The 12 Best Medical Schools in Texas, Ranked for 2026

No school in Houston shows its work like this one. For the 2025-26 cycle it took 5,674 applications and made 298 offers. The year before it took 5,228 and made 302. You can read both years side by side. You can watch the odds tighten. None of the other 15 schools let you do that.

The results hold up. Step 1 and Step 2 are the national license exams every MD student has to pass. Students here clear Step 1 at 99.3 percent, against a national 95.3 percent. They average 255 on Step 2, against a national 247.

In March 2026, 72 graduates went into primary care. Another 53 stayed here to train. The school has led Texas in federal research money since 2001.

Being private does not open the door as wide as it sounds. The state cap on out-of-state students does not apply here. Even so, 92 percent of the class is Texan. If you live elsewhere the school can take you.

In practice almost no one from out of state gets a seat. Apply through TMDSAS by October 1. The MD/PhD track runs on AMCAS instead.

Six faculty here have won Nobel Prizes since 1985. The research budget that keeps them in Dallas hit $816.6 million in fiscal 2025. That paid for 6,215 active projects. That total covers every funding source. Federal grants are one part of it. Read it as a measure of size.

Students train at Parkland Memorial, the county hospital that takes the hardest cases in Dallas. Clements University Hospital sits next door. On March 20, 2026, 239 students matched into more than 80 programs. Eighty-one of them stayed here to train, about a third of the class. Internal medicine, pediatrics and psychiatry led the list. A few landed at Johns Hopkins and Stanford.

What the school will not say is the frustrating part. There is no applicant count, no interview count, no admit rate. You cannot tell how your file compares. In August 2026 the class profile on the site still described the Class of 2028, so the newest public numbers are two cycles old. The one number it does give up tells an out-of-state applicant most of what it needs to.

Every graduating student here matched in March 2026. Not most of them. All 245. They spread into 22 specialties across 28 states, and 137 stayed in Texas. A clean sweep is rare enough to say plainly.

This is the biggest MD program in the state, and it got there slowly. The first class of 19 students enrolled in 1970 across three cities. The first group to study only in Houston started in 1971. There were 32 of them. George H.W. Bush dedicated the first building in 1972. The name changed in 2015 after a $75 million gift, the largest the university had ever received.

You have to be a US citizen or a permanent resident to be considered here. That rules out international applicants and DACA recipients before anyone reads the file. The tuition sheet is not the whole bill either. Clinical rotations in the middle years carry travel and gear costs the sheet leaves out. Nobody budgets for them until they arrive.

Nothing else in this ranking is close on price. A first year in Fort Worth costs about two thirds of what the cheapest MD program charges. It costs about a fifth of what the two private schools ask.

Cheap does not mean thin. The Class of 2026 placed into 19 specialties, and most of them stayed in Texas. More than half went into primary care. The school has been chartered since October 1, 1970. That makes it the oldest osteopathic program in the state by half a century.

Its first class of 18 graduated in 1974. The rural track has held up over decades. Of the students who went through it between 2010 and 2016, 74 percent now practice primary care.

It is also honest about admissions, and it prints every step two years running. For fall 2025 it interviewed 683 people and made 435 offers. The year before it interviewed 687 and made 473. You can watch the offer rate tighten in real time. What you cannot do is get in from out of state. That door is close to shut.

Medical school in Texas started here. The first one in the state opened in 1891. The first session met in the Ashbel Smith Building, which locals call Old Red.

The 1900 hurricane tore off much of the roof. The walls held. The Board of Regents ordered classes back a short time later. The school took the John Sealy name in 2022, for a foundation that has given more than $1 billion over a century.

This is one of only two schools here that print both an application count and an admit rate. So you can do the math on your own chances. Of the 213 graduating students in the March 2026 match, 134 landed in Texas. Another 34 stayed on the island. Internal medicine took 49 of them and general surgery took 28.

Then there is the weather. Hurricane Ike hit in September 2008. The campus spent $947 million on work meant to make it harder to knock down. Evacuation planning is part of student life here in a way it is not in Dallas or Lubbock. The school’s own pages also print slightly different figures for class size and average score. Check which one you are quoting.

El Paso prints the average score at every rung of the ladder. No other Texas school does. The people who applied averaged a 506 MCAT and a 3.83 GPA. The people who got an interview averaged 513 and 3.94.

The people who got a seat landed between the two. They sat closer to the applicant pool than to the interview pool, which tells you the interview carries real weight. The school even says how many interview days it held. There were 29.

The Spanish rule is the part no other Texas program copies. Every student starts with about 30 hours of spoken Spanish during orientation. Then comes a weekly medical Spanish class for three semesters. A placement test sorts you into a beginner, middle or advanced group. This is the only health sciences center on the US-Mexico border. The patients in its clinics are the reason.

The class is small and almost all Texan. Of the 103 students who matched in March 2026, more than half stayed in Texas. Ten stayed right here in El Paso. Internal medicine took 16. Psychiatry and emergency medicine took eight each.

Travis County voters built this school. In 2012 they approved a property tax measure that sends about $35 million a year to it. The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation pledged $50 million for the name a year later. The first 50 students arrived in June 2016, picked from more than 4,500 who applied. The first class graduated in 2020, the same year the school won full accreditation.

This is the smallest MD class in Texas. State law caps non-residents at 10 percent of any public medical school class. That leaves about five seats a year in Austin for everyone else. The upside of a class this size showed at the 2026 match. Every student who took part placed. Half stayed in Texas, 10 of them right here, and 11 went into primary care.

The curriculum has a wrinkle worth planning for. Third year is not a normal clinical year. It is a required stretch of project work. Students who add a second degree during it pay extra, and the cost depends on the program. Federal research money has climbed fast over the same years, which is unusual for a school this young.

Almost everyone who graduated here in March 2026 got a residency spot. Most did not leave the state. Fifty-nine percent stayed in Texas. About one in five stayed in San Antonio, often in a program the school runs itself. Internal medicine and anesthesiology led the list. The school opened to students on September 3, 1968, nine years after Governor Price Daniel signed the bill that created it.

The research side is strong too. The medical school pulled just over $124 million in federal research money in fiscal 2025. It runs the only cancer center in Central and South Texas named by the National Cancer Institute. Students rotate through University Hospital, the veterans hospital and the military medical center. That is a wider mix of patients than most Texas campuses can offer.

It sits at eighth because it will not tell you what its students look like. The only class profile we found is an old page, and its figures are roughly eight years out of date. The tuition numbers sit in PDFs that are hard to find at all. That is a strange choice for a school with these results. It makes planning an application harder than it needs to be.

Seventy-five students put on white coats here in August 2020. Six years later its board pass rates match schools four times its age. COMLEX is what DO students take instead of the Step exams. The Class of 2025 cleared the first one at 99 percent and the third at 100.

Placement follows the same line. Just over half the Class of 2026 went into primary care. Sixty-six percent stayed in Texas. Part of the reason is that the school runs its own residency programs in Conroe and Huntsville. They cover family medicine and psychiatry, plus a sports medicine fellowship. Graduates who want to stay near home have somewhere to go.

The mission is rural and underserved East Texas. The school says openly that it reads each application as a whole, with no score cutoffs. That is friendly in spirit and hard in practice. With no score ranges printed, you are guessing at your own odds. And with only three classes out the door, the alumni network is still small.

There is one thing in Lubbock you cannot get anywhere else in Texas. The accelerated family medicine track packs the MD into three years. At the end it hands you a family medicine residency in Lubbock, Amarillo or the Permian Basin. You are considered for it after you have been accepted, either with your file or in the fall of your first year. Scholarship help in that third year is possible. The school says plainly that it is not promised.

The rest of the program is built to keep doctors in West Texas. More than half the Class of 2029 grew up out here. In April 2026, US News placed the school in the top third of the country for graduates who practice where doctors are scarce. At the March 2026 match, nearly two thirds of the class stayed in Texas. About 25 students landed hard specialties like ophthalmology, orthopedic surgery and urology.

Plan for a lot of driving. Clinical years split across Lubbock, Amarillo and the Permian Basin. You may spend a year several hours from where you started. The school also stopped taking AMCAS applications in 2021. Only US citizens and permanent residents are considered at all.

The interesting part of this school is not in Bryan. EnMed, its engineering and medicine program, runs out of Holcombe Boulevard in Houston. Houston Methodist is the partner.

Its students walk away with an MD and a master of engineering. Fifty of them started in the summer of 2025. That was the largest group yet and the program’s current cap. Nobody else in Texas offers the pairing.

The main MD program spreads students across four campuses. They run from Bryan and College Station up to Dallas, then back down to Houston and Round Rock. Congress created the school in 1977 under a law that paired new medical schools with veterans hospitals. It took its current name in August 2025, after a gift the November before.

There is no single university hospital behind any of it. Clinical training happens at CHI St. Joseph in Bryan, at Houston Methodist and at other partners. So what your third year looks like depends on where you get assigned. The school keeps its score ranges to itself as well. That makes it hard to judge whether you are in range before you apply.

The Texas Legislature created this school in Edinburg in June 2013. It was built to fix one problem. The Rio Grande Valley had a doctor shortage and no medical school of its own. The charter class arrived in the summer of 2016. The program has stayed small on purpose ever since. More than half the seats go to students who grew up in the Valley.

Ten years in, the accreditation question is settled. Full accreditation was continued in October 2025. That puts this school ahead of the two newest programs in the state on the measure that matters most before you enroll. The money side is easier here than in the big cities. A student living with family is budgeted at $48,798 a year, housing and food included.

Where you cannot go is the problem. The school lists three hospital partners that run residencies with it: Knapp Medical Center, Valley Baptist and HCA. That is a thin bench next to what a Houston student can walk into. It also gives applicants nothing to measure against. You are aiming at a very small class with no idea what a winning file looks like.