How hard is it to actually get promoted in your job?
Every branch ranks you against everyone else in your job and draws a line: make the cutoff, you pin; miss it, you wait. It’s the single biggest predictor of your career — and the one number the recruiter never shows you. We pulled the cutoffs the services publish, built the multi-year trends, and mapped exactly where the rest are hidden behind a login.
The transparency scorecard
Six branches, six different promotion systems. Every one of them computes your odds by job. Here’s who shows you the number — and who makes you take it on faith.
By-MOS points cutoff (E5 / E6), published every month by HQDA.
By-rating advancement-sequence cutoff (E5–E9), in the public ALCGENL message.
By-rating advancement quotas are public; the per-rating exam cut line is CAC-only.
By-MOS cutting scores (Cpl / Sgt) exist — but the DoD stopped publishing the numbers in 2001.
Per-AFSC cutoff scores are computed every cycle — and kept behind CAC. Only branch-wide averages are public.
No cutoff system — Guardians promote by evaluation board, not a per-specialty score.
“Hidden · CAC only” doesn’t mean the number doesn’t exist — it means the service computes your by-job promotion odds and won’t let the public see them. That’s the gap this index exists to close.
Army: which MOS got harder to promote in
July 2024 – June 2026 · 23 monthly HQDA memos · 144 MOS tracked
Higher points = harder. 94Y eased the most (762→269).
Full Army cutoff tracker — every MOS, monthly trend →Coast Guard: which ratings tightened — and opened up
May 2018 – May 2023 · 9 exam terms · 21 ratings tracked
Coast Guard cutoffs run the opposite way: it’s a list-depth number, so a higher cutoff = more advanced = easier. IS1 opened up the most (3→34). Raw cutoffs aren’t comparable across ratings of different sizes — only each rating’s own trend is.
Full Coast Guard SWE tracker — every rating, all grades →Where the rest of it is hidden
The Navy publishes by-rating advancement quotas, but keeps the per-rating exam cut line behind a CAC login. We’re assembling the public quota trend now — it shows opportunity by rating, the closest honest proxy.
Marines promote to Cpl and Sgt on a by-MOS cutting score. The Corps published those numbers publicly until January 2001 — then moved them behind a CAC. The score that decides your promotion still exists; the public just can’t read it anymore.
WAPS computes a cutoff score for every AFSC each cycle. The Air Force releases branch-wide averages to the public and keeps the per-AFSC cutoffs behind CAC — so you can see the Air Force’s odds, but not your job’s.
If you have a CAC and want to help close these gaps with official aggregate numbers (never anyone’s individual record), get in touch. We’ll only ever publish branch-and-job aggregates, sourced and dated like everything else here.
How we built this
Army figures are machine-extracted from the signed HQDA AHRC-PDV-PE promotion-point cutoff memos — 24 months, Active Army, E-5 and E-6. Coast Guard figures are transcribed from the official PPC ALCGENL Servicewide-Exam cutoff messages — nine exam terms, E-5 through E-9, with member names stripped on ingest because that’s PII. Every figure links back to its source. Nothing is estimated, interpolated, or filled in; a month or cycle we couldn’t retrieve is simply absent, and small samples are flagged.
We normalize each branch’s native metric to plain “got harder / got easier” language so you can compare across services, and we never rank jobs against each other on raw cutoffs when the underlying pools aren’t comparable. The point isn’t to scare you off a job — it’s to put the number the recruiter skipped back in your hands before you sign, re-class, or reenlist.