UF Commencement: Six Ceremonies in December, Three Weeks in Spring

Six ceremonies, three days, and your college picks one

UF’s December round is close and fully published, which makes it the easier of its two rounds to plan. It is also longer than a single ceremony day.

When	Ceremony	Who	Where
Fri 11 Dec, 2:00 p.m.	Doctoral	All colleges except Dentistry and Law	O’Connell Center
Fri 11 Dec, 7:00 p.m.	Ceremony 1	Agricultural and Life Sciences; Health and Human Performance; the Arts; Pharmacy; Medicine; Nursing; Public Health and Health Professions; Veterinary Medicine	O’Connell Center
Sat 12 Dec, 9:00 a.m.	Ceremony 2	Journalism and Communications; Warrington College of Business	O’Connell Center
Sat 12 Dec, 2:00 p.m.	Ceremony 3	Design, Construction and Planning; Liberal Arts and Sciences	O’Connell Center
Sat 12 Dec, 7:00 p.m.	Ceremony 4	Education; Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering	O’Connell Center
Sun 13 Dec, 9:00 a.m.	Warrington MBA	Online, South Florida and Weekend Professional MBA	Phillips Center

Two things in that table are new to this page and both cost money if you miss them.

There is a Sunday. The Warrington MBA ceremony on 13 December is a real ceremony on a third day, and it is not in the same building as the rest. A family with an MBA graduate needs the Saturday night, which is precisely the night a two-day reading of this round would tell them to check out.

The college split is published, so you do not have to guess which of the four bachelor and master ceremonies is yours. Find your college in the table and the rest of the weekend follows from it.

Doors, tickets and the two-hour ceremony

Each main ceremony runs a published two hours, and guest doors open 90 minutes before it.

• 7:00 p.m. ceremonies: doors 5:30 p.m., Gates 1 and 3
• 9:00 a.m. ceremony: doors 7:30 a.m., Gates 1 and 3
• 2:00 p.m. ceremony: doors 12:30 p.m., Gates 1 and 3
• Doctoral ceremony: doors 12:30 p.m., Gate 1

On tickets, UF is refreshingly plain, and it says the same thing for all four December ceremonies:

We do not plan to ticket this ceremony nor limit the per-candidate guest count.

Bring who you like. Everyone entering the O’Connell Center goes through a metal detector, and cameras are welcome, including interchangeable lenses, which is unusually relaxed for a venue this size.

The exception is in spring, and it is worth knowing now if it applies to you. The Medicine MD and PA ceremonies are capped at ten tickets per graduate, and the Dentistry ceremony is ticketed at a number the college sets during the spring semester. Those are the only capped ceremonies UF runs, and none of them falls in December.

Spring is three weeks, and almost nobody expects that

If there is one thing on this page worth reading twice, it is this.

UF’s spring 2027 round is not a weekend, and it is not a single week either. It runs from Sunday 25 April to Saturday 15 May.

When	Ceremony	Where
Sun 25 Apr, 9:00 a.m.	Warrington MBA, Executive and Online	Phillips Center
Wed 28 Apr to Mon 3 May	College recognition ceremonies, varying by college	Varies
Thu 29 Apr, 9:00 a.m.	Doctoral	O’Connell Center
Fri 30 Apr, 7:00 p.m.	University-Wide Commencement	Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, outdoors
Fri 14 May, 12 noon	Levin College of Law	O’Connell Center
Sat 15 May, 10:00 a.m.	Pharmacy, MS and PharmD	O’Connell Center

A family whose graduate’s college holds its recognition ceremony on the Monday is travelling after most of the crowd has left, which is inconvenient for the schedule and potentially rather good for the room rate. A family with a law graduate is travelling a full fortnight after “UF graduation weekend” has been and gone.

The one ceremony that confers the degree is the Friday evening one. UF puts it in as many words: bachelor’s, master’s and specialist’s degrees are conferred only at the University-Wide Commencement, not at the college recognition ceremonies. If you can only attend one event, that is the one, and it is the one that fills Ben Hill Griffin Stadium.

That ceremony is also outdoors. Guest gates 1, 2, 12, 15, 16 and 18 open at 5:30 p.m. for a 7:00 p.m. start.

A weather statement that only covers half the year

UF publishes a clear weather position for December:

These ceremonies are rain-or-shine events, since they’re scheduled indoors at the Stephen C. O’Connell Center.

Only severe weather, a tornado or a hurricane, would postpone or cancel them, and UF would announce that on its commencement site, on WUFT 89.1 and WJUF 90.1, and through the UF Alert system.

That reasoning does not survive the move to the stadium. The spring university-wide ceremony is outdoors, in Florida, in the evening, and the “since they’re scheduled indoors” clause plainly does not apply to it. We could find no separate wet-weather plan published for it. That is a genuine gap rather than something we did not look for, and it is the thing to check before travelling for the spring round.

Reading the times, practically

The 7:00 p.m. ceremonies are the easiest to reach and the hardest to leave. A family staying in Ocala, 43 minutes south because Gainesville’s rates tripled, can drive up comfortably in the afternoon and will be driving back at nine at night.

The 9:00 a.m. ceremonies invert that. Easy to leave, hard to reach, and with doors at 7:30 a.m. they mean setting off from Ocala around six.

The 2:00 p.m. slots are the forgiving ones in both directions, and if your college happens to hold one, the logistics of this cluster largely stop being a problem.

What we checked, and what we could not

Every date, time, venue, college assignment, door time and ticket statement above was read directly from UF’s own commencement site on 18 August 2026, across its December doctoral, bachelor and degree-specific schedules and the equivalent spring pages. Every weekday was verified independently: 11 December 2026 is a Friday, 12 December a Saturday, 13 December a Sunday, 25 April 2027 a Sunday, 28 April a Wednesday, 29 April a Thursday, 30 April a Friday, 3 May a Monday, 14 May a Friday and 15 May a Saturday.

Three corrections this audit made to our own pages are worth naming. We had been recording “venue not published” against all six stored ceremonies; UF publishes one for every ceremony it schedules. We had been missing the Sunday MBA ceremony entirely, which meant the booking window this cluster emitted checked out on the morning that ceremony started. And we had the spring round two weeks too narrow at both ends.

Not published, and each is a real gap:

• Dates for the Dentistry, Medicine MD and Medicine PA spring ceremonies, all three still to be confirmed and all three at the Phillips Center.
• The Dentistry ticket allotment, which UF says the college will communicate during the spring semester.
• A wet-weather plan for the outdoor spring university-wide ceremony.
• College-level recognition ceremony times, which UF says vary by college and department and publishes separately.