Answers to common questions about researching, comparing and planning your NYC public-school search, and how Public School Match fits into the process.
About Public School Match
What is Public School Match?
Public School Match is a free research and planning tool for NYC public-school families, covering 2-K through high school in all five boroughs. It brings school, admissions, academic, demographic, survey, program and spending data into one profile per school. Fill out one child profile and every school from kindergarten up is automatically scored and ranked against your family's priorities, each with a deliberately conservative admissions outlook, so you can see fit and admissions difficulty next to the underlying data.
You do not have to build the comparison yourself. One profile scores every school from kindergarten up at once, instead of leaving you to narrow a thousand schools by hand.
Which schools does Public School Match cover?
What information does Public School Match show for each school?
Where does Public School Match get its school data?
How current is the data?
Does Public School Match use AI?
Matching and admissions
How does the automatic ranking work?
What does the Match score mean?
What is the difference between Match and Admissions outlook?
How does Public School Match estimate admissions chances?
Does Public School Match use my child's lottery number?
How Public School Match compares
How is Public School Match different from MySchools?
Which NYC school website should I use?
Why doesn't Public School Match give every school a rating?
Does Public School Match accept payment from schools?
Using Public School Match
Do I need an account to research schools?
What does Premium include?
Can I compare NYC schools side by side?
Can I save schools and keep notes?
Can two parents work on the same search?
Does Public School Match include tours and open houses?
Can I apply to NYC public schools through Public School Match?
Is Public School Match affiliated with NYC Public Schools?
Is Public School Match available in other languages?
Public School Match is an independent service and is not operated by, endorsed by, or affiliated with NYC Public Schools or the New York City Department of Education.
Public School Match covers NYC district and charter schools in all five boroughs, plus 2-K, 3-K and Pre-K sites.
School profiles differ by school type because the underlying public data differs. District schools carry the fullest set, including admissions tables and school finances. Charter schools carry academics, community and survey data but no DOE admissions table or DOE budget, because charters run their own lotteries and are funded differently. Early-childhood sites carry program features, language supports, transit and hours rather than test-based metrics, since those metrics do not exist for that age group. Hunter College Campus Schools and the specialized high schools carry their own admissions data.
You can browse every profile without an account.
Every school profile covers the same ground in the same order, so schools can be read against each other rather than one tab at a time. Availability varies by school type and grade level.
Academics and outcomes
state ELA and math proficiency with citywide percentiles, average class size for general education and ICT settings, accelerated coursework, graduation rate, college enrollment, college and career readiness, where graduates go after high school, Regents pass rates by individual subject, SAT and ACT averages, Advanced Placement and arts course lists, electives, clubs and activities, and PSAL sports teams.
Community and climate
enrollment, attendance and chronic absenteeism, suspension rate, race and ethnicity, gender, Economic Need Index, free and reduced-price lunch, English learners, students with IEPs, teacher experience and out-of-certification rates, students per teacher, and the DOE quality ratings.
School survey
the NYC School Survey broken out topic by topic, with each topic compared against the citywide figure and each of its individual questions listed with its own favorable response rate, not just a single summary score.
Admissions
admissions method and program codes, general education and students-with-disabilities tracks shown separately with each track's seats and applicants from the most recent published cycle, the full priority ladder showing how deep offers went, eligibility requirements, waitlist movement, and any set-aside for students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Specialized high schools show SHSAT seats, applicants, cutoff scores and Discovery ranges by year.
Finances
all-in per-school and per-student spending from New York State, plus the DOE school-managed budget broken into leadership, teaching, support staff, programs and supplies, with citywide percentiles. Spending is not a measure of quality and is labeled as such.
Location, schedule and school life
address, grade range, start and dismissal times, shared building status, uniform policy, accessibility, transit lines, routed door-to-door commute time from your home, the school's attendance zone drawn on the map where one exists, and lunch, afterschool and parent association details.
Two signals on the profile are AI estimates rather than published figures, and both say so where they appear. See "Does Public School Match use AI?" below.
Where a figure is missing it is shown as a dash. Some sections explain the gap in words, for example where a school type has no DOE admissions table or no published budget, but most blanks are not individually explained.
Public School Match combines several public sources rather than relying on one school database.
NYC Public Schools School Quality data and the School Quality Snapshot
MySchools admissions data
NYC School Survey
NYC Open Data and the DOE School Information Report (LCGMS)
NYC DOE Galaxy school budget summaries
New York State Education Department report cards and expenditures-per-pupil data
Hunter College Campus Schools
Published MTA schedules and OpenStreetMap data for commute calculations
Each profile lists the specific sources cited on that page. Our Methodology page explains the matching and admissions models in detail.
Most datasets update when new annual figures are published by NYC Public Schools, MySchools, NYC Open Data or New York State, so different figures on the same profile can come from different years. Admissions tables name the cycle they cover and the specialized high-school tables are broken out by year, but not every figure on a profile is labeled with its own year.
Time-sensitive information such as deadlines, seat counts for the current cycle and program availability should always be confirmed on MySchools or with the school before you act on it.
Yes, in a small number of specific places, and each one is disclosed where it appears. District and charter school profiles open with a plain-language summary generated by AI from that school's underlying published data. Two quality signals are AI estimates because no published value exists for them: an overall faculty rating, and a per-program estimate of academic pace. Early-childhood sites do not have an AI summary.
The rest of a profile comes from the published sources listed on that page, with two narrow exceptions: whether a school is single-sex is sometimes derived by a language model from published program text, and the short per-program notes are model-written and are shown in English only.
Premium adds Parent Coordinator, an assistant grounded in the same school data, events and deadlines shown on the site plus your child's profile and saved list.
Fill out one child profile with their grade, your address and what matters to your family, and every school from kindergarten up is scored against those priorities at once. You get a ranked list of the full set rather than a search box and a thousand schools to narrow down yourself.
Factors can include academics, school community, programs, school size, commute, admissions preferences, special education support and bilingual programs. Change your priorities and the ranking changes, without anything about the schools changing.
The underlying school data stays visible regardless of where a school lands in your ranking.
A Match result answers one question: how well does this school line up with the priorities this family selected for this child?
It is not a judgment of whether a school is good or bad. A school can be a strong Match for one child and a weak Match for their classmate down the block.
They answer two different questions. Match asks whether a school fits what your family is looking for. Admissions outlook asks how realistic admission might be for your child.
A school can be an excellent Match and a difficult admission. Another can have a favorable outlook and be a weaker fit. Keeping them separate helps families tell "do we want this school?" apart from "how hard is it to get in?"
Match appears on every school in your ranked list. An outlook appears wherever the published admissions data supports one, so you are rarely looking at chances without fit.
Public School Match uses published admissions data, identifies the highest priority group your child appears to qualify for, and reads that against the applicants and offers recorded at each priority group in the most recent published cycle. The estimate is deliberately conservative.
It sits on the same page as the rest of the school's data rather than inside an application flow. Where we do not have enough information to say anything useful, we say that instead of showing a number, and that happens often: early-childhood sites, District 75 schools and the specialized high schools are not modeled, and many schools have no published demand data for us to read.
Charter schools work differently. Each charter runs its own lottery outside the DOE system and your MySchools lottery number does not apply, so we do not estimate admissions chances for charter schools.
Admissions outcomes change year to year. Treat an outlook as planning information, not a prediction.
Families can optionally provide their MySchools lottery number to sharpen certain estimates where it applies. It is optional, and our Methodology and Privacy Policy explain how sensitive information is handled.
MySchools is the official NYC Public Schools system for browsing schools, submitting applications, receiving offers and managing waitlists. Public School Match is built for the research that comes before the application: scoring and ranking every school for your child, comparing schools side by side, understanding admissions, checking commute times, and organizing your search. When it is time to apply, you still submit through MySchools.
Most families use more than one, because they do different jobs.
Use MySchools to submit your official application, receive offers and manage waitlists. It is the only place any of that happens, and it is the authority on current-cycle admissions rules.
Use InsideSchools for independent school visits and editorial judgment. Their reviewers sit in on classes and interview principals and teachers, and they publish some city data we do not, including Quality Review ratings and guidance counselor ratios.
Use Niche and GreatSchools for national context and user reviews. Both assign schools a single overall grade or rating built from nationally comparable inputs.
Use Public School Match for the research and planning in between: every school from kindergarten up automatically scored and ranked for your child, an admissions outlook wherever the published data supports one, comparison on the same NYC fields, commute times from your door, and your list, notes and tours in one place.
Feature
Public School Match
MySchools
InsideSchools
Niche
GreatSchools
Built only for NYC schools
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
No
Submit applications, offers, waitlists
No
Yes
No
No
No
Automatic scoring and ranking for one child
Yes
No
No
No
No
Admissions outlook on every school
Partial
Partial
No
No
No
A single rating requires someone else to decide what "good" means, and national rating systems use standardized inputs that may not reflect the factors NYC families care about most. We wrote about one clear example in Why national school rankings mislead NYC families.
Some families prioritize academic performance. Others care more about school culture, commute, arts, language programs, special education support or school size. Rather than compress a school into one number, Public School Match shows the underlying data and ranks schools for your child specifically.
No. Schools cannot pay for a better Match result, a higher position in your ranking, better placement or different treatment, and no school has any commercial relationship with us. Rankings come from the priorities a family selects and the published data available for that school.
No. Every school profile, filter, sort, table, map view and guide is open without an account.
Creating a free account and a child profile adds the automatic scoring and ranking, admissions outlook, commute times, ranked lists and notes. That is free too, and stays free.
Premium is $5 a month or $20 a year and adds AI assistance, richer notes, and the ability to connect your own AI assistant to your school data. See our Plans page for full details.
Everything else stays free whether or not you subscribe.
Yes. You can compare schools across the same academic, admissions, program, climate and logistics fields in card, table or map view, and sort the whole list by any of them, including commute time from your home. With a child profile, your priorities decide which columns appear first.
Yes. You can build ranked target lists, reorder them as your thinking changes, and keep private notes on every school, searchable in one place. Premium adds photos, files and transcribed voice memos to those notes.
Yes. You can share a child's school search with a co-parent or caregiver you invite, so you both see the same schools, notes and matches, and you choose whether they can edit.
Yes. Public School Match maintains a searchable calendar of NYC tours, open houses and information sessions. You can save the ones you want and subscribe once to see them in your own calendar app.
No. Official applications to NYC Public Schools are submitted through MySchools. Public School Match handles the research and planning that comes first.
No. Public School Match is an independent service and is not operated by, endorsed by, or affiliated with NYC Public Schools or the New York City Department of Education. It uses publicly available government data, and every profile lists the sources its data comes from.
Yes. The site is available in English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Haitian Creole and French.
NYC admissions priority and demand data
Yes
Yes
Partial
No
No
Full NYC School Survey, question by question
Yes
No
Partial
No
No
School-level spending and budget detail
Yes
No
No
Partial
No
Door-to-door commute from your address
Yes
Partial
No
No
No
Independent school visits and reviews
No
No
Yes
No
No
User reviews
No
No
Partial
Yes
Yes
Single overall school rating or ranking
No
No
Partial
Yes
Yes
Yes means a core, documented feature. Partial means the site does some version of this at narrower scope or coverage. No means it is not a feature of that site.
Last reviewed Sep 20, 2026. These sites change their features and methodologies regularly, so confirm anything that matters to your decision on the site itself.