How many banking internships should you apply for? A lot
How many applications does it take for a student to get an internship at a financial services firm? A lot. Somewhere between 63 to 70. As always, however, the devil is in the details.
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A report from Trackr (formerly known as the Bristol Tracker), based on analysis of 213 summer internship applicants across 37 UK universities, showed that students sent on average around 63 to 70 applications each during the 2024 to 2025 application season. After all these applications, they each received 0.9 internship offers. That's a banking internship acceptance rate of 1.5%.
Not all finance applications or applicants were made equal, however. Trackr’s data shows that students from target and semi-target universities were much more likely to receive interview offers out of their applications – and also less likely to convert their interviews into internships than students from non-target universities.
70 applications for internship might seem scary. It’s certainly higher than last year’s average, which was between 45 and 60. The number of applications necessary to secure a banking internship seems to be rising. When we spoke to Andrew Osayemi back in 2022, he suggested that there were “about 30 firms” people should be applying to in order to get a banking or financial services job. Times have changed.
In the grand scheme of things, however, 63 to 70 applications for an internship is not terrible. There was one particularly egregious example a few years ago when a UK student told us that he had sent 750 emails before landing an internship. 63 to 70 applications for an internship is also less than the number of applications students applying for banks' graduate schemes send out. - That average was almost 200, last we checked.
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