Every CORE A* Conference: The 2026 to 2027 Calendar

CORE A* is the top band of the CORE ranking, and in computer science it is the closest thing the field has to a shortlist. The problem is that nobody publishes it as a calendar. The CORE portal tells you a conference is A*, and the conference website tells you when it is, and joining those up is a manual job every researcher redoes for themselves.

So here it is joined up. We track 62 A* series, and 54 of them have confirmed dates between now and the end of 2027.

Updated 28 August 2026 against the current CORE listing. Ranks move between rounds, and this refresh changed the membership of the list: AAMAS, Asiacrypt and UAI are no longer A*, while DAC, HRI, ICALP and ISMAR now are.

The calendar

Which ones you can still submit to

Sixteen of these have a submission deadline that has not passed:

Nine of the sixteen close in September, and eight of those inside ten days. If your work could plausibly go to more than one of ASPLOS, CHI, PerCom, ICRA, ICALP, Eurocrypt, NSDI or HRI, that decision needs making now, not in September. We found the same pileup across the whole dataset when we measured how conference timing actually works: late September is the densest deadline window in computer science.

A* is not one thing

The most common misreading of this list is that everything on it is equally hard to get into. It is not, and the gap is enormous.

Acceptance rates across these venues run from 14.5% to 43.0%. At the selective end: CCS 14.5%, NSDI 14.7%, IEEE S&P 14.8%, OSDI 15.6%, SOSP 16.0%, NDSS 16.1%, then MobiCom, SIGMETRICS, SenSys and SIGMOD clustered at 18 to 19%. At the open end: ICLR 32.1%, STOC 29.8%, SODA 29.3%, ECCV 27.9%, POPL and ICAPS both 27.0%, and ICRA at 43.0%.

That is a three-fold spread inside a single tier. It tracks subfield, not quality: systems and networking venues stayed small and single-track, machine learning venues expanded to absorb enormous submission volumes, and robotics conferences function partly as community gatherings where presenting is the point. We went through this in detail in our acceptance-rate analysis.

The practical consequence is that “aim for an A*” is not useful advice on its own. Aim for the right A* for your subfield.

Where they are

Of the 53 with an announced location:

• North America: 27 (51%)
• Europe: 14 (26%)
• Asia: 9 (17%)
• Australia: 2
• South America: 1

North America takes half the list, which is a heavier concentration than the field as a whole shows. That matches what we found looking at where CS conferences actually happen. If you are budgeting for a year of top-tier travel and you are not based in the US, assume several long-haul trips rather than one.

When they cluster

The calendar is badly uneven. June 2027 carries ten of these conferences and May 2027 eight, so those two months alone hold a third of the list. October and November 2026 and July 2027 carry five each. September 2026 and January and February 2027 have two apiece.

Eight cities host more than one, and one of them is doing something unusual:

• Atlanta, June 2027: four. ISCA, PLDI and STOC all start on 5 June and SIGMETRICS on 7 June, all at the Hyatt Regency. This is FCRC, the multi-conference ACM runs roughly every four years, and it is the single best-value week on this calendar: four A* conferences across architecture, programming languages, theory and performance, one flight, one hotel.
• Montreal: three. AAAI in February, IEEE S&P in May, LICS in June 2027.
• Huntington Beach: two on the same day. SIGMOD and PODS are co-located as usual, on 13 June 2027.
• Athens, Dublin, New York, San Jose and Seoul each host two, spread across the window.

For anyone planning a year, the June 2027 pileup matters twice over: it is a month where two A* conferences you care about may collide, and it is when flights and hotels in those cities will be at their worst. Book Atlanta early.

Caveats

This is what we hold, not the whole of CORE. A* series with no announced 2026 or 2027 edition are not listed. ICML is the notable absence: its 2027 edition has still published nothing beyond a region, so there is no date to list. ICLR is the reverse case and is included on its dates alone, because the city has not been named yet.

Ranks are from the CORE portal and reflect the current round. They do move: this update alone dropped three conferences off the list and added four. Acceptance rates come from different years, mostly 2024 and 2025, and we record the year against each; where a series reports different figures for different editions we use the most recent. Thirteen of the 54 have no acceptance rate recorded.

Dates and venues come from each conference’s own site and change more often than you would like, particularly for editions still eighteen months out. Seventeen of the 54 above have no venue announced yet.

We keep this current as new editions publish, alongside deadlines on the deadlines page. If something here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will fix it.