GCSE Physics 2026: Papers, Tiers and Grades

GCSE Physics is a separate science GCSE, graded 9 to 1, taken by students who study the three sciences individually rather than Combined Science. AQA (8463), Pearson Edexcel (1PH0) and OCR (J249 and J259) each assess it with two written papers; WJEC Eduqas instead sets one paper of 2 hours 15 minutes worth 75% and one of 1 hour 15 minutes worth 25%. Every board tiers the exam.

Almost everything written about this subject online is either a revision-notes site or a tutor directory. Neither tells a parent what their child is actually entered for. This page does: the qualification, the papers, the tier ceiling, the practical requirement and the marks each grade took in the last published series, taken from the exam boards' own specifications and the June 2025 boundary tables. Where a figure is quoted, the document it comes from is named.

Is your child taking GCSE Physics or Combined Science?

This is the first thing to establish, because the two qualifications are assessed differently and reported differently, and a great deal of generic revision advice quietly assumes the wrong one.

Separate GCSE Physics on the AQA 8463 specification is assessed by two papers. Paper 1 covers energy, electricity, particle model of matter and atomic structure; Paper 2 covers forces, waves, magnetism and electromagnetism, and space physics. Each is a written exam of 1 hour 45 minutes, carries 100 marks and is worth 50% of the GCSE. AQA describes the award plainly: the qualification “will be graded on a nine-point scale: 1–9 – where 9 is the best grade”. A Foundation tier candidate is awarded within the range 1 to 5; a Higher tier candidate within 4 to 9, with an allowed grade 3 for a student who just misses grade 4.

Combined Science: Trilogy is a different animal. AQA's 8464 specification states that “There are six papers: two biology, two chemistry and two physics”, each a written exam of 1 hour 15 minutes carrying 70 marks and worth 16.7% of the GCSE, for a total scaled mark of 420. It is reported as a double award: “The qualification will be graded on a 17-point scale: 1–1 to 9–9 – where 9–9 is the best grade.” Foundation tier candidates are awarded from 1–1 to 5–5, Higher tier candidates from 4–4 to 9–9, with an allowed grade 4–3 just below.

That is the practical answer to a question parents ask constantly: Combined Science counts as two GCSEs and produces two grades, which are always adjacent or identical. Separate Physics counts as one, alongside separate Biology and separate Chemistry. The physics content is also not the same. Space physics appears in the separate specification and not in Trilogy, and AQA sets 10 required practicals for Physics against 21 across the whole of Combined Science.

Which route to take is a decision made in Year 9, and it is not primarily a physics question — it turns on timetable, option blocks and how a school groups its sets. We do not re-argue it here: our guide to triple versus double science at GCSE covers that choice in full. What matters on this page is that once the route is fixed, the exam in front of your child is fixed with it.

Do students still have to memorise the physics equations?

No — and this is the single most out-of-date claim in circulation about GCSE Physics. Revision guides, tutor listings and a good deal of school advice still describe equation recall as the defining difficulty of the subject. For the 2026 exams it is not.

AQA's specification does still list the equations. Appendix A opens: “In solving quantitative problems, students should be able to recall and apply the following equations, using standard SI units”, and 23 numbered equations follow, of which 8 are marked as Higher Tier only. That appendix has not changed. What changed is what happens in the exam hall.

AQA confirms that students taking exams in 2025, 2026 and 2027 “will not need to memorise…the physics equations”, and that the 2026 Physics Equations Sheet “will continue to be provided as an insert” with “the Physics (8463) papers 1 and 2, Combined Science: Trilogy (8464) physics papers 1 and 2 and all four Combined Science: Synergy (8465) question papers”. Pearson Edexcel had already taken a softer line in its own specification, whose Appendix 2 notes that the recall equations “may sometimes be given in the exam papers”.

This is no longer a temporary pandemic measure. Ofqual's published decision is to “continue the requirement for exam boards to provide students with support materials that set out the relevant formulae and equations for exams from 2028 onwards for the lifetime of the current specifications”. The consultation was not close: “The vast majority of respondents, 93%, supported the proposal.”

The consequence for revision is concrete. Hours spent drilling equations from flashcards are hours spent on the one part of the question that is now printed on the desk. The marks are in deciding which of the equations on the sheet applies, rearranging it correctly, converting units before substituting, and carrying the answer to a sensible number of significant figures. A student who can recite every formula and still cannot choose between them under time pressure will not gain from the sheet at all.

Which papers will your child sit, board by board?

The specifications available in England are not interchangeable. Paper length, total marks and even the number of components differ, and the differences are large enough to change how a revision timetable should be built.

Three of those rows deserve comment, because they are where an assumption carried over from another board causes real damage.

Eduqas is structurally unlike the rest. Its summary of assessment sets Component 1, Concepts in Physics, as a written examination of 2 hours 15 minutes worth 75% of the qualification and 120 marks, and Component 2, Applications in Physics, at 1 hour 15 minutes, 25% and 60 marks. Component 2 includes a section built on a resource booklet containing an unseen article. A student rehearsing for two equal 1 hour 45 minute papers has prepared for the wrong shape of exam entirely.

OCR issues separate component codes for each tier. On Gateway Physics A, learners are entered “for either Foundation Tier (Paper 1 and Paper 2) or Higher Tier (Paper 3 and Paper 4)” — codes J249/01 and J249/02 against J249/03 and J249/04, each 90 marks over 1 hour 45 minutes and worth 50%. Twenty First Century Physics B works the same way, with Breadth in physics and Depth in physics at J259/01 and J259/02 for Foundation and J259/03 and J259/04 for Higher. Downloading the wrong tier's past paper is an easy and common mistake.

Edexcel publishes the overlap explicitly. Its assessment information states that each 1PH0 paper “consists of ten questions”, that the Foundation paper targets grades 1–5 and the Higher paper grades 4–9, and that “27 marks of the paper will be overlap questions that appear in both the foundation and higher tier papers”. For a borderline candidate that is 54 marks across the two papers on which both tiers are judged identically — the clearest evidence available of where a tier decision actually bites.

What did each grade actually take in marks in June 2025?

Grade boundaries are set after each series, so last year's figures are an indication and not a promise. They are still far more useful than the vague percentages that circulate online, and AQA publishes them in full. The table below is the AQA subject grade boundary set for GCSE Physics 8463 from the June 2025 exams, out of a maximum of 200 marks.

Read down the grade 4 column and the tier decision stops being abstract. On Higher tier a grade 4 took 70 of 200 marks, which is 35% of the paper. On Foundation tier the same grade 4 took 131 of 200, which is 66%. A Foundation entry is not the safe option it is often assumed to be; it is a different bargain, in which the ceiling drops to grade 5 and the pass threshold nearly doubles as a proportion of the paper.

The comparison with Combined Science is equally instructive, and it is the closest thing to an answer for the endlessly asked question of whether Combined Science is easier. In the same June 2025 series, Higher tier Combined Science: Trilogy needed 228 of 420 marks for a 7–7, or 54%, against 126 of 200 for a single grade 7 in separate Physics, or 63%. That does not make Trilogy easier in any meaningful sense — the papers, cohorts and content differ, and boundaries are set to hold the standard, not to rank the qualifications. What it does show is that a student's chance of a strong grade depends on which paper they sit as much as on how much physics they know.

One caution worth stating plainly. These are subject boundaries on the full qualification, not component boundaries, and they move every year with the difficulty of the paper. Use them to size the gap between a mock mark and a target grade, not as a figure to revise towards. Each summer's confirmed boundaries are published by the board on results day.

When are the 2026 GCSE Physics exams and results?

The Joint Council for Qualifications publishes the dates common to every awarding body. For the June 2026 series it lists 07/05/2026 as the “Date of first examination on common timetable” for GCSE and 17/06/2026 as the “Date of final examination on common timetable”. A contingency day is held on 24/06/2026 “in the event of national or significant local disruption to examinations in the United Kingdom”, and students are expected to remain available until it has passed.

Results follow in August. JCQ records 19/08/2026 as the “Restricted release of results to centres only” and 20/08/2026 as the “Release of results to candidates” for GCSE. The individual physics paper dates sit inside that window and are published on each board's own timetable, so a family planning around a specific paper should take the date from AQA, Pearson, OCR or WJEC rather than from a general calendar.

Two planning points follow from those dates. A student starting in September of Year 11 has roughly two full terms before the first paper, which is enough to rebuild one or two weak topics properly but not enough to cover a two-year specification from scratch. And sixth-form places conditional on science grades are confirmed against results issued on 20 August, so any appeal or review of marking runs after offers have already been made. Families weighing a science A-level for 2026 entry should plan on that sequence rather than hope to renegotiate afterwards.

How much of the exam comes from the practical work?

There is no separate practical exam at GCSE on any of these specifications, and no coursework. The practicals are assessed inside the written papers, and the weighting is substantial.

AQA is explicit: questions in the written exams draw on the knowledge gained from the required practical activities, and “These questions will count for at least 15% of the overall marks for the qualification.” The separate Physics specification sets ten of them — the document notes that “A rich practical experience will include more than the ten required practical activities” — while Combined Science: Trilogy covers 21 across the three sciences.

OCR reaches the same weighting by a different route. Gateway Physics A requires that “learners complete at least eight practical activities”, organised into eight Practical Activity Groups, and Topic P9 exists to give learners “the necessary skills to undertake the 15% practical content in the examinations”. The flexibility is in which activity a school chooses; the apparatus and techniques that must be experienced are fixed.

Pearson Edexcel sets a fixed list and an administrative deadline that catches centres out. Students “must carry out all eight of the mandatory core practicals”, must keep a written record of them, and the head of centre declaration confirming this “must be submitted to Pearson by 15th April in the year that the students will sit their examinations”. Eduqas embeds practical work in the papers themselves: its Component 2 contains a section of 45 marks “all set in a practical context”.

What this means in a lesson is narrower than it sounds. Examiners rarely ask a student to describe an entire method. They ask which variable was controlled, why a particular measurement was repeated, what the largest source of error was, or how a graph of the results should be interpreted. Those are answerable only by a student who has done the practical and thought about it afterwards, which is why our tutors work through the specific investigation a school is teaching that term rather than a generic list.

The mark scheme reinforces the same point, and it is identical on every board. AQA states that assessment objectives “are set by Ofqual and are the same across all GCSE Physics specifications and all exam boards”, weighted at approximately 40% for AO1 knowledge and understanding, 40% for AO2 application and 20% for AO3 analysis and evaluation. Only two marks in five are available for recall. The rest are for using physics on something a student has not seen before — which is also the reason a strong grade in GCSE Maths tracks so closely with a strong grade in physics, and why students continuing to A-Level Physics find the mathematical step up sharper than the conceptual one.

If you would rather start from the tutoring side than the specification side, our physics tutor page sets out how lessons are matched and what they cost, and our GCSE tuition hub covers every subject we support at this level.

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