The eligibility checker tells you which scholarships you are allowed to apply for. That is the easy half. This tool answers the harder question: how competitive is each one, and where does the funder actually publish numbers versus stay silent? Every award and application figure below was read from the funder’s own site or annual report.

Why there is no percentage chance here

You will not find “you have a 4% chance” anywhere in this tool, and that is deliberate. Selection panels read essays, weigh references, and judge fit against country quotas and a cohort they are trying to balance. No published dataset supports a personal probability, so producing one would mean inventing it. What the published ratios do tell you honestly is the scale of the field you are entering, and that is worth knowing before you spend three months on an application.

What the published numbers actually say

A handful of funders are transparent about their selection, and the numbers are sobering. Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford received 9,223 applications for its 2026 cohort and selected 87 — roughly one in 106, and only 5,144 of those applications were even eligible. Schwarzman Scholars picked 150 from just over 5,800 candidates for the Class of 2026–27, inviting about 400 to interview. Chevening received around 60,000 applications in its 2022–23 cycle and offers about 1,500 awards globally for 2025/26. Hungary’s Stipendium Hungaricum is the most winnable of the four by a wide margin: 80,000 applications in 2025 against more than 4,500 scholarships awarded.

Others publish only how many awards they make. The Fulbright Foreign Student Program grants about 4,000 awards a year. The Commonwealth Scholarship Commission offers around 800 awards a year across all its schemes, with 654 new Scholars and Fellows starting in the 2023 cohort. Oxford’s Clarendon Fund made over 230 new awards in 2025/26, plus roughly 85 more with partners. The Lester B. Pearson scholarship names about 37 scholars a year. None of these publish application counts, so no ratio is shown for them.

Frequently asked questions

What are my actual chances of winning a scholarship?

Nobody can tell you that honestly, and anyone quoting you a personal percentage is guessing. What is knowable is the size of the field: Chevening runs at roughly 1,500 awards against around 60,000 applications, and Knight-Hennessy at 87 against 9,223. Your realistic path is to apply to several awards where your profile is strong rather than one where it is not.

Which fully funded scholarships are the least competitive?

Of the awards with published figures, Hungary’s Stipendium Hungaricum has by far the widest intake — more than 4,500 scholarships against 80,000 applications in 2025. Awards restricted to one country, one university or one partner list are structurally less crowded than globally open flagships, simply because far fewer people can enter. Use the “least brutal odds first” filter above to see those first.

Does work experience really matter for scholarships?

For some it is a hard gate rather than a preference. Chevening requires roughly 2,800 hours — about two years — and an application below that threshold is rejected regardless of how strong the rest is. For most university-run awards it carries no weight at all.

How current are these figures?

Every published count here was read from the funder’s own site or annual report and checked on 27 July 2026. Funders update these at different times of year, so confirm the current round on the official page before you apply.

Next steps

Confirm you are eligible in the first place with our scholarship eligibility checker, make sure any offer you receive is genuine with our scholarship verifier, browse the full guides in our scholarships hub, and if the odds here look thin, see the real alternatives that fund study abroad without one. For a shareable summary of the headline ratios — built for citing, not just browsing — see How Competitive Is Your Dream Scholarship, Really?