What is the acceptance rate for a call for papers? Figures from over 2,000 submissions

The acceptance rate for a call for papers is 5 per cent at most in the typical market, and up to 19 per cent per conference in our submissions for clients. Per individual abstract, roughly one in fourteen of ours is accepted, about 7 per cent. An abstract is the talk proposal you submit in a call for papers, the public invitation a professional conference uses to assemble its programme. The figures come from 2,189 abstracts we have submitted for clients and from the 1,374 of them on which a decision has been made. This article explains how the two rates differ and what moves them, and works out how many submissions you need.

What is the acceptance rate for a call for papers?

At the volume of submissions a plannable pipeline needs, 5 per cent at most is typical in the market, and in our submissions for clients we reach up to 19 per cent acceptances per conference. For professional conferences in the business world there is no overarching statistic on acceptance rates; individual organisers publish their own figures, but a market value is missing. What circulates online mostly comes from the peer review of academic journals, where different rules apply than at a conference looking for practitioners for its programme. So we looked at our own data.

Of the 2,189 abstracts we have submitted for clients, 1,374 have been decided, meaning the conference has accepted or declined. 94 were accepted and 1,280 declined. That gives an acceptance rate of around 7 per cent per abstract, or roughly one in fourteen. At conference level, 83 of 433 decided conferences accepted at least one abstract, roughly one in five.

How does the rate at large tech conferences compare with small industry conferences?

At large tech conferences, the acceptance rate is in the single digits to low double digits, while in our experience it is higher at smaller industry conferences and on the direct email route. One organiser that publishes its figures is the Cloud Native Computing Foundation: for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 in London it reported 2,947 submissions and an acceptance rate of 8 per cent, and for the 2023 edition in Amsterdam 1,768 submissions and 11 per cent.

Smaller industry conferences receive fewer submissions because their call addresses a narrower audience, and the organisers often decide themselves. In our experience a mid-sized conference easily receives 300 submissions, and a small industry conference considerably fewer. Each conference decides how many slots its programme reserves for the open call, because keynotes, sponsor slots and invitations are filled without a call.

What counts as a decided abstract?

An abstract counts as decided as soon as the conference has accepted or declined it. Weeks often pass between submission and decision, so abstracts whose conference has not yet replied are not among the 1,374. A rate that also counted open cases as rejections would come out considerably lower, even though some of those abstracts will still be accepted. All figures come from our own submissions for clients.

Why the rate per conference is higher than per abstract

The two rates measure different things. Per abstract, every single talk proposal counts; per conference, an acceptance counts as soon as the conference has accepted at least one proposal. If an expert submits several abstracts to the same conference, for example for different tracks or formats, all of them count individually in the abstract rate, but only the hit counts in the conference rate.

An example makes the gap visible. If you submit three abstracts to a conference and one is accepted, the abstract rate shows one acceptance next to two rejections, while the conference counts as an acceptance. Our figures show 94 accepted abstracts next to 83 accepting conferences, so some conferences took more than one abstract.

You need both figures for planning. The rate per abstract tells you how many texts have to be written, and the rate per conference shows how many organisers you need to be in the running with to get an appearance. For winning clients, the appearance is what counts, which is why you plan your calendar with the conference rate.

How do I raise my acceptance rate?

Your acceptance rate rises with the fit between topic and conference, with a title that stands out in the pile, and with the volume of submissions. These are the factors on which a submission is won or lost, and if you work on them systematically, you lift your rate above the market value.

A programme committee, the group of organisers and often volunteer experts that decides on the programme, assesses each proposal against all the others in the same track. A good talk in the wrong track fails at a conference where it should never have landed. Most submissions fail on this fit or because they sound like a product pitch. The article What a programme committee looks for describes what committees want.

The title decides whether an abstract gets attention, because the committee reads a great many proposals in a short time. It makes the topic and the benefit to the audience clear, and that rarely works in the first draft. Volume works through probability: because every conference decides in its own window and the rate per abstract stays in single digits, an appearance comes only from a larger number of submissions, and with few submissions a single acceptance or rejection shifts the whole rate.

Following up works where a conference without an open call fills its programme through direct requests, and after a decision date has passed. During the review of an open call, a message changes nothing about the assessment, as the article Following up after a call for papers shows.

How many submissions does one appearance take?

At around 7 per cent per abstract, one acceptance comes on average after fourteen abstracts, and five acceptances take around seventy. If you want to count on an acceptance, plan with considerably more, because with n submissions at a rate p, the chance of at least one acceptance is 1 − (1 − p)^n. After fourteen abstracts that is only around 64 per cent, and the chance rises above 90 per cent from 32 abstracts.

At conference level, the same formula gives a similar picture. At 19 per cent per conference, five conferences give a chance of around 65 per cent of at least one acceptance, eleven conferences around 90 per cent and twenty more than 98 per cent. At the typical 5 per cent, the same chance with twenty conferences is only around 64 per cent, and more than one in three such rounds ends without an acceptance.

Then there is time. Decisions come after the submission deadline, and in our analysis of 2,415 conferences that publicly invite talk proposals for 2026, the median gap between submission deadline and conference start is 50 days. Too small a volume of submissions therefore usually shows only when the calendar for the coming months is already empty. The call for papers guide shows how the whole process runs, from the call to the stage.

What this means alongside your day-to-day business

You run a consultancy, work as a freelancer or lead a company, and the stage is meant to bring you B2B clients. For a handful of appearances a year, these rates mean around seventy abstracts, spread across many conferences, each with its own form and deadline. Every abstract needs to fit its conference and carry a title that stands out, and on top come tracking deadlines and following up over months in which your day-to-day business also needs attention. The article Submitting yourself or hiring a speaker agency expresses this calculation in working days.

Stage Starter takes this work off your hands: we find the right calls, write the submission and submit in your name, follow up and accompany you all the way to the stage. The rates in this article come from that work for our clients. From you come your expertise and your approval of talk and abstracts. Working together starts from €990 net per month, and in the Speaker Audit from €2,000 net we clarify beforehand which conferences your topic suits. No agency can guarantee an acceptance, because the programme committee decides.

Volume as a planning figure

If you know the rates, you plan your stage work in volumes and read a rejection as one of the expected outcomes on the way to the next acceptance. How many submissions your goals require, and who writes and tracks them, is something we clarify in an introductory call.