How to Send Your IELTS Results to Universities

A scan of your Test Report Form may be enough for a first look at an application, but it is not the same thing as IELTS delivering your result. What an organisation checks is the record held on the IELTS Results Service, and getting your score in front of that organisation officially is a request you make through the portal you booked with or through your test centre.

There are two delivery routes and you do not choose between them. The organisation does.

Ask the organisation before you request anything

Each organisation states how it wants to receive official IELTS scores: by postal mail, or through IELTS Results Service e-delivery. Asking first saves a wasted request, and it also gets you the detail the request itself needs. For postal delivery you need the address they want results sent to. For e-delivery you need their account name in the results service.

Those two details are the whole reason to email them first. A postal request to the wrong department, or an e-delivery request against a name that does not match their account, fails on their end, and nothing tells you it did.

The two routes, and what each one costs you

Postal delivery is capped and chargeable past the cap. E-delivery is neither.

The five free postal deliveries are the number most people need to know. If you are applying to six or more places that want paper, the sixth onward carries a processing fee. IELTS does not publish the amount, so your test centre is the place to ask. E-delivery has no such cap, which is worth knowing if you are applying broadly: an organisation that accepts e-delivery costs you nothing to add.

How to make the request

Through the booking portal you used, or by contacting your test centre. E-delivery recipients can be selected in the portal or arranged through the centre. Postal delivery goes through the centre.

Your test centre is also the place every question about an individual result is routed to. IELTS does not run a central service that will look up your score or chase a delivery for you, so the centre you tested at is the contact for anything that goes wrong.

If you took IELTS Online

E-delivery only. IELTS states that IELTS Online results can be shared officially with organisations only through the IELTS Results Service, so the postal route is not available to you and the five free deliveries are not the relevant number.

Before you book an online test, that is worth checking against the places you plan to apply to, along with the separate question of whether they accept an online result at all. Receiving organisations decide that for themselves, and the Test Report Form records that the test was taken online. Academic or General Training covers the online option alongside the other format choices.

What happens at the other end

The organisation looks your result up rather than reading your copy of it. IELTS gives receiving organisations the IELTS Results Service free of charge, and through it they can verify a result from a Test Report Form number, check the identity and score against the record, review results on screen, download them, pull them in bulk, or connect an API that imports results into their own admissions system automatically.

This is why a scan of your form is not equivalent. What the organisation trusts is the record on the results service, not the document in your email. It is also why a form with an older design is not a problem: the check runs against the record either way.

Leave time for both halves of the wait

Getting your result and sending it are separate waits, and only the first one has published figures. Results take 1 to 5 days for a computer test and 6 to 8 for an online one, and how long IELTS results take sets out the full table. Delivery to an organisation then takes whatever the route takes, and postal is slower than electronic by an amount no one publishes.

Check the age of your result before you send it, too. IELTS recommends results be treated as current for two years, several systems enforce that hard, and how long IELTS results stay valid covers who does what with an older form.

If you need a better score first

Sending is the last step, so it is worth being sure the score is the one you want to send. If a single section pulled your overall band down, One Skill Retake may apply, and it produces a new Test Report Form you can send instead of the original. If you are not sure how much one section is costing you, the band score calculator will show what changing it does to your overall band.

The delivery routes, the five free postal deliveries, the e-delivery limits, the online restriction, the closed centre service and the organisation side of the results service above all come from ielts.org, last checked in September 2026. Fees, portal layouts and centre procedures vary by market, so your own test centre is the authority on what your request will cost and how long it will take.