Joint Entrance Examination (Main)(JEE Main)

About the exam

About JEE Main

Applications for JEE (Main) 2026 opened on 31 October 2025, the date set in the JEE (Main) 2026 Information Bulletin. Two days later the National Testing Agency corrected that bulletin. An appendix had told candidates an onscreen standard calculator would be available during the computer-based test; a public notice dated 02 November 2025 said the feature "does NOT apply to JEE (Main) conducted by the NTA, as the use of calculators in any form is not permitted in this examination", called it a typographic error and pointed candidates to a revised bulletin (NTA public notice on the virtual calculator in JEE (Main) 2026).

Details like that decide how a candidate practises, and they live in the conducting body's own documents rather than in any summary of them. NTA ran JEE (Main) 2026 across two sessions and declared both papers' results. The counselling that turns those ranks into seats is run by other bodies altogether, and for the 2026-27 academic year it has already worked through to its special rounds.

JEE (Main) is the gate to undergraduate engineering, architecture and planning seats in the centrally funded technical system, and the qualifying step for the harder paper above it. The information bulletin puts it plainly: Paper 1 is conducted for admission to undergraduate engineering programmes at NITs, IIITs, other Centrally Funded Technical Institutions and institutions or universities funded or recognised by participating State Governments, it is "also an eligibility test for JEE (Advanced), which is conducted for admission to IITs", and Paper 2 is conducted for admission to B.Arch and B.Planning courses in the country.

The examination changed hands before it changed shape. NTA's engineering exam page records that JEE Main "is being conducted by the NTA from 2019 onwards" and that it "was being conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) till 2018" (NTA's Engineering Exam page).

Paper 2 carries its own candidate pool, and NTA publishes its size. Across the 2026 cycle, 94,513 candidates registered for B.Arch and 67,139 appeared, while B.Planning drew 45,729 registrations and 30,050 appearances (NTA press release declaring the JEE (Main) 2026 Paper 2 final scores).

Two sessions a year is a design choice with a stated purpose. The bulletin says a candidate need not appear in both, and that where one does, "his/her best of the JEE (Main) - 2026 NTA Scores will be considered for preparation of the Merit List/ Ranking".

At a glance

JEE Main highlights

Calendar

Important dates

The bulletin fixed Session 1 in full and left Session 2 partly open, because the Session 2 application window is notified separately by public notice.

Which days inside those windows were actually used differed by paper. NTA's own date, shift, gender and category-wise distribution of candidates scheduled for Paper 1 sets out sittings on 21.01.2026, 22.01.2026, 23.01.2026, 24.01.2026 and 28.01.2026 in Session 1, and on 02.04.2026, 04.04.2026, 05.04.2026, 06.04.2026 and 08.04.2026 in Session 2 (NTA public notice, JEE (Main) 2026 Session 1 and Session 2 for Paper 1). Paper 2A and Paper 2B took the days Paper 1 left: a press release records them on 29 January 2026 and on 07 April 2026 (NTA press release declaring the JEE (Main) 2026 Paper 2 final scores).

Session 2 did not run to a single fixed announcement. NTA invited Session 2 applications by a separate public notice, re-opened the application portal afterwards for candidates who had missed it, released admit cards in two batches, and issued an advisory on the examination city for candidates registered from Kuwait, Dubai and Bahrain, all of which sit in the notice list on the JEE (Main) official portal.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Age is not a bar. The bulletin states that "there is no age limit for the candidates" for appearing, while noting that a candidate may still have to meet the age criteria of the institute they seek admission to.

The year of the Class XII pass is the real filter. Candidates who passed Class XII or an equivalent examination in 2024 or 2025, or who were appearing in 2026, were eligible for JEE (Main) 2026; those who passed in 2023 or earlier were not, per the information bulletin. It defines the passing year as the year the result was first declared as a pass, and adds that an attempt to improve marks "will not be considered as their first attempt". The sitting window is therefore three consecutive cycles, and the bulletin sets no separate cap on how many times a candidate may appear.

What counts as Class XII is wider than a school board, and the bulletin's list of qualifying examinations says so item by item. From the school system it takes the 10+2 final examination of any recognised central or state board, an intermediate or two-year pre-university examination, and the senior secondary examination of the National Institute of Open Schooling sat with at least five subjects. From outside that system it takes the two-year Joint Services Wing course of the National Defence Academy, a GCE examination at Advanced level, the Cambridge High School Certificate, the International Baccalaureate Diploma, and any public school, board or university examination sat in India or a foreign country that the Association of Indian Universities certifies as equivalent to 10+2. On the vocational and technical side it takes the Higher Secondary Certificate Vocational Examination and a diploma of at least three years recognised by AICTE or a state board of technical education. The Board of Open Schooling and Skill Education, Sikkim closes the list. Anything sat abroad, or under a board the list does not name, needs an AIU certificate of equivalence before it will be read as Class XII at all, and a Class XII taken outside the public examination system counts only where the candidate had already sat and passed a board or pre-university examination earlier.

The marks bar that students most often mistake for an entry condition sits somewhere else entirely. In the bulletin it appears in the chapter on admission to the NIT+ system, not in the chapter on who may sit the paper, and it is printed there as a recommendation CSAB submitted rather than as an NTA rule. Five subjects at Class XII, and then one of two things: an aggregate of 75% across those five, relaxed to 65% for SC, ST and PwD candidates, or a place in the top 20 percentile of successful candidates in that candidate's own board, counted category-wise.

Subject combinations are set at that same admission stage, and they differ by paper. For programmes on a Paper 1 rank the qualifying examination must carry Physics, Mathematics, a language, one of Chemistry, Biotechnology, Biology or a technical vocational subject, and any subject other than those four. For a Paper 2A rank it must carry Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and two more subjects. For a Paper 2B rank it must carry Mathematics and four other subjects. Two marks bars sit on top of the subject lists. B.Plan wants at least 50% in Mathematics and 50% in aggregate. For B.Arch the bulletin stops speaking for itself and quotes the Gazette of India notification of 19 July 2023, under which nobody is admitted to an architecture course without Physics and Mathematics in the qualifying examination, a third subject taken from Chemistry, Biology, a technical vocational subject, Computer Science, Information Technology, Informatics Practices, Engineering Graphics or Business Studies, and 45% in aggregate. A 10+3 diploma carrying compulsory Mathematics at the same 45% is the other way in.

Reservation follows the central pattern. The bulletin records 10% of seats in every course for GEN-EWS, 27% for OBC-NCL, 15% for SC and 7.5% for ST, with 5% of the seats in each of those categories and in General reserved horizontally for Persons with Benchmark Disability.

Step by step

Application process and fee

Applying is a three-stage sequence the bulletin numbers as steps. Step 1 is registration, which issues the application number a candidate then uses for both sessions. Step 2 is the application form itself, carrying the paper chosen, the examination cities, the educational qualifications, a live photograph captured on camera at that moment, and the scanned images. Step 3 is payment, and the bulletin leaves no offline route open: net banking, a credit or debit card, or UPI, with the confirmation page generated only once the transaction has actually succeeded. Processing charges and GST fall on the candidate on top of the examination fee.

One application number is the rule, not a convenience. The bulletin warns that multiple application forms "will not be accepted and will lead to the cancellation of his/her result", and treats a candidate holding more than one application number as an unfair means case.

Fees are charged per session, and they vary by category and by gender. For centres in India, for any single paper:

Third gender candidates are not split by gender in that table: the bulletin gives them one row, at Rs 500 for a single paper at a centre in India and Rs 3000 at a centre outside it.

Taking more than one paper costs more, and sitting abroad costs several times as much. For Paper 1 with Paper 2A, or Paper 1 with Paper 2B, or all three together, or Paper 2A with Paper 2B, the bulletin sets Rs 2000 for General, Gen-EWS and OBC-NCL male candidates, Rs 1600 for female candidates in those categories, and Rs 1000 for SC, ST, PwD, PwBD and third gender candidates. At centres outside India a single paper costs a General male candidate Rs 5000, against Rs 2500 for SC, ST, PwD and PwBD candidates.

Two limits on fixing mistakes are worth reading before the form is submitted. NTA's FAQ says a submitted application form "cannot be cancelled or withdrawn", and that a one-time correction facility is provided for selected fields only (JEE (Main) 2026 FAQ).

Before the exam

Admit card and exam day

Three hard limits sit around the admit card in the bulletin's own notes: it is not sent by post, no duplicate is issued at an examination centre in any case, and a candidate without a valid admit card and an authorised photo ID is not permitted to take the examination under any circumstances. The bulletin schedules it 03 to 04 days before the examination date and puts the exact date, shift and city on it. A candidate who reaches the centre after gate closing time is not admitted, whatever the reason, and the bulletin says no re-test is provided to anyone who misses a scheduled shift.

The morning clock in the bulletin runs like this: entry, frisking, biometric registration and document verification from 07.00 A.M. to 08.30 A.M.; the invigilator's instructions from 08.30 A.M. to 08.50 A.M.; candidate login to read instructions at 08.50 A.M.; the test starts at 09.00 A.M. The afternoon shift runs the same sequence six hours later, and candidates are advised to report two hours before the examination begins.

What to bring is a short list in the bulletin, and it is absolute: in the absence of these documents a candidate is not allowed to appear at all. First the admit card, printed clearly on A4, with its self-declaration completed. Then an authorised photo ID in the original, valid and unexpired, which may be a school identity card, PAN, voter ID, passport, Aadhaar or a bank passbook carrying a photograph. Then a passport size photograph identical to the uploaded one, to be pasted on the attendance sheet at the centre. A PwD or PwBD certificate where a relaxation is claimed. And a transparent ball point pen. The banned list is long and includes any geometry or pencil box, log tables, a calculator, an electronic watch with calculator functions and any metallic item. NTA's FAQ adds that a candidate may not leave the examination centre early even after finishing.

One instruction pulls against another for B.Arch candidates. The official syllabus tells them, under the Drawing Test, that they are "advised to bring pencils, own geometry box set, crasets and colour pencils and crayons for the Drawing Test" (JEE (Main) 2026 syllabus), while the bulletin's centre rules list a geometry or pencil box among the items no candidate may carry in. Neither document acknowledges the other, so the candidate advisory NTA issues for each session is the thing to read before the exam day.

Structure

Exam pattern

Paper 1 is computer-based only. Each subject carries two sections, Section A of multiple-choice questions and Section B of questions answered as a numerical value, and negative marking applies in both.

Paper 2A and Paper 2B are built on the same Mathematics part and diverge after it.

Both sections are marked the same way, which is the part candidates most often get wrong: a Section B numerical value question carries the same minus one for a wrong answer as a Section A multiple-choice question does, and the bulletin says so twice, in the pattern table and again in its note on numerical value questions. Four marks go to a correct or most appropriate answer, nothing to a question left unanswered or marked for review. The Drawing Test is the exception, evaluated as two questions out of 100 marks. Where a question is dropped, the bulletin awards four marks to every candidate who appeared in that shift, and where two or more options turn out to be correct, the same four marks reach every candidate who picked any one of them.

Mode and length follow the paper. In Paper 2A the Mathematics and Aptitude parts are computer-based while the Drawing Test is attempted in pen and paper on an A4 drawing sheet; Paper 2B is back on the screen throughout. Each single paper runs 03 hours, and Paper 2A and Paper 2B taken together run 03 hours 30 minutes. PwD and PwBD candidates eligible for a scribe get 04 hours and 04 hours 10 minutes respectively, which the bulletin sets as compensatory time of 20 minutes per hour of examination.

What to study

Syllabus

NTA publishes the syllabus as its own document, separate from the bulletin, and the bulletin does no more than point to the website for it. The Paper 1 syllabus is organised into numbered units across Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, and the Physics list closes with a unit on Experimental Skills rather than a theory topic.

Paper 2A shares the Mathematics units and then goes its own way. Its Aptitude Test covers awareness of persons, buildings and materials, objects and texture related to architecture and the built environment, visualising three-dimensional objects from two-dimensional drawings, analytical reasoning and mental ability, then three-dimensional perception, scale and proportion, colour texture harmony and contrast, and the generation of plans, elevations and three-dimensional views. Its Drawing Test is sketching from memory: scenes and activities of urbanscape such as public space, market, festivals, street scenes, monuments and recreational spaces, of landscape such as riverfronts, jungle, gardens, trees and plants, and of rural life. Paper 2B keeps Mathematics and the Aptitude Test and replaces Drawing with Planning.

How to prepare

Preparation and books

Three things come from NTA itself, and they are worth separating from everything else published about this exam. One is the syllabus document, which the bulletin does not reproduce but points to on the website. Another is a rehearsal of the screen itself: the appendix explaining the computer-based test says a sample or mock test is put up on the NTA website, and the live Mock Test link sits in the Quick Links strip at the foot of NTA's Engineering Exam page.

The third is the papers already sat, published after the event rather than before it. The JEE (Main) official portal lists the Session 2 B.Tech question papers shift by shift under its Question Papers menu, for the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th of April 2026. Nothing in the bulletin, the syllabus document or the FAQ names a book, a publisher or a coaching course.

Where it is held

Exam centres

Choice is bounded by address, not by preference. While filling the form a candidate may select a maximum of four cities, and the bulletin confines that choice to the states given in the candidate's present and permanent address. Allotment, it says, is done "mostly in one of the preferred cities of the candidates and there will be no human intervention", and NTA reserves the right to allot a city outside the list or to merge cities that draw few candidates. The FAQ is blunter still: the allotted examination centre "cannot be changed, in any case", and the date, shift and slot are allotted randomly by computer.

One session shows the size of the network behind that. NTA records JEE (Main) 2026 Session 2 as conducted at 584 unique examination centres in 319 cities, including 15 cities outside India, and names those overseas cities as Manama, Doha City, Muscat, Riyadh, Sharjah, Singapore, Kuwait, Kuala Lumpur, Kathmandu, Abu Dhabi, West Java, Washington, Lagos, Munich and Dammam (NTA press release declaring the JEE (Main) 2026 Paper 2 final scores).

Some of those centres and dates moved on the eve of the session. NTA's press release of 01 April 2026, the day before Session 2 began, lists the grounds on which Session 2 centres and dates were revised, naming requests from candidates in the Middle East affected by the conflict in the region, requests to move away from the Easter celebration, and coordination with CBSE to avoid a clash with the Class XII board examinations (NTA press release on JEE (Main) 2026 Session 2).

After the exam

Answer key

The provisional answer key and the candidate's recorded responses go up together, and the bulletin says both are "likely to be displayed for two to three days". Every challenge carries a processing charge of Rs 200 per question, which NTA does not refund whether the challenge succeeds or fails, and the bulletin counts only those filed and paid for through the key challenge link inside the stated window. It also discards challenges submitted without justification or evidence.

The window itself is announced by public notice, session by session and paper by paper, and it closes at a stated hour rather than at the end of a day. Every one of those notices for the 2026 cycle sits in the notice list on the JEE (Main) official portal.

NTA does not write back about individual challenges. Subject experts examine them, a final answer key is published, the result is compiled on that key, and the bulletin closes the door afterwards: no grievance about the answer key or recorded responses is entertained once the result is declared.

Scores

Result and scorecard

The mark a candidate sees is not the mark they scored. Raw marks become an NTA score inside the shift that candidate sat, and the bulletin prints the arithmetic: how many people in that shift finished at or below the candidate's raw score, over everyone who appeared in it, worked out to 7 decimal places so that large numbers of candidates do not bunch on one figure. Whoever tops a shift therefore lands at 100, and the bulletin adds two warnings in the same breath: "the percentile score is not the same as the percentage of marks obtained", and the percentile of the total is not an average of the three subject percentiles.

Across sessions, the better score wins. The bulletin says the best of the two total NTA scores, not the best subject scores, is carried forward for a candidate who appeared in both sessions, and that the All India Rank is compiled only after Session 2. Ties are broken in a fixed order for Paper 1: NTA score in Mathematics, then Physics, then Chemistry, then the candidate with the smaller proportion of incorrect to correct attempted answers across all subjects, then the same proportion in Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry in turn, and if the tie survives all of that, both candidates get the same rank.

The rank itself is handed on to the counselling machinery on a fixed day. JoSAA's schedule of events records the Joint Apex Board declaring the JEE (Main) 2026 ranks on Monday, 20 April, 2026 at 10:00, and the JEE (Advanced) 2026 result on Monday, 1 June, 2026 (JoSAA 2026 Business Rules).

There is no appeal on marks. The bulletin says flatly that there "shall be no re-evaluation/re-checking of the result", that records of the examination are preserved for up to 90 days from the declaration of result, and that the confirmation page, admit card and scorecard would not be available after 31 July 2026. Candidates are told to keep their own copies.

Scores you need

Cutoff

NTA publishes exactly one cut-off for JEE (Main), and it is not an admission cut-off. It is the bar that decides who may sit JEE (Advanced), and the bulletin fixes the headcount behind it: candidates "should be among the top 2, 50, 000 successful candidates (including all categories)" in the B.E./B.Tech paper. What that headcount works out to in NTA scores is published with the Paper 1 result, cycle by cycle, and it is a band rather than a single number: the release carries one row per category giving the percentile the band runs from, the percentile it runs down to, and how many candidates fell inside it (NTA press release declaring the JEE (Main) 2026 Paper 1 result). A single "JEE Main cut-off" number is a compression of one of those rows, the percentile at which that category's band closed.

How that headcount is split is decided by the organising IIT, not by NTA, and it is split before anyone is ranked. IIT Roorkee, which organised the 2026 edition, set aside 10% of the shortlist for GEN-EWS, 27% for OBC-NCL, 15% for SC and 7.5% for ST, left 40.5% open to every category, and then took a further 5% out of each of those five shares, horizontally, for PwD candidates (JEE (Advanced) 2026 eligibility criteria).

A second cut-off governs the same candidate at a different door, and it is counted in board marks rather than percentile. CSAB publishes the top 20 percentile Class XII cut-off marks out of 500 board by board, which is the alternative to the aggregate-marks rule for NIT+ admission. For 2026 the general-category figure is 418 for the Central Board of Secondary Education, 452 for the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations, 479 for the Andhra Pradesh Board of Intermediate Education and 359 for the Maharashtra State Board, with a long tail of boards marked NR, the table's code for a cut-off its board had not sent in (CSAB category-wise top 20 percentile cut-off marks for 2026).

Closing ranks for a branch at a particular institute are neither of these. They are produced round by round by the counselling authorities, and NTA does not publish them.

Getting a seat

Counselling and seat allotment

A rank is not a seat, and the two are handled by different bodies. The Joint Seat Allocation Authority states that JoSAA 2026 manages joint seat allocation to 138 institutes for the academic year 2026-27, comprising 23 IITs, IISc Bengaluru, 31 NITs, IIEST Shibpur, 26 IIITs and 56 Other-Government Funded Technical Institutes (Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JoSAA) 2026). Its rulebook splits the two rank lists cleanly: seat allocation in IITs and IISc is based on the JEE (Advanced) 2026 rank, and seat allocation in the NIT+ system on the JEE (Main) 2026 rank.

JoSAA 2026 ran five rounds. On each allotment a candidate chooses Freeze to keep the seat and leave the process, Float to stay in contention for any higher preference anywhere, or Slide to stay in contention within the same institute, and must pay a seat acceptance fee to continue: the JoSAA 2026 Business Rules set Rs 15,000 for candidates tagged SC, ST or any PwD category and Rs 30,000 for everyone else, both including Rs 5,000 of JoSAA processing charges, with the balance adjusted against the admission fee. Not paying is treated as rejecting the seat.

For an NIT+ seat the acceptance fee is not the whole bill. At the end of the fifth round a candidate still holding a provisionally allocated NIT+ seat has to pay a Partial Admission Fee on top of it, which the business rules set at Rs 20,000 for candidates tagged SC, ST or any PwD category and Rs 45,000 for everyone else, adjusted later against the institute's admission fee and never refunded. A candidate who does not pay it forfeits the seat, and the vacancy goes into the CSAB special rounds.

Backing out has a price and a deadline. Withdrawal is available from the second round up to the second last round for IIT and IISc seats and up to the final round for the NIT+ system; the business rules refund the seat acceptance fee after deducting withdrawal processing charges of Rs 7,000, and the candidate then forfeits eligibility for admission to any institute through JoSAA 2026. They also record that there is no spot or special round for IITs and IISc, and that special rounds for vacant NIT+ seats are run by the Central Seat Allocation Board instead.

CSAB's own rounds carry on after JoSAA closes, and in 2026 they were still being settled in September. A CSAB public notice dated 8.9.2026 records that its Fourth (Emergency) Meeting of 04.09.2026 decided that candidates whose seats were cancelled in the CSAB Special Rounds 2026 for not meeting the Class XII eligibility bar "shall be considered for the seat allotment as per their JEE (Mains) Rank and filled choices", and asked them to submit any revised or improved marksheet through the CSAB portal by September 10, 2026 at 5 pm (CSAB public notice of 8 September 2026).

Where it is accepted

Participating institutes

The centralised route is what most candidates mean by JEE Main admission, and it is the JoSAA and CSAB list: the IITs and IISc on a JEE (Advanced) rank, and the NITs, IIEST Shibpur, the IIITs and the Other-GFTIs on a JEE (Main) rank. The Central Seat Allocation Board also runs the DASA and CSAB Supernumerary channels for the same NIT+ system (Central Seat Allocation Board (CSAB) 2026).

Outside that list the score travels further than the counselling does. The bulletin notes that only the All India Rank is used for admission through CSAB and JoSAA, and that "All participating Institutions that do not use the Centralized Seat Allocation Process will prepare their own ranking based on the performance in JEE (Main) - 2026 and other criteria as decided by them". It also records that the Paper 1 result is used for programmes beyond B.E. and B.Tech, naming integrated M.Sc., integrated M.Tech, integrated B.Tech, MBA, Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of pharmaceutics and Bachelor of Design among them.

Where a state admits to engineering colleges affiliated to its own universities, the bulletin says the state may prepare a separate rank list on criteria it decides. And NTA draws its own boundary in a single line: it "is an examination conducting body and not an admission giving authority", and does not hold seat matrices or institute-level reservation rules.

Get help

Contact

NTA's JEE (Main) unit still gives its address as the NSIC-MDBP Building, First Floor, Okhla Industrial Estate, New Delhi-110020, with contact numbers 01169227700 and 011-40759000 (JEE (Main) contact page). NTA has since relocated its office. Its current address, on the NTA contact page, is 5th Floor, Government of India Press Building, Minto Road, New Delhi-110002. The move was announced in NTA's public notice Relocation of NTA Office, which tells candidates, institutions and service providers to send everything official to the new office from now on. So a candidate with something to put in the post should use Minto Road, not the address the JEE (Main) page still carries. The FAQ gives the same helpline number and the email address jeemain@nta.ac.in, and the bulletin asks that correspondence go by email carrying the sender's name, application number, postal address and contact number, since anonymous or vague queries are not answered.

Source

Official links

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Disclaimer

Disclaimer

Exact dates, cutoffs, percentile-to-rank mappings, answer keys, results are per-cycle and must be scraped from the official NTA portal/Information Bulletin each cycle; pattern can change. 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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