Spring internships have become harder to get, and less useful too
Spring internships have been, for some time, the best way to start your career in finance in the UK. Get in the pipeline nice and early, convert it into a summer internship, convert that into a job. Things might be changing, however.
Click here to join the bubble by eFinancialCareers, our new anonymous community. ✍️
New data from Trackr, formerly the Bristol Tracker, said that 2026 spring internships were significantly more difficult to get than 2025 ones – and led to fewer summer internships, to boot.
In 2026, the average aspiring spring intern applied to 35 different roles. That was comparable to their 2025 colleagues, who applied to 33, on average. However, just 51% of applicants in 2026 received some sort of offer, compared to 74% of their peers in 2025.
The other downside for 2026 applicants was that spring internships became less useful. 31% of spring interns received return offers in 2025, but in 2026, it was just 20%. Instead of concrete offers, banks increased the number of students being fast-tracked for interviews next year. They also increased the number of outright rejections.
What’s driving the changes? A few things. For one, although spring internships are aimed at first-year students, fewer first-year students were getting into them, with more places instead going to third-year students, Trackr noted. 2% of spring interns were third-year students, Trackr said in 2025, and that number increased to 5% in 2026. The number of second-year students was flat across both years at 24%, suggesting that first-year students suffered on account of their third-year peers.
This might be bad, this might be good. America doesn’t really have spring internships anymore (not since the diversity apocalypse the other year), and the student recruitment process there seems to be doing just fine. And bank internships have become more difficult to get over the last few years, too. The situation is becoming worse everywhere – have no fear that you are in an exclusively bad situation.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.
