If you have an SAT score and you're applying to a college that reports ACT middle-50% ranges, or vice versa, you need a concordance table — and specifically, you need the 2018 College Board and ACT joint concordance, which is the one every US admissions office has used since the 2016 SAT redesign settled. The table doesn't do what it looks like. It doesn't "convert" a score point-for-point. What it does is anchor your test to a percentile rank and return the other test's score at the same percentile. A 1450 SAT and a 33 ACT sit near the same 97th percentile; that's what makes them concordant. They're not algebraically equal, and an admissions office reading them side by side will read them as comparable, not identical. This guide walks through what the table actually does, how to use it without over-interpreting the output, and where the calculator on this site fits into the process.
Concordance is not conversion
A conversion is arithmetic: miles to kilometres, Fahrenheit to Celsius — you plug in a number, apply a formula, and the output is equivalent in a strong sense. Concordance isn't that. A concordance table says: "among students who took both tests, a 1450 SAT fell at roughly the same percentile as a 33 ACT, based on the year we built the table." That percentile relationship is empirical, built by analyzing score distributions of students who took both exams in the same testing year. It isn't algebra; it's statistics.
Two practical consequences follow. First, small score differences don't mean what they look like — a 1450 SAT and a 1460 SAT probably map to the same ACT, because the percentile difference between them is tiny. Second, the table has real uncertainty — students at the same percentile vary on either test, and the concordance entry is the median of that variation, not a guarantee. Treat the output as "roughly equivalent for admissions purposes," because that's exactly what it is.
The 2018 table and why it replaced the old one
The 2018 concordance replaced a previous joint table built on the old pre-2016 SAT, which was scored on a 2400-point scale across three sections. The 2016 SAT redesign collapsed to two sections and a 1600-point total, with different question types and a different score distribution. The old table couldn't be used directly because the new SAT's score points didn't mean the same thing as the old SAT's, so the College Board and ACT analyzed a cohort of students who took both the redesigned SAT and the ACT and built a fresh percentile crosswalk.
That 2018 table is still the official reference today, and every college and admissions office uses it. The calculators on this site use the 2018 table directly. If you see an older conversion tool on another site that maps, say, 2100 (old SAT) to 30 (ACT), the math is out of date — the old and new SATs are not on the same scale, and a concordance of one to the other has to flow through the 2018 table in two steps rather than being read directly.
Worked examples and percentile anchoring
Three concrete equivalences to anchor the intuition. A 1500 SAT sits near the 99th percentile and concordances to a 34 ACT, which also sits near the 99th percentile. A 1400 SAT is roughly the 94th percentile, concordant with a 31 ACT. A 1300 SAT is roughly the 87th percentile, concordant with a 27 ACT.
The mapping isn't linear. The gap between a 1400 and a 1500 SAT is 100 points, but the gap between the corresponding 31 and 34 ACT is three points. The reason is that both tests have non-uniform score distributions — getting from the 94th to the 99th percentile takes a lot more performance gain than getting from the 50th to the 55th — so the score-point distance at the top of the scale looks much bigger than the percentile distance would suggest. This is why concordance calculators that do linear interpolation between table entries are close to right for mid-range scores and noticeably off at the top and bottom.
Superscoring and concordance
Most selective colleges superscore — they take the highest section scores across multiple test dates and combine them into a single composite used for admissions. Concordance tables still work, but the input is the superscored composite, not any single sitting. A student whose raw sittings were 1420 and 1440 but whose superscored composite is 1470 uses 1470 in the concordance lookup, which concordances to a 33 ACT rather than a 32.
The calculator on this site accepts a total score and returns the corresponding composite; whether you feed it a single-sitting score or a superscore is up to you. For admissions purposes, the superscore is almost always the right input — admissions offices are going to superscore the number they read in context, so feeding the tool your superscored total gives you the number they'll actually use.
Test-optional era and what it changed
The pandemic pushed most selective US universities to test-optional or test-blind policies for the 2020 through 2024 application cycles. Some have restored score requirements (MIT, Georgetown, several others). Many remain test-optional. A handful went test-blind. For applications to test-optional schools, concordance is relevant only if you choose to submit scores, in which case the same table applies. If you aren't submitting scores at all, the concordance calculation is purely informational. For students trying to decide which test to send, it often comes down to which test's percentile is higher — and that's exactly what concordance is designed to tell you.
AP exams are not on this table
One common mistake: the AP exam score is on a 1–5 scale and is not part of the SAT-ACT concordance. A 5 on AP Calculus doesn't concordance to an SAT Math subscore or a 33 ACT. AP exam scoring is a separate weighted composite run through an annual equating step, and its meaning is "extremely well qualified" through "no recommendation" rather than a percentile-anchored position. If you need AP score math, use the AP score predictor and the blog post on AP scoring; if you need SAT-ACT, use the converters on this page.
Calculators and further reading
The SAT-to-ACT and ACT-to-SAT converters on this site run the 2018 concordance table directly. The SAT-ACT concordance blog post walks through the methodology in more depth. For admissions context on how these numbers fit into the rest of the application, the acceptance-probability calculator gives a numerical baseline, and the college GPA requirements post covers the non-test side of the admissions math.