L.A. Unified’s School-Choice Window Closes November 6. One District Site Still Shows November 14.

Apply by the earlier one. After it closes, the lottery turns into a queue — and the queue opens earlier this year.

You’re wondering whether the deadline you remember from last fall is still the deadline. It isn’t. Los Angeles Unified opens its on-time Choices application — the one application that covers magnets, dual language, Schools for Advanced Studies, early and middle colleges, affiliated charters and Permits With Transportation — on Thursday, October 1. The district’s Choices site says it closes on Friday, November 6, 2026. The portal where you actually submit it still displays a calendar with November 14 on it. Use November 6. Being early costs you nothing; being eight days late moves your child out of a random draw and into a waiting list.

The two dates, and where each one is printed

Both halves of the district’s Choices website — choices.lausd.net and echoices.lausd.net — carry the same banner across the top of every page: on-time application window, Oct. 1 thru Nov. 6. The General Application Guidelines page states it twice in prose, once as “October 1st through November 6, 2026” and once as an instruction to submit online on or before the November 6, 2026 deadline. The same page confirms the year it’s for: the district is taking applications for 2027–2028.

Apply.lausd.net is the portal those pages send you to, and the only place an on-time application is accepted. Its own front page carries a module headed “2026-2027 Application Calendar,” and the first two rows of that calendar read “10/1 – On-Time Choices Application Window Oct. 1 thru Nov. 14” and “11/14 – On-Time Choices Application Window Oct. 1 thru Nov. 14.” We read all three sites on September 20, 2026, and both dates were live the same day.

The likeliest explanation is the dull one, and two things point at it. That calendar is headed with last school year, and LAist reported in September 2025 that the on-time window for 2026–27 ran October 1 to November 14 — so the date on the portal is last cycle’s date, sitting under last cycle’s heading. And November 14 falls on a Saturday in 2026. Neither page explains the gap, and nobody from this desk called the district to ask.

None of that matters to a parent with a form to file. Two district addresses show two deadlines eight days apart; one of them is certainly wrong, and only one of them is safe to be wrong about. Apply by November 6.

What November 6 actually decides

It’s tempting to read a deadline as paperwork — get it in, and late means a little late. This one changes the machine you are in.

On-time applications are not processed as they arrive. The district’s Choices FAQ says so for program after program: applications received during the on-time period are processed after the window closes, and where more students apply than there are seats, a random, unbiased selection is run centrally against each program’s published priorities. Magnet selection is random too, weighted by the priority points a family has accrued. Filing on October 1 and filing on November 6 are worth exactly the same.

Late applications work the other way around. The FAQ says they are added to the school’s waiting list in the order received, and that a family is contacted only if a seat opens and their child is next. The lottery becomes a queue, and your place in the queue is a timestamp.

So November 6 is the line between a draw you can’t improve by hurrying and a line you can only improve by hurrying. That is the whole reason this date is worth a calendar reminder and the others are worth a bookmark.

December 1 is the second date that matters, and it moved

If you miss the window, the late application opens on December 1, 2026. The Choices FAQ states it in three separate program sections — early and middle colleges, the multilingual programs, and the affiliated charters — each time with the same rule attached: first come, first served, placed in the order received.

Last cycle that queue did not open until February. LAist put late applications for 2026–27 as beginning February 2, 2026, and the apply portal still carries a banner of its own reading “Late Application Window Feb. 2 thru Sept. 18” — the current year’s window, which closed two days before this page was written. Compare the two cycles and the wait shortens sharply: last year about eleven weeks passed between the on-time close and the late opening, and this year it is under four.

There’s one more date here, and we’re printing it unresolved. The apply portal’s calendar lists “12/1 – Current Year Late Choices Application Dec. 1 thru Jan. 23” and then “1/23 – Current Year Choices Late Application Closes.” The Choices site names no closing date for the late window at all. December 1 is confirmed by both; January 23 appears on one district site and nowhere else, so treat it as real until the district says otherwise rather than assuming the late door stays open all spring.

The calendar, in the order it bites

Now through November 6 — verification of eligibility, if you are applying to a gifted program. Gifted Magnet, Highly Gifted Magnet, Schools for Advanced Studies and the Individualized Honors Programs all require the parent to review and follow the verification-of-eligibility requirements by the deadline, and the Choices timeline is explicit that this is the parent’s job, not the school’s. Fifty-seven of the district’s 333 magnet programs are gifted or highly gifted, so this catches more families than it sounds like it should.

October 1 — the on-time application opens. Online only. Schools will not accept a paper application during the on-time window, and the FAQ says so twice, once to families and once to schools. If there is no computer at home, the district names the substitutes: a phone, a school computer, a public library, a Region welcome center, a parent center.

November 6 — the on-time window closes. One application, up to six programs, multiple schools inside most of them. The per-program caps are not the same: three magnet choices, three SAS schools plus any or all of the Individualized Honors Programs and single-gender academies, and exactly one early or middle college.

December — confirmation and correction notices. The district sends a confirmation/correction notification and gives a deadline printed on the notice itself. This is the one chance to fix an error, a wrong sibling entry or a missing priority point before selection runs, and the district’s own timeline tells you what to check: errors on the application, magnet priority points, and whether sibling information is accurate.

December 1 — the late application opens, first come, first served, as above. December is also when magnet and PWT schools may start calling waiting-list families for spring-semester seats, so a December phone call from a school is not necessarily about next year.

January — eligibility notices, and the charter drawings. Applicants to the gifted programs, SAS, IHP and the early/middle colleges are told whether they are eligible; the district adds, in its own words on the timeline, that eligible does not mean selected. Affiliated charter schools that are oversubscribed hold their public random drawing during January, and each school posts its own date and procedure on its website and in its main office.

February — selection and waiting-list letters, for everyone. Then the sentence to read twice: a selected family accepts or declines online or through the school by the deadline, no response is treated as a decline, and all declines are final. A waiting-list family does nothing and is contacted if a seat opens.

February 1 — the permit doors open for the following year. These are separate from Choices and easy to confuse with it. An intra-district permit — to attend another L.A. Unified school that is not your school of residence — is open all year long, starting February 1 for the next school year, and the application goes directly to the school rather than through the Choices portal. Incoming inter-district permits, for students who live outside district boundaries, are likewise accepted all year starting in February.

Late April to mid-May — Open Enrollment. The district’s K–12 Open Enrollment Transfer Program, which it runs to comply with AB 1114, is a separate parental-choice route to schools that have identified available seats for the following year. Its on-time window runs late April to mid-May annually, with a late window from early June to mid-September.

June through August — the Conservatory of Fine Arts. The Saturday arts program for grades 3–12 takes applications across those three months, on its own schedule, entirely outside the Choices calendar.

The fourth week of the fall semester — the last waiting-list calls. Magnet and PWT waiting-list calls may begin as early as February and continue through the fourth week of the fall semester. That is the outer edge of the process: a seat can still arrive after school has started.

The first week of school — show up or lose it. The district’s guidelines are blunt about this one. A student who is not enrolled and attending by the first week loses the Choices seat.

The rules inside the window that cost families seats

These are all on the district’s own guidelines page, and every one of them is a way to do the application correctly and still lose.

You are waitlisted for your first choice only. List three magnets, get none of them, and you go on one waiting list — the first. Second and third choices are optional and they are not consolation prizes. The same rule runs through SAS. Affiliated charters are the exception: applicants stay on the waiting list at every affiliated charter they applied to, for one school year.

A magnet student who applies elsewhere can lose the seat they have. In the district’s words, a current magnet student who applies to another magnet program and is selected will automatically lose their seat regardless of whether or not they accept. Selection alone does it.

Sibling priority is address-dependent and deadline-dependent. Siblings must be listed on the application and must live at the same address, and the guidelines say to make sure the address is correct in the system before the application deadline — not before selection, before the deadline.

Only the first application counts. If more than one application is submitted for the same student, only the first is considered. There is no submitting a better version later.

The age cutoffs are all September 1. Transitional kindergarten is for children turning 4 by September 1, kindergarten 5 by September 1, first grade 6 by September 1. Not every Choices elementary program offers TK.

Some students do not need this application at all. If you live inside an affiliated charter’s attendance boundary, you enroll directly at the school. If you live inside a Schools for Advanced Studies campus’s attendance area, you are placed in its gifted and advanced-learner program without a Choices application, provided you meet the criteria. And a family applying to an affiliated charter from outside district boundaries does not need an inter-district permit to do it — any student living in California may apply.

Do it in this order

First, put November 6 in your phone, not November 14. If the portal still shows the later date in October, the earlier one is the one two district sites and the year’s own application year agree on.

Then check whether your program needs eligibility verified — gifted magnet, highly gifted magnet, SAS or IHP — because that step belongs to you and it runs against the same deadline.

Then fix the address and the siblings before you submit, since both stop being fixable when the window closes, and one application is all the system will read.

Then watch for the December notice, correct anything wrong on it by the date printed on it, and mark December 1 in case you need the late queue.

And in February, answer. Silence is a decline, and a decline is final.