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 60 A* series, and 46 of them have confirmed dates between now and the end of 2027.

The calendar

Which ones you can still submit to

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

Six of the twelve close in September, and five of those inside nine days. If your work could plausibly go to more than one of ASPLOS, CHI, PerCom, ICRA, NSDI or Eurocrypt, that decision needs making in August, not 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 14.0% to 43.0%. At the selective end: SIGCOMM and IJCAI at 14.0%, CCS 14.5%, NSDI 14.7%, IEEE S&P 14.8%, OSDI 15.6%, SOSP 16.0%, NDSS 16.1%. At the open end: ICLR 32.1%, UAI 30.7%, STOC 29.8%, SODA and Asiacrypt both 29.3%, 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 46:

• North America: 18 (39%)
• Europe: 13 (28%)
• Asia: 12 (26%)
• Australia: 2
• South America: 1

Asia is over-represented relative to its share of all conferences, which matches what we found looking at where CS conferences actually happen: Asia hosts 16% of all editions but 22% of A* ones. If you are budgeting for a year of top-tier travel, assume at least one long-haul trip.

Dublin is the only city hosting two of them, with ICSE in April and The Web Conference in May 2027, two weeks apart.

When they cluster

The calendar is not evenly spread. May 2027 carries seven of these conferences, August 2026 six, and June 2027 and November 2026 five each. February and September are the thin months.

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

Caveats

This is what we hold, not the whole of CORE. A* series with no announced 2026 or 2027 edition are not listed, and several are genuinely unannounced rather than missing: ICML 2027 has published only “South America” and ICLR 2027 only “West Coast North America”, so neither ICML nor ICLR is here.

Ranks are from the CORE portal and reflect the current listing. 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.

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. Fourteen of the 46 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.