Institutes of National Importance Combined Entrance Test(INI-CET)

About the exam

About INI-CET

The INI-CET exam fills MD, MS, MDS, MD (Hospital Administration) and six-year DM and MCh seats at AIIMS New Delhi and the other AIIMS, JIPMER, NIMHANS, PGIMER and SCTIMST. AIIMS New Delhi runs the form, the paper, the result and the allocation of seats, while each institute keeps its own admission rules. A session is named for the month its courses start rather than the month its paper is held: the July 2026 session sat its paper in May 2026, and AIIMS's tentative schedule puts the January 2027 session's paper in November 2026.

INI-CET is the Institutes of National Importance Combined Entrance Test, administered by the Examination Section of AIIMS New Delhi in consultation with nodal officers from each participating institute. The INI-CET July 2026 Prospectus Part A names the courses as MD, MS, DM (6 yrs), MCh (6 yrs), MDS and MD (Hospital Administration), at AIIMS New Delhi and the other AIIMS, JIPMER Puducherry, NIMHANS Bengaluru, PGIMER Chandigarh and SCTIMST Trivandrum.

Part A makes AIIMS New Delhi the sole authority for the application, the conduct of the paper, the result and seat allocation. Admission itself follows each institute's own rules, printed in that institute's Part B prospectus, and where Part A and a Part B disagree the institute's rule applies. Part A calls the test "just a common examination conducted in larger public interest as per approval of competent authorities at all participating INIs" and says it does not change any institute's rules on seats, allocation or admission.

Part A requires an MBBS for the six-year DM and MCh, the only DM and MCh courses this paper covers. The three-year DM and MCh go through a different test: the AIIMS Tentative Schedule of Entrance Examinations, 2026 lists them under INI-SS, with dates of their own. On the AIIMS examination portal, every INI-CET session has a page carrying Prospectus, Advertisement, Notification, Seat Position and Result buttons, and the portal page for the July 2026 session is where that session's notices and allotment results were posted.

At a glance

INI-CET highlights

Calendar

Important dates

For the January 2027 session, the AIIMS Tentative Schedule of Entrance Examinations, 2026 tentatively lists the INI-CET paper on Sunday, 1 November 2026 and the result notification on 7 November 2026. That tentative schedule has rows for the paper, the result and four counselling stages, but none for registration, which each session's own prospectus fixes.

The July 2026 session, whose last date of admission has passed, ran on this timetable:

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Part A deals only with eligibility to apply and sit the paper, and warns that the conditions for admission can differ between institutes, as each Part B sets out. It lists these routes for the July 2026 session:

• Indian nationals with an Indian degree. An MBBS for MD, MS, DM (6 years), MCh (6 years) and MD (Hospital Administration), or a BDS for MDS, from a university recognised by the National Medical Commission/Medical Council of India or the Dental Council of India, with the 12-month compulsory rotating internship completed on or before 31 July 2026. Anyone finishing the internship after that date could not register. Part A also set a minimum aggregate across all professional MBBS or BDS examinations of 50% for SC and ST candidates and 55% for every other category, OBC and EWS included; a PwBD candidate takes the minimum of their own category.
• The 2007-08 BDS batch. Graduates who passed with four and a half years plus six months of paid rotatory internship, or a five-year course, under the DCI's Revised BDS Course (4th Amendment) Regulations, 2011 are deemed equivalent to the four-plus-one-year BDS, a provision Part A carries from the DCI's 2013 notification.
• Indian nationals who graduated abroad. Marks in the Foreign Medical Graduate Examination conducted by NBE replace the aggregate, against the same 50% and 55% minimums in Part A.
• Sponsored Indian candidates. The same minimum marks in Part A, plus a sponsorship certificate uploaded by the deadline and produced in original at admission. For all AIIMS, NIMHANS and SCTIMST the candidate must have worked three years for the sponsoring employer by 31 January or 31 July, for the January or July session; JIPMER and PGIMER set out their three-year service rule in their own Part B. The sponsorship form turns away sponsors that are private institutes, hospitals or nursing homes, and candidates on tenure, ad hoc, contract or honorary appointments. For MD and MS at AIIMS New Delhi, it lowers the aggregate bar to 50% for sponsored candidates who served in the Armed Forces and to 52% for those with three or more years in Central or State Government service; at PGIMER both groups need 50%.
• Foreign nationals. An MBBS or BDS with the internship, 55% aggregate or equivalent (converted from grades through a certificate from the university), and a No Objection Certificate from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, as Part A requires. An NOC from the Ministry of External Affairs alone is not accepted.
• OCI and PIO cardholders. Under the Supreme Court's decision of 3 February 2023 in Writ Petition (Civil) 891/2021, a candidate born before 4 March 2021 who secured the OCI card before that date counts as an Indian national for unreserved open seats only, and other OCI and PIO holders count as foreign nationals, as Part A applies the ruling. No NOC is needed, but the earliest-issued valid OCI card must be uploaded.

Online registration also needs a provisional or permanent registration with the NMC, the DCI or a state medical or dental council. A candidate who has already done, or is pursuing, an MD, MS, MDS, six-year DM or MCh, or MD (Hospital Administration) at the time of seat allocation is not considered for admission. Sponsored and foreign-national applicants cannot take general seats, and general applicants cannot take theirs. Part A sets no age limit for sitting the test.

Two institutes did apply age caps at seat allocation in the July 2025 session. AIIMS's INI-CET July 2025 Seat Allocation Brochure for Rounds 1 and 2 limited NIMHANS's MD Psychiatry to 32 years for unreserved candidates, 35 for OBC, 37 for SC, ST and PwBD and 45 for sponsored candidates, and its DM Neurology, MCh Neurosurgery and MD Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation to 32, all as on 1 July 2025. SCTIMST's limits were 40 for general, EWS and foreign-national candidates, 43 for OBC, 45 for SC, ST, ex-service and PwBD candidates and 50 for sponsored candidates.

Step by step

Application process and fee

Applications run on the AIIMS examination portal under Academic Course, then INI-CET. The July 2026 registration was a one-time form covering basic information, qualification details, experience, the images (photograph, signature and left thumb impression) and the fee, as Part A describes it. The fee is paid online by debit card, credit card or net banking, any bank charge falls on the applicant, and it is never refunded; only a fee paid more than once against the same form comes back, after verification and the end of the examination process.

SC, ST, OBC (NCL), EWS and PwBD certificates had to be uploaded with the online registration by its last date. For July 2026 an OBC non-creamy-layer certificate counted if issued between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026, or between 1 April 2026 and the 25 April 2026 closing date, and EWS certificates followed the same two windows; an OBC applicant awaiting renewal could upload the older certificate with the renewal acknowledgement and produce the valid one when asked, under the certificate rules in Part A. An OBC certificate valid only for a state, not the Central Government, was rejected. A later switch from general to a reserved category, or between reserved categories, is refused, except that a community notified within three months before the application may be considered before the result.

Uploaded images are checked for format and quality, and an applicant whose images fail gets a further chance to re-upload in the correction window before the form is rejected, a step Part A schedules in its Important Dates.

Before the exam

Admit card and exam day

The admit card is online only, downloaded from "MyPage" after login, and AIIMS does not post or email it. It is issued only to applicants who completed every stage of the form, no candidate enters the centre without a printout, and that printout must carry details such as the IP address. Errors go through the query section of the candidate dashboard, where Part A warns a reply can take up to 3 working days. AIIMS's allotment of centre and shift is final.

Part A's disciplinary list bars any mobile phone, even switched off, along with smart watches, pen drives, Bluetooth devices and cameras. Candidates with blindness, locomotor disability affecting both arms or cerebral palsy may have a scribe and compensatory time of twenty minutes per hour; other benchmark disabilities, and some below the benchmark with difficulty in writing, qualify on a certificate from a government health institution. A scribe, whether AIIMS's or the candidate's own, must hold a qualification one step below MBBS and never below matriculation, and a candidate who opts for their own scribe and arrives without one gets no replacement from AIIMS.

Structure

Exam pattern

The paper is computer-based, and its objective questions are of varying types, including Single Correct Choice and Multiple Correct Choice questions, according to the scheme of examination in Part A. Its timing is fixed in blocks: the paper is divided on a random basis into four parts of 50 questions, each open for 45 minutes. Only the active part can be seen or answered. When its 45 minutes run out it is submitted automatically and the next part opens, so a skipped or marked-for-review question can only be revisited inside its own part.

A wrong answer costs a third of a mark, and an unanswered or marked-for-review question scores zero. Part A prints a single scheme of examination, with no separate one for MDS applicants, although AIIMS's allocation results rank MDS candidates on a list of their own, as the MDS section of the July 2025 second-round result shows.

What to study

Syllabus

The only account of the paper's content in the July 2026 Prospectus Part A is its scheme of examination, which fixes the question types, the timing and the marking but leaves the subjects and their weight unstated.

How to prepare

Preparation and books

The one instruction in the July 2026 Prospectus Part A that bears on preparation sits under its scheme of examination: because a part cannot be reopened, candidates are told to attempt every question they can in each part, reviews of skipped and marked questions included, within that part's time. That is as far as Part A goes towards preparation.

Where it is held

Exam centres

INI-CET applicants choose states, not cities. During the July 2026 application each candidate picked three states in order of preference after paying the fee, and states were allotted first come, first allotted, subject to the computer nodes available in each state, under Part A. The choice cannot be changed once the application is complete, AIIMS may still allot a centre in another state, and states may be added or removed. The prospectus gives the examination centres only as cities all over India.

After the exam

Answer key

In the July 2026 Prospectus Part A, the Important Dates table moves from the 16 May 2026 paper to the expected result on 23 May 2026 with no row in between for publishing a key or taking objections, and the scheme of examination is silent on the subject.

Scores

Result and scorecard

Part A uses INI-CET percentile scores to decide eligibility for postgraduate seats at every participating institute. Part A settles equal marks by applying its tie-break criteria in sequence: less negative marking, a better percentage in the MBBS or BDS degree, greater age, and finally the name in alphabetical order.

Eligibility is not scrutinised before the paper: candidates sit the examination and seat allocation provisionally, and their eligibility stays open to verification even after admission, under Part A. If a reservation certificate is found invalid or issued outside the permitted dates, the candidate may be treated as general category and considered for unreserved seats, subject to the qualifying percentile.

The result list doubles as the entry list for counselling. For July 2025, the seat allocation brochure for rounds 1 and 2 made everyone listed in Result Notification No. 70/2025 of 24 May 2025 eligible for both rounds, subject to the prospectus eligibility rules, except OBC and EWS candidates ranked below the UR cut-off rank who had failed to produce a valid category certificate.

Scores you need

Cutoff

The qualifying percentile, fixed in Part A, was the 50th percentile for unreserved candidates (OCI included), EWS, sponsored and foreign nationals, and the 45th percentile for OBC, SC, ST and PwBD candidates and for Bhutanese nationals at PGIMER Chandigarh only.

The other figure read as a cut-off is the rank of the last candidate allotted a seat in a round, which AIIMS prints in a "Last Allocated Candidate Rank" table with a figure for each category, not split by institute or subject. For the second round of the July 2025 session it read:

The same notification, dated 10 July 2025, gives PwBD ranks of 47,791 under UR, 41,024 under OBC and 45,862 under ST, and 42,059 for foreign nationals and 40,843 for sponsored candidates in MD and MS courses.

Getting a seat

Counselling and seat allotment

AIIMS New Delhi allocates INI-CET seats itself, online only, in at least two rounds followed by an open round, by merit, the candidate's choices and each institute's reservation policy, a process Part A calls Institute-wise Synchronization of Seat Allocation. Part A promises the detailed schedule and procedure "in due course of time", in documents of their own.

For the July 2025 session those rules came in the seat allocation brochure for rounds 1 and 2. Candidates could add any number of institute-and-subject choices, a candidate who skipped first-round choice filling was carried on their mock-round choices, and the choices locked when first-round filling closed and were reused for the second round. A first-round allottee had to pick Option 1 (accept and take no further part) or Option 2 (accept and stay in for an upgrade); there was no option to refuse, and not choosing forfeited the seat along with a place in every later round except the open round. Every allottee had to report in person with original certificates or a Rs 3 lakh deposit, and failing to join a first-round or upgraded seat drew a Rs 3 lakh penalty.

Institutional preference differed by institute under that brochure: allocated by roster at AIIMS New Delhi, the other AIIMS and JIPMER, with no preference seats at NIMHANS, PGIMER or SCTIMST. The July 2025 second-round result defines the AIIMS preference as a UR seat of an AIIMS allocated to a candidate who took an MBBS at that AIIMS and meets the UR eligibility, and a JIPMER "Institute" (INST) candidate as one who took an MBBS at JIPMER. In that second round, an allottee reporting without originals paid the Rs 3 lakh deposit as a demand draft, refunded once the originals were handed in, and originals not deposited within five days cost both the seat and the draft.

The July 2025 open-round brochure asked every entrant for a Rs 3 lakh security deposit by RTGS or NEFT. A candidate already holding a seat could enter, but an open-round allotment vacated the held seat as a deemed resignation, with any institute penalty to pay, and an open-round allottee who did not join by the deadline lost the deposit. The July 2026 session published its own brochures, schedules and FAQ among the INI-CET July 2026 Session Notices, and those, not the July 2025 set, governed that session.

Where it is accepted

Participating institutes

Table 1 of Part A lists AIIMS New Delhi, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Jodhpur, Nagpur, Patna, Raipur, Rishikesh, Bibinagar, Bathinda, Deoghar, Mangalagiri, Raebareli, Kalyani, Bilaspur, Gorakhpur, Guwahati, Rajkot and Jammu, alongside JIPMER Puducherry, NIMHANS Bengaluru, PGIMER Chandigarh and SCTIMST Trivandrum.

Seats come in two groups that cannot be swapped unless an institute's Part B says so: open seats for Indian nationals, and sponsored and foreign-national seats. Part A has AIIMS publish the consolidated institute-wise and speciality-wise seat list before the result; institutes can change it until then, and it does not change after the result is declared. The sponsored and foreign-national list appears under the portal's Seats Available tab by the time the completion-of-application stage opens.

Get help

Contact

Part A directs INI-CET queries to the help or query section of the candidate dashboard, "MyPage", reached after login, where a reply can take up to 3 working days. Telephone calls or written requests about applications or admit cards before their scheduled dates are not entertained. Its contact page names the Assistant Controller (Exams), Examination Section, AIIMS, Ansari Nagar, New Delhi 110029, and its cover puts the Examination Section on the 1st Floor of the Convergence Block, but Part A routes correspondence through MyPage only.

Questions about an institute's admission or allocation rules go to that institute's nodal officer, listed in Appendix F of Part A. For July 2026 these included registrar@aiims.edu for AIIMS New Delhi, academicjr@jipmer.ac.in for JIPMER, admissions@nimhans.net for NIMHANS, registrar@pgimer.edu.in for PGIMER and reg@sctimst.ac.in for SCTIMST.

Source

Official links

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Disclaimer

Disclaimer

Exact exam dates, registration windows, qualifying percentiles/cutoffs, answer keys, results, seat matrix and participating-institute lists change every cycle. Anything per-cycle here is stated for the cycle it names and is taken from the conducting body's own notification; confirm it on the official website before acting on it. Expertie does not conduct any exam, process applications or charge fees.

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