Blog · California · October 2, 2026
The Bay Area applies January 5. Los Angeles applies January 15.
Twenty-five California private high schools have applications due on Tuesday, January 5, 2027. Twenty-four of them are in the Bay Area.
Twenty-seven more are due on Friday, January 15. Sixteen of those are in Los Angeles.
Ten days apart, and the map does the sorting.
The January 5 group is who you would expect up north: Menlo, Harker, Nueva, Lick-Wilmerding, Castilleja, College Prep, Urban, San Francisco University High, Bishop O'Dowd, Crystal Springs Uplands, Drew, Carondelet, Woodside Priory and eleven more. One school outside the region shares the date, Academy of Our Lady of Peace in San Diego.
The January 15 group is mostly Los Angeles: Harvard-Westlake, Loyola, Marymount, Immaculate Heart, Louisville, La Salle College Prep, Flintridge Sacred Heart and St. Monica. Three more sit on the Central Coast — Thacher, Cate and Ojai Valley.
Why this matters for one family: if your list crosses regions, you are not working to one deadline. You are working to two, and the first one falls the week school comes back from winter break.
That is the trap. January 5 is a Tuesday. Many schools are barely back from winter break. A deadline in the first week back is really a deadline in December, because the week before it is Christmas.
A few more dates sit in between. Fourteen schools are due December 11. Thirteen are due February 1. Nine are due January 8, and nine more December 1.
So the honest shape of the season is this: it starts in early December, peaks twice in January, and is mostly finished by the first of February.
What we would do in October. Write down the single earliest deadline on your list and work backwards from it. If that date is January 5, your real working deadline is mid-December, before the holidays swallow two weeks. Teacher recommendations and transcript requests are the parts that depend on other people, so they go first.
Our California tracker has the dates for 265 private schools. Every one comes from the school's own admissions page, with a link to where the school states it, and we re-check them monthly through the season.
Choose the schools you are considering and it lays them out as one timeline, so you can see which deadline actually comes first. Free, no sign-up, at highschoolreach.com/california.