Change of Mind: Free, Powerful, and Closing 1 July

The list you sent the CAO in January was written by a person who had not sat the mocks. Since then you have gained hard evidence about your grades and a spring of thinking about what you want. The Change of Mind facility exists for this moment. The window opened at the start of May, it costs nothing, and it shuts at 5pm on 1 July. Confirm the dates for this cycle on cao.ie, then put your own deadline a week earlier.

Changes the window allows

You can change almost everything: add courses, remove courses, and reorder both columns from scratch. The Level 8 list and the Level 7/6 list each hold ten choices, and both are open to a full rewrite. Nothing you entered in January binds you. The CAO treats whatever stands at the deadline as the list you meant from the start, so a January list built in a rush carries no penalty once you fix it now.

Off the table: restricted courses

Restricted courses are the exception. A course that requires a portfolio, an audition, an interview or an admissions test such as the HPAT cannot be added during Change of Mind, because those assessments ran months ago. You can still remove a restricted course, or reorder one you applied to on time. If a restricted course has started calling to you this spring, the door reopens with next year's application, and the months between now and then are portfolio time.

The deadline is a wall

5pm, Irish time, on 1 July. The portal closes whether your changes are saved or not, so finish days ahead rather than hours. The exams will swallow most of June, which makes the bank holiday weekend at the start of the month a sensible slot for the rebuild. An hour of focus covers it.

The rebuild, in three steps

Re-run your points estimate. Your mock results are the freshest signal you own, and they replace whatever guess you used in January. Enter them in the calculator to convert grades into points and see which courses sit within reach, with the safety margin shown on each one.
Re-check each course's trend. A single 2025 cut-off is one data point. The trends page puts six years side by side, so a stable course and a volatile one stop looking alike. Apply the cushion rule: an estimate 30 or more points above last year's cut-off survives a typical year-to-year rise, while anything under 30 belongs in your hope zone rather than your plan.
Re-order by genuine desire. An offer kills your chances at the courses below it on that list, and the courses above it stay live for later rounds. Putting a "safer" course first to bank an offer locks you out of the things you wanted more. Rank by want, top to bottom. Our guide to ordering walks through the common traps.

Room to widen as well as trim

Many January lists are thin, six choices on the Level 8 column and a blank Level 7/6 column. Use the window to fill both. The CAO offered 1,376 courses in 2025, the median Level 8 Round 1 cut-off sat at 377 with portfolio courses excluded, and 25 courses admitted all qualified applicants. The field is far wider than the handful of headline courses that dominate school conversations, and ten of those 1,376 deserve a slot on your form.

A note for advice season

May brings confident predictions about which courses will jump this year. The August cut-offs depend on demand and grades that do not exist yet, and anyone selling certainty is selling. Lean on last year's numbers, the six-year trend and your own cushion instead, and leave the gambling to other households.

The mocks told you something. The window lets you act on it for free. Spend the evening on the rebuild before June crowds it out, then close the laptop and study.