Notre Dame's In-State and Out-of-State Applicants Are Admitted at Nearly the Same Rate

The University of Notre Dame's published acceptance rate for the Fall 2025 entering class was 9.38%, from 3,320 admits out of 35,401 first-time, first-year applicants. Families researching Notre Dame often assume being from Indiana carries some kind of advantage, or at least isn't a disadvantage, at a school with such a small in-state applicant pool. The Common Data Set doesn't support that assumption either way. In-state applicants were admitted at 10.58%. Out-of-state applicants were admitted at 10.6%. That's a 0.02-point difference — not an advantage for either group, essentially a rounding error. Notre Dame draws its class nationally, and geography barely moves the number.

The Decomposition

All figures are from Notre Dame's Common Data Set, Section C1 residency supplement, for the Fall 2025 entering cohort, filed by the Office of Institutional Research, Innovation, & Strategy (IRIS). The three residency rows sum exactly to the stated totals, so nothing here is estimated.

Show the math: 219 of 2,069 in-state applicants were admitted, and 219 / 2,069 = 10.58%. Out-of-state, 2,813 of 26,548 applicants were admitted, and 2,813 / 26,548 = 10.60%. Subtract the two and the gap is 10.60 − 10.58 = 0.02 percentage points, which is not a meaningfully different admit rate in either direction. International applicants tell a different story: 288 of 6,784 were admitted, and 288 / 6,784 = 4.25% — well below both domestic groups.

Why the Real Split Isn't Residency — It's the Application Round

Notre Dame does not offer Early Decision — Section C21 of its Common Data Set answers "No" in both the Fall 2025 and Fall 2024 filings — but it does run Restrictive Early Action (REA), a non-binding early round that still restricts applicants from applying early elsewhere. Here's a sourcing distinction worth being explicit about: the Common Data Set's early-action section has no numeric applicant or admit fields at all for schools like Notre Dame — it's a template limitation, not something Notre Dame is withholding. The REA figures below instead come from Notre Dame's own Enrollment Division, which publishes year-of press releases with real applicant and admit counts. That means these numbers carry a different kind of authority than a CDS filing: they're self-reported by the admissions office in real time, not filed in a standardized annual survey.

The Regular Decision row is not something Notre Dame publishes directly — it's derived by subtracting the REA press-release figures from the Common Data Set's whole-pool total for the same Fall 2025 cohort. REA applicants are admitted at roughly 12.92%, versus a derived 7.34% for Regular Decision — REA applicants were admitted at close to double the rate. The same pattern held a year earlier: REA for Fall 2024 was 11,498 applied / 1,724 admitted, or 14.99%, against a derived Regular Decision rate of 8.95% (18,444 applied / 1,650 admitted).

What Notre Dame Doesn't Publish

Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business is one of the most searched-for names attached to this school, and families frequently look for a Mendoza-specific acceptance rate. It doesn't exist in any source we could find. Notre Dame's Common Data Set reports only the percentage of degrees conferred by discipline for the graduating class — that describes the composition of students who already enrolled and finished a degree, not the odds of getting admitted as an applicant. No Notre Dame page, including Mendoza's own site, publishes an applicant or admit count broken out by college. The same is true of every other undergraduate college at Notre Dame: no by-college or by-major admit rate is published anywhere, and enrolled-class composition should not be mistaken for one.

Notre Dame also doesn't publish an exact yield or enrollment rate specific to REA admits. The Enrollment Division states only that "nearly 70 percent" of REA admits typically enroll — a general, qualitative claim, not an audited per-cohort figure, so we're not converting it into a precise number here.

What This Means for Your Application

The headline 9.38% describes the whole applicant pool, but it obscures more than it reveals for two different reasons, and they're not the reasons families usually expect. Residency isn't one of them — in-state and out-of-state applicants face essentially identical odds, so an Indiana address doesn't buy you anything at Notre Dame, and it doesn't cost you anything either. Application round is the real lever: Restrictive Early Action applicants were admitted at roughly double the rate of the derived Regular Decision pool, two years running.

If Notre Dame is a genuine first choice and you're comfortable with REA's restriction on applying early to other private schools, applying in that round appears to come with a real odds advantage based on Notre Dame's own reporting. If you're not ready to commit to that restriction, plan around the derived Regular Decision rate — closer to 7% than to the 9.38% headline — rather than assuming the blended number describes your chances.

Our application deadline tracker can help you keep Notre Dame's REA and Regular Decision deadlines lined up against the rest of your list. If you're trying to figure out how a school with this kind of round-based gap should sit among your reaches, targets, and safeties, our free college list builder is built for exactly that kind of planning. And if you want to talk through whether REA's binding-adjacent restriction makes sense for your overall strategy, a free strategy call is a low-pressure way to work through it.