The MAA has published the 2027 AMC 8 as a competition week — 21 to 27 January 2027 — rather than one fixed date. Your school or authorised test centre chooses a single day inside that week, so two students in the same city can sit on different days. Last year’s date tells you nothing. Plan a peak that tolerates a six-day swing.
What the MAA published — and what it deliberately left open
The MAA’s own 2026-27 competition calendar, as published on maa.org, gives three anchors: AMC 10 A and AMC 12 A on 5 November 2026 (a Thursday), AMC 10 B and AMC 12 B on 13 November 2026 (a Friday), and the AMC 8 across a week, 21 to 27 January 2027. Note the difference in kind. The November competitions are named days. The AMC 8 is a named week, and the MAA leaves the choice of day inside it to whoever administers the paper.
That week runs Thursday 21 January to Wednesday 27 January and contains exactly one weekend, Saturday the 23rd and Sunday the 24th. A school administering to its own students will usually want a school day; an independent centre gathering students from several schools may prefer the weekend. Either is permitted. Which one applies to you is a fact only your centre holds.
The two-calendar rule — and why it is not a contradiction
Here is where families in China get confused, so read this slowly. There are two different calendars in play, and neither corrects the other.
Take the November competitions as the worked example. The MAA lists AMC 10/12 A on 5 November and B on 13 November 2026. Meanwhile, our China-region authorised centres are scheduling their own sittings for 6 November and 14 November 2026, 17:00–18:15 Beijing time, on a bilingual paper at 120 RMB per sitting (operator briefing, 6 August 2026). Both of those are true statements. A competition day published in United States terms and a local administration slot expressed in Beijing time are simply not the same fact, and quoting one at the other produces nonsense.
So the rule for the AMC 8 is: the MAA window is 21–27 January 2027, and your local sitting date and start time come from your centre and from nowhere else. Never accept a single unqualified date from a forum post, a parents’ group chat, or a sibling who sat two years ago. If you have not yet chosen a centre at all, start with the 2026-27 in-person AMC 8 registration guide, then come back to this page to plan around whatever day you are given.
| Fact | Who decides it | Where to confirm it |
|---|---|---|
| The competition week (21–27 Jan 2027) | MAA | maa.org |
| Your exact sitting day inside that week | Your school / authorised centre | Your centre, in writing |
| Local start time and check-in | Your centre | Your centre |
| Paper language (bilingual or English only) | Your centre | Your centre |
| Fee and payment deadline | Your centre | Your centre |
| Seat lock and withdrawal cut-off | Your centre | Your centre |
| Format: 25 questions, 40 minutes, no calculator | MAA | maa.org |
| Eligibility: grade 8 and under | MAA | maa.org |
Why a seven-day window rewrites your last three weeks
Most prep plans are built as a spike: load hard, then taper into one known date. That design fails against a window, because the spike can only be centred on one guess and the true date can be up to six days either side of it.
Both failure modes are real and they look different:
- Peak too late. You build towards the 27th, your centre runs on the 21st. You arrive with the last block of consolidation unfinished, and it shows most on questions 16–25, where fluency has not yet turned into speed.
- Peak too early. You build towards the 21st, your centre runs on the 27th. Now you have six unplanned days. In practice students fill them by drilling harder, and accuracy on the easy block quietly slides — the questions you were never going to miss start costing marks.
The fix is structural, not motivational: build a flat top instead of a spike. Design the final fortnight so that every day inside it is a plausible competition day. Concretely, that means the last full-length timed mock stops being a single event three days before the exam and becomes a fixed weekly cadence that simply continues through the window. If your day turns out to be the 21st, your most recent mock is a few days old. If it is the 27th, so is that one. Neither scenario needs a rewrite.
One operator observation, offered as a pattern rather than a statistic (per Hanlin; individual experience varies): the families who cope best with the window are the ones who asked for the date in writing at registration, not the ones who asked in January. By January the centre is confirming logistics to everyone at once, and a late answer leaves no room to move anything.
Five questions to put to your test centre — and when to ask
Ask all five in one message, at the moment you register, and keep the reply. In order of how badly the answer disrupts your plan if it arrives late:
- Which day inside 21–27 January 2027 will you administer the AMC 8? If the centre has not decided yet, ask by which date it will decide.
- What is the local start time, and how early is check-in? A 17:00 start after a full school day is a different preparation problem from a 09:00 weekend start — the sleep, food and warm-up plan differ.
- Is the paper bilingual or English only? Our China-region centres are running the November AMC 10/12 sittings on a bilingual paper; do not assume the same for a different competition at a different centre.
- What is the fee, and when is payment due? The 120 RMB per sitting figure in our operator briefing refers to those November AMC 10/12 sittings. AMC 8 fees come from your own centre.
- When do seats lock, and what is the withdrawal cut-off? For the November sittings, our briefing has seats locking in early October, with withdrawal possible before 10 October 2026 and not afterwards. Those cut-offs belong to the November cycle — do not carry them over to January. Ask for the AMC 8 equivalents explicitly.
If any answer comes back as “we will confirm later”, that is fine — write down the date by which they promised to confirm, and diary it. An undated promise is the thing that turns into a scramble.
A window-proof plan from August to January
From mid-August you have roughly twenty-two weeks. Here is the shape that survives a moving date. Volume falls as the window approaches; what does not fall is the habit of sitting a full 40-minute paper on a schedule.
Two local-calendar checks belong in this plan, and both are things maa.org cannot tell you. First, your school’s own winter break and internal mock-exam week: in many international schools in China these land in exactly this stretch, and a student sitting school mocks on the Monday cannot also treat that Monday as a light day. Second, Lunar New Year falls on Saturday 6 February 2027, with the official public holiday period usually beginning in the days before it, though the 2027 arrangement is announced closer to the time. That puts the AMC 8 week roughly ten days ahead of the holiday — often the last stretch of ordinary school routine before families travel. It is a good reason not to leave anything to “the week after”.
If you are still deciding between a school-run sitting and an independent authorised centre, that choice also changes which day you are likely to get, and it is worth reading alongside the in-person registration guide for the 2026-27 cycle before you commit.
Three traps a window creates
Trap 1: inheriting a date. A student hears “it was the 25th last year” or “my friend at another school is sitting on the Saturday” and plans accordingly. Neither transfers. The administering centre chooses afresh each cycle, and two centres in the same district can legitimately pick different days out of the same week.
Trap 2: booking around a guess. Family travel, a competing weekend commitment, or a sibling’s event booked before the centre confirms. This is the one that produces genuinely unfixable clashes, because the exam date is not negotiable once the centre has set it and the withdrawal cut-off has passed. Hold January dates loosely until the confirmation is in writing.
Trap 3: the “extra week” illusion. The centre confirms the 27th, and the student mentally banks six extra days of preparation. Those six days are only useful if they are spent the same way the fortnight was already going to be spent. New material introduced inside the last two weeks rarely converts into marks and reliably costs attention on the setups that were already secure. Extra days are for rest and rehearsal, not for a new topic.
The one page to write down today
Before this week ends, put a single date sheet somewhere the whole family can see it. It needs seven lines and nothing else:
- MAA competition week: 21–27 January 2027 (source: maa.org)
- Our centre: ______________________
- Confirmed sitting day: ______ (or: centre will confirm by ______)
- Local start time and check-in: ______
- Fee paid / due by: ______
- Seat locks on: ______ Withdrawal cut-off: ______
- Weekly timed-mock slot: every ______ from ______ onwards
The last line is the one people skip and the one that makes the rest work. A fixed weekly slot is what converts “we do not know the date yet” from a source of anxiety into an administrative detail. When the centre finally names the day, nothing about your training has to change — you simply stop on the right morning.
Questions families ask
Is the 2027 AMC 8 held on a single day?
No. The MAA publishes it as a competition week, 21–27 January 2027. Your school or authorised centre selects one day inside that week; confirm yours with the centre.
Can I plan using last year’s AMC 8 date?
No. The administering centre chooses the day each cycle, so a previous year’s date, or a friend’s date at a different school, does not transfer to you.
Are the November AMC 10/12 dates the same as my centre’s sitting date?
Not necessarily. The MAA lists 5 and 13 November 2026; China-region centres schedule their own local sittings. Both are real. Confirm yours with the centre.
When should I ask my centre for the exact January day?
At registration, in writing. Seat-lock and withdrawal cut-offs are set by the centre, not by the MAA calendar, and late answers leave no room to move plans.
This is an independent guide operated by Hanlin Education for China-based international-school students. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). Competition dates, eligibility, format and registration rules are set by the MAA and by individual authorised test centres and can change — always confirm current details on maa.org and directly with your centre. If you spot an error on this page, tell us and we will correct it within 7 working days.