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Jessica Freedman, M.D.
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The ERAS (Electronic Residency Application Service) application is the centerpiece of your residency match cycle. Every program you apply to reviews the same document, which means there is no such thing as a minor detail. Understanding what each section requires and what program directors actually look for will help you submit a stronger, more complete application.
This guide walks through every section of the 2026 MyERAS application in order, with strategic guidance on how to approach each one.
Use the ERAS worksheet first. Draft every section offline before touching the live application. Errors made in MyERAS are difficult to correct after submission.
The Selected Experiences section is your most underutilized asset. Up to 10 entries with 750-character descriptions and use them to show judgment and impact, not just job duties.
Program signals cannot be changed after submission. Designate them carefully before you certify your application.
ERAS and NRMP are separate systems. Registering with MyERAS does not register you for the Match.
Answer additional questions accurately. Inconsistencies discovered during credentialing after the match can result in withdrawal of an offer.
Getting Started: The ERAS Worksheet
Before logging into MyERAS, download the official ERAS Applicant Worksheet from the AAMC website. It contains every field in the application and allows you to draft responses offline before entering them into the system. This is worth doing. Rushing through sections directly in MyERAS leads to errors, missed fields, and responses you will wish you had thought through more carefully. Use the worksheet to draft, review, and edit before you ever touch the live application.
Required fields are marked with an asterisk. Some fields are only required in certain circumstances — visa sponsorship questions apply only to applicants who need them, and specialty-specific questions appear only for the specialties you select.
"I tell every MedEdits client the same thing: treat the ERAS application like a legal document, not a form. Every word, every date, every yes-or-no answer will be cross-checked during credentialing. The applicants who run into problems are the ones who moved too quickly and assumed they could fix things later. Draft offline. Review twice. Then submit."
Section 1: Basic Information and Work Authorization
This section covers your legal name, preferred name, pronouns, contact information, and addresses. Enter your name exactly as it appears on your medical school transcript and USMLE score reports. Inconsistencies create administrative headaches with programs and credentialing offices.
You will enter both a current mailing address and a permanent address. If you are in a transitional living situation, use the address where you reliably receive mail. Programs may send correspondence by postal mail, particularly for credentialing purposes.
Work Authorization
If you are a U.S. citizen, permanent resident, or otherwise authorized to work without sponsorship, this section is straightforward. If you require visa sponsorship — either ECFMG J-1 or hospital-sponsored H-1B you must indicate this clearly. Programs use this information to determine whether they can legally offer you a position, and failing to disclose your status accurately can disqualify your application entirely.
Eligibility for ECFMG J-1 sponsorship is not automatic. Review the requirements at ecfmg.org before selecting that option.
Section 2: Match Information and NRMP Registration
Enter your NRMP ID if you have already registered for the Match. If you have not yet received it, you can leave this field blank and add it later. Your NRMP ID is not required to certify and submit your application.
If you are applying to urology, enter your AUA member number here. If you are participating in the Match as a couples match, indicate your partner's name and the specialties they are applying to. Couples matching requires coordination between two separate applications and rank lists — begin planning this early in the cycle.
Section 3: Biographic Information and Self-Identification
This section is voluntary. You may indicate racial and ethnic self-identification, language fluency, and military service obligations. No field in this section is required, and programs are not permitted to use demographic information as a basis for screening applicants.
The language fluency section uses a five-tier scale ranging from Basic to Native/Near-Native. Rate yourself honestly. If you indicate advanced proficiency in a language, you may be asked to demonstrate it in an interview or clinical setting.
If you have a U.S. military active duty service obligation or deferment, disclose it here. Programs need to know the length and nature of your obligation when evaluating your candidacy, since it affects your availability to begin training.
Section 4: Geographic and Setting Preferences
This section allows you to indicate preference for up to three U.S. Census divisions and to specify urban, suburban, or rural setting preferences. Your responses are shared only with programs in the divisions you select. If you indicate a preference for the South Atlantic division, programs in other divisions will not see that response. If you select "I do not have a division preference," all programs you apply to will see it.
"Geographic signals work in your favor at programs that prioritize local applicants or candidates with ties to the region. For competitive specialties like dermatology, neurosurgery, or plastic surgery, programs actively look for candidates who are likely to accept an offer and stay in the area. If you have genuine ties to a region whether family, a partner's career, or prior training., this section is the place to communicate that. You may also enter up to three hometowns, defined as places where you currently or previously lived and feel strong ties to."
Section 5: Education and Postgraduate Training
Higher Education
List every undergraduate and graduate institution you attended, including field of study, degree earned or expected, and dates of attendance. Do not omit any institution, even if you attended briefly or did not complete a degree. Gaps or inconsistencies in your educational timeline will be noticed. International medical graduates should note that most IMGs will indicate "None" for undergraduate education type in the U.S. model fields.
Medical Education
Enter your medical school, degree, and expected or conferred graduation date. If you attended more than one medical school, list each separately.
Postgraduate Training
If you have completed or are currently in a prior residency or fellowship, enter it here. Include the program director and supervisor names, accreditation information, and location. If you are currently in training, work with your program coordinator to confirm an expected end date. This section applies primarily to applicants re-entering the match, switching specialties, or pursuing fellowship after residency.
Section 6: Academic and Professional Interruptions
This section asks whether you experienced extensions, leaves, or gaps due to repeated or remediated coursework, or due to professionalism sanctions or adverse actions by your medical school.
Answer honestly. If you select yes, you will be prompted to explain the reason, the timeframe, the steps you took to address it, and what you learned. Program directors understand that circumstances arise. What they are evaluating is your judgment, self-awareness, and whether your explanation is consistent with the rest of your application. A brief, direct, non-defensive explanation is almost always better received than an attempt to minimize or omit.
Section 7: Honors, Awards, and Professional Memberships
List honor society memberships (AOA, Gold Humanism Honor Society, Sigma Sigma Phi), other awards, and professional organization memberships. For each honor or award, include the type, name, description, and date received.
Section 8: Selected Experiences
This is one of the most important sections of the application, and one of the most underutilized. You may enter up to 10 experiences that communicate who you are, what you are passionate about, and what matters to you. For each entry, you will provide the organization, experience type, position title, dates, location, participation frequency, primary focus area, and a 750-character description of your context, roles, and responsibilities.
For each entry, think carefully about what the experience communicates beyond what appears in your CV. The 750-character description is not a job description: it is an opportunity to show judgment, initiative, and impact. What did you actually do? What was the outcome? What would not have happened without you?
Most Meaningful Experiences
From your 10 experiences, you will also identify up to 3 as most meaningful and write a 300-character reflection for each. These reflections should not describe what you did — the experience entry already covers that. Instead, they should explain why the experience mattered to you and how it shaped your path to residency. This is a small field (roughly 2 to 3 sentences), so every word counts.
"The most meaningful experience reflections are where I see the sharpest divide between strong and weak applications. The prompt explicitly tells you not to describe what you did. Most applicants describe what they did anyway. Use those 300 characters to tell the reader something the rest of the application cannot: what do you carry with you from that experience, and why does it matters to the physician you are becoming."
Section 9: Impactful Experiences
This section invites applicants to describe challenges or hardships that influenced their journey to residency — including family background, financial hardship, community setting, limited educational opportunities, or other life circumstances. The field holds 750 characters.
This section is not required, and programs do not expect all applicants to complete it. If your path to residency involved genuine adversity that is not captured elsewhere in the application, this is the appropriate place to address it. If it does not apply to you, leave it blank. Do not manufacture hardship where none exists, and do not repeat content from your personal statement.
Section 10: Hobbies, Licenses, and Certifications
Hobbies and Interests
A 300-character field. Be specific rather than generic. Listing "traveling, reading, hiking" communicates nothing. Mentioning that you have completed three marathons, play in a community orchestra, or have been restoring a classic car for five years gives interviewers something concrete to discuss and gives programs a sense of who you are outside of medicine.
Licenses and Certifications
Enter any active state medical licenses, including license type, number, and expiration date. If you hold a DEA registration, enter the number and expiration. Board certifications and other health care related certifications — BLS, ACLS, ATLS — are also entered here. List all active certifications; do not leave this section partially complete.
Section 11: Additional Questions
This section requires yes or no answers to several legally significant questions: ability to carry out residency responsibilities with or without reasonable accommodations, prior license suspension or revocation, malpractice cases, anything that would limit licensure or hospital privileges, and misdemeanor or felony convictions in the United States.
Answer accurately. If you answer yes to any question, you will be prompted to provide an explanation. Programs take these responses seriously. Inconsistencies between your ERAS application and credentialing documentation discovered after the match can result in withdrawal of an offer or termination from a program.
Section 12: Scholarly Works and Publications
ERAS has consolidated and reframed how applicants present their research output under a new section called Scholarly Works. This replaces the previous publications structure and introduces one important new feature: the ability to designate up to three most meaningful scholarly works.
Add an entry for each item in your scholarly portfolio. The section accommodates the full range of output: peer-reviewed journal articles, abstracts, book chapters, poster presentations, oral presentations, and online publications. For each entry, the available fields will adjust based on the publication status you select, so complete the status field first before filling in the remaining details.
For oral and poster presentations, you can add multiple events within a single entry in MyERAS — so if a poster was presented at more than one conference, you do not need to create a separate entry for each.
One critical administrative note: publications from prior application seasons will not be automatically imported into the Scholarly Works section. If you applied in a previous cycle, you will need to re-enter your research output from scratch for the 2026 application.
Most Meaningful Scholarly Works
From all entries in this section, you may select up to three as your most meaningful scholarly works. This is a new and strategically significant feature. Program directors reviewing a long list of abstracts and presentations now have a direct signal from you about which work you consider most important, and by extension, which you are most prepared to discuss in depth in an interview.
Choose these three deliberately. The strongest choices are typically work where you played a primary or lead role, work that is directly relevant to the specialty you are applying to, or work that represents a meaningful contribution to the field rather than peripheral involvement. A first-author publication or a project you designed and executed will almost always be a stronger choice than a middle-author abstract where your contribution was limited.
Be prepared to discuss each of your three selections in detail: the research question, your specific role, the methodology, the findings, and the implications. If you cannot speak fluently about a piece of work in an interview, it should not be one of your three.
Section 13: Specialty-Specific Questions
Certain specialties require additional written responses transmitted only to programs within that specialty. The 2026 ERAS application includes specialty-specific questions for anesthesiology, neurosurgery, and plastic surgery (integrated). Each specialty's questions focus on behavioral and situational competencies — decision-making under pressure, receiving critical feedback, managing workload, and conflict resolution.
Treat these questions with the same care as your personal statement. Programs in these specialties read every response, and generic answers are easy to identify. Use the STAR framework — Situation, Task, Action, Result — to structure your responses, and choose examples that are specific, memorable, and honest.
Section 14: How Many Program Signals?
Program signaling allows you to express interest in specific programs at the time of application. Signals must be designated before you submit — they cannot be added or changed after your application is certified. Each participating specialty has a defined signal allotment, and in some cases a gold/silver tier system where the two tiers carry meaningfully different interview conversion rates.
| Specialty | Signal Allotment |
|---|---|
| Anesthesiology | 5 gold, 10 silver |
| Dermatology | 3 gold, 25 silver |
| Diagnostic Radiology | 6 gold, 9 silver |
| Family Medicine | 5 signals |
| General Surgery | 15 signals |
| Internal Medicine | 3 gold, 12 silver |
| Interventional Radiology | 8 signals |
| Neurological Surgery | 25 signals |
| Neurology | 8 signals |
| Orthopedic Surgery | 30 signals |
| Otolaryngology | 25 signals |
| Pathology | 5 signals |
| Pediatrics | 5 signals |
| Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation | 20 signals |
| Psychiatry | 10 signals |
| Radiation Oncology | 4 signals |
| Thoracic Surgery | 3 signals |
| Transitional Year | 12 signals |
Section 15: Certification and Submission
Before you certify your application, review every section carefully. Once certified and submitted, most fields cannot be edited.
The certification statement confirms that all information is accurate, that your written passages represent your own work, and that you understand the consequences of false or missing information — which include disqualification, AAMC investigation, expulsion from ERAS, or termination from a program after hire.
The 2026 ERAS certification statement specifically acknowledges that applicants may use mentors, peers, or AI tools for brainstorming, proofreading, or editing. The standard is that your final submission accurately reflects your own experiences and is written in your own voice. Your personal statement and experience descriptions must be your own work and must be defensible in an interview. Working with an experienced advisor or editor to strengthen your writing is appropriate. Having someone write your application for you is not.
Get Expert Guidance on Your ERAS Application
MedEdits has helped thousands of applicants build stronger residency applications over 18 years. Our physician advisors — including former admissions committee members — review every section of your ERAS application before you submit.
Frequently Asked Questions
ERAS (Electronic Residency Application Service) is the centralized application system used by most residency and fellowship programs in the United States. Through MyERAS, applicants submit a single application — including their personal statement, CV, work and activities, letters of recommendation, and USMLE scores — that is distributed to every program they apply to.
For the September cycle, ERAS opens for program registration and MyERAS application access in July. Application submission opens in September, and most competitive applicants submit on or close to opening day. Interview invitations begin in October and move quickly — most go out within the first two weeks in competitive specialties.
No. Registering with MyERAS does not register you for the NRMP Match. These are two separate systems. You must register independently with the NRMP at nrmp.org. Missing this step is one of the most consequential mistakes an applicant can make.
You may enter up to 10 experiences in the Selected Experiences section. From those 10, you identify up to 3 as most meaningful and write a 300-character reflection for each. Use all 10 entries if you can — each one is an opportunity to show programs who you are beyond your test scores and transcripts.
Program signals allow applicants to express interest in specific residency or fellowship programs at the time of application. Signals are not technically required, but in specialties that use them — particularly competitive ones like dermatology — programs virtually never interview unsignaled applicants. Signals must be designated before you certify your application; they cannot be changed afterward.
The 2026 ERAS certification statement acknowledges that applicants may use mentors, peers, or AI tools for brainstorming, proofreading, or editing. The standard is that your final submission accurately reflects your own experiences and is written in your own voice. Working with an advisor or editor is appropriate and common. Having someone — or something — write your application for you is not, and creates serious risk in interviews.
Answer honestly in the Academic and Professional Interruptions section. If you select yes, provide a clear, non-defensive explanation of the reason, the timeframe, the steps you took to address it, and what you learned. Program directors understand that circumstances arise. What they are evaluating is your self-awareness and judgment — not the fact that something happened.
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