Do colleges calculate honors into your GPA when recalculating?

Honors classes in general are not re-calculated by colleges as weighted classes.

In fact, almost all the top colleges in America only use unweighted GPA to a normalized 4.00 scale regardless of whether the student received their grades on a 6 or 7 or 11 point scale. And they often re-calc GPAs submitted on a 100 pt scale back to a 4.00 scale so that when they look at applicants it's an "apples to apples comparison". That is the first academic threshold marker. The 2nd hurdle, is course rigor, and to do that, they look to see how many APs and IBs and DE, and college courses you took and what your grades and test scores where in those College level courses. The spread between your UWGPA and WGPA helps them validate that you challenged yourself with difficult college coursework during high school and succeeded.

UC schools have their own re-calculation methodology which weighs APs and IBs for out-of-state applicants but only includes a subset of Honors classes for California In- state applicants. Here is the link to the honors classes they count for in-state applicants.

https://hs-articulation.ucop.edu/agcourselist/institution/3248

In short, if you are a California resident and take say Honors Calculus or Honors Latin III, it counts as weighted class. From all these classes, the UC schools calcultate your UC- GPA and typically they align very closely to WGPAs on applicants transcripts since their CA HSs follows a similar methodology of weighing things.

Regardless if you apply to an Ivy, Elite or top Liberal arts college, your UWGPA will count more toward your admissions. As I wrote previously your WGPA is a good indicator if you challenged yourself and succeeded in getting top marks in the hardest classes your school offered. That is why, top schools who have admit GPAs of say 3.90-4.00 expect to see some spread when they review WGPA read off their transcripts like 4.30-4.50. They will look at your course list and see how many and what APs or IBs you took and learn whether or not you have taken advantage of all those opportunities offered you to your advantage. If your school offers 15-25 APs and you have taken only 3, then that looks like you didn't take advantage of what was offered you. Some students have a 4.0 GPA but have not taken any APs/IBs/DEs/or College classes. Such students appear less competitive academically than those that have a full IB courseload and got 6s and 7s on their IBs or someone that has taken 9-12 APs and scores mostly 4s and 5s. While advanced coursework is not required to apply to top schools, most successful admits have them under their belt if that makes any sense.

Hope that answers your question.

Indeed, they take account of every single course you submitted. So, the honors GPA will be counted too.