, and DO season runs later than MD. Here's what tracked cycles show — and why silence in October isn't a rejection.

The hardest part of a cycle is often the waiting. A published study of crowdsourced application tracking gives a clearer picture of when invitations actually arrive (Amusin, Hua & Kozhumam, J Med Internet Res 2026 (CycleTrack)).

Invitations come over months

In completed cycles, reported invitations ran roughly:

• MD: mid-July to early March
• DO: late June to late April
• MD-PhD: early August to early February

Programs start at different times

In the 2024–25 cycle, half of tracked programs had sent their first invitation by about August 1 for DO, August 14 for MD and September 4 for MD-PhD; three quarters had started by August 23, August 29 and September 23.

Read that carefully: it's when programs started inviting, not how many invitations had gone out. A program that has started keeps sending for months.

What this does and doesn't tell you

The people who report to trackers are academically stronger than the national pool, so treat these dates as context. They don't tell you what share of your chances remain, and they don't show that submitting later lowers anyone's chances. Each school runs its own timeline; your portal is the real source.

What they do show: hearing nothing from a school in October is normal, and DO programs keep inviting later into spring than MD programs.

AesculaMD shows this timing on your application calendar once you've submitted, for the degrees you applied to.