You checked CAPS and there it is. An offer from 2022 for a course you never wanted, at a school you never attended, still sitting there unanswered. And this year you finally got the admission you actually wanted.
So now you are staring at a Reject button and wondering whether pressing it will pull down the good one with it.
The short answer
No. Rejecting the old offer does not affect your 2026 admission.
JAMB said this itself when it extended the acceptance deadline on 29 August 2026. Candidates who hold a 2026 offer and still have an older offer pending were told plainly not to be apprehensive, and that rejecting the earlier offer has no adverse effect on the new one.
That is the whole answer. The rest of this post is why the fear exists, what happens if you do nothing instead, and how to actually do it.
Why people are afraid of this
The fear is reasonable, and it comes from three places.
First, the word reject sounds final. On a portal that has already caused people to lose admissions, nobody wants to press a button with reject written on it.
Second, most students do not know whether JAMB treats their profile as one record or as several separate ones. If it is one record, surely rejecting something inside it damages the rest. That is the instinct, and it is wrong here.
Third, WhatsApp. Every admission season produces a confident voice note explaining that rejecting an old offer flags your profile, or blocks you for two years, or hands your slot to someone else. None of that came from JAMB.
What JAMB actually said
On 29 August 2026, Dr Fabian Benjamin, Acting Director of Public Affairs and Protocol, announced that the deadline for candidates offered admission from 2021 to date to accept or reject those offers had moved from 31 August to 30 September 2026.
Three things came with that announcement.
It covers offers made through the regular process and through the Centralised University and Institution Admission process. It applies to anything still pending from 2021 onwards, not only recent years. And at the end of the deadline, any offer that has been neither accepted nor rejected reverts automatically to Not Admitted on the Board records, and stays that way.
The reassurance about 2026 offers was part of the same statement. JAMB volunteered it, which tells you the Board already knew people were sitting frozen over exactly this question.
Doing nothing is the risky option, not rejecting
This is the part that gets missed.
People assume the safe move is to touch nothing. Leave the old offer alone, protect the new one, walk away. But silence is not neutral on CAPS. An offer left unanswered past 30 September does not simply expire quietly. It is recorded, and the record says you were offered admission and did not respond.
Rejecting is a clean, deliberate answer. Ignoring is an answer too, just one you did not choose and cannot explain later.
If you are unsure what any of the labels on your screen mean before you act, read our guide to what each CAPS admission status means first.
How to reject an old offer on CAPS
- Sign in to the JAMB e-Facility portal with the email address on your JAMB profile. If you cannot get in, recover your profile first rather than creating a new one.
- Open Check Admission Status and select the year the old offer belongs to, not 2026.
- Open Access My CAPS, then Admission Status.
- Read the institution and the course on the screen. Confirm this is the offer you mean to reject, because the year selector is easy to get wrong.
- Select Reject Admission and confirm.
- Take a screenshot of the confirmation screen and keep it.
- Go back, switch the year to 2026, and confirm your current offer is still showing as it was.
Step seven is the one people skip and the one that would actually catch a problem. It takes thirty seconds.
What rejecting does not do
It does not cancel your 2026 admission.
It does not remove your JAMB result or your registration number.
It does not stop you applying again in a future year.
What it does do is close an old file. If you ever want to revive an admission from a previous year, rejecting it removes that option, so only reject offers you are genuinely finished with. If there is any chance you may want to take up an old offer, accept it instead and speak to the institution.
If the old offer is the one you want
Some people are in the opposite position. The old offer is the good one, and it has been sitting there because of a fee, a transfer or a change of mind.
In that case, accept it before 30 September and then deal with the school directly. Accepting on CAPS is not the same as being cleared by the institution, and the institution has its own deadlines and its own acceptance fee to pay. If you are regularising an older admission, the printing problems covered in our regularization guide will probably apply to you too.
One more group is caught in this month’s deadlines without knowing it: parents of candidates under 16, whose results JAMB released on 5 September for viewing only. If that is your house, read our guide to the JAMB underage results and the 320 rule before anyone tells you the score alone gets the child in.
Deadline season is scam season
Every extension produces a fresh crop of people offering to accept or reject on your behalf for a fee, or claiming they can restore a forfeited admission.
Rejecting an offer on CAPS is free and takes about two minutes. Nobody needs your JAMB password to do it for you, and handing it over is how profiles get hijacked in September. If someone asks for money to press a button you can press yourself, that is the whole scam.
Where we come in
We write these guides because the portal explains itself badly and the gap gets filled by guesswork. If you have read this and you are still not sure which offer is which on your screen, send us a message and describe what you are seeing.
You have until 30 September. That is long enough to think it through properly, and far too short to spend the whole month afraid of a button.
Full detail on the deadline itself, including the four week rule on fresh offers, is in our JAMB acceptance deadline guide.