National Council for Hotel Management and Catering Technology Joint Entrance Examination (NCHM JEE)(NCHMCT JEE)

About the exam

About NCHMCT JEE

Two organisations stand between a hotel management aspirant and a seat, and only one of them writes the question paper. The National Testing Agency conducts NCHM JEE and then hands the scores over. Everything that turns a rank into a place at an Institute of Hotel Management, the counselling rounds, the seat acceptance fee, the extra test rounds for seats nobody took, belongs to the National Council for Hotel Management and Catering Technology. The 2026 cycle is the clearest published record of how that split actually works.

NCHM JEE opens one door: the three-year, six-semester B.Sc. in Hospitality and Hotel Administration taught at institutes affiliated to NCHMCT, which the NCHM JEE 2026 Information Bulletin describes as an autonomous body set up in 1982 under the Ministry of Tourism to centrally run and regulate academics for that degree and ten other structured courses. NTA's NCHM JEE exam page records that the agency was entrusted with the examination with effect from 2019. The bulletin sets out how far the resulting score reaches: it "is accepted by all the affiliated Institutes for admission to the B.Sc. (HHA) Course in their respective Institutes", and the same passage adds that under NEP 2020 there may be an option of a fourth year for an Honours degree.

Where the two bodies part company is stated plainly in NTA's notice declaring the NCHM JEE 2026 result: the agency's role "is confined to the registration of candidates, conduct of the test, hosting of answer keys, inviting challenges, finalization of answer keys, preparation and declaration of results, hosting of Score Cards, and providing the results to NCHMCT for further action at their end". Admission itself, from the merit list onward, is NCHMCT's.

The degree does not come from either of them. NCHMCT's M.Sc. counselling brochure sets out the history: the council launched the B.Sc. with Indira Gandhi National Open University in 2002, and on 23rd February 2023 signed an MOU with Jawaharlal Nehru University to recognise its B.Sc. and M.Sc. programmes and award the degrees, after which "the earlier collaboration with IGNOU ended now" (M.Sc. JEE 2026 Counselling Brochure, hosted on NCHMCT's counselling portal). A student admitted through NCHM JEE today graduates with a JNU degree.

At a glance

NCHMCT JEE highlights

Calendar

Important dates

Every date below belongs to the 2026 cycle and has already passed: the result was declared in May 2026, and NCHMCT's two counselling rounds closed in June. Filling the seats those rounds left empty took longer, and that stretch of the cycle is NCHMCT's alone.

The bulletin's closing date did not hold. A public notice titled Extension of Online Application Registration for NCHM-JEE 2026 moved the deadline well past January, citing a request from NCHMCT and the recent addition of examination cities, and a further notice then opened the one-time correction window that the bulletin had left as "To be announced on the Website". Both sit in the Public Notices list on the exam page, which is where a future cycle's changes will also appear.

For the cycle after this one, the pattern in NCHMCT's own literature is a December opening and an April paper: the NCHM-JEE 2026 brochure gave "2nd week of December 2025" for registration and "2nd week of April 2026" for the examination, both marked tentative. The months held; the weeks did not, since registration actually opened in the last week of December and the paper was sat in the last week of April. NTA's exam page, stamped as last updated on Sep 10, 2026, still lists the 2026 result as its newest public notice, so nothing has been announced for the cycle after it.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Qualifying Examination

The academic bar is low and specific: a pass in the 10+2 system of Senior Secondary Examination or its equivalent, from a recognised educational board, with English as one of the subjects. The NCHM JEE 2026 Information Bulletin tightens that last clause, requiring that the candidate "must have passed English as a subject of study (core/elective/functional) in the qualifying examination". No stream requirement appears anywhere in it.

Candidates still sitting 10+2 may appear on a provisional basis. Their admission stands cancelled if proof of passing is not produced at counselling, at admission, or by 30 September of the admission year at the latest.

Seven other examinations count as equivalent, under a list the bulletin spells out. A plus-two level examination of any recognised central or state board qualifies, and so does an Intermediate or two-year Pre-University examination held by a recognised board or university. Three routes come from outside that system: the GCE examination (London, Cambridge or Sri Lanka) at Advanced level, the High School Certificate Examination of the Cambridge University, and any public school, board or university examination in India or abroad that COBSE or AIU recognises as equivalent. Two more close the list, one open and one vocational: the NIOS or state open schooling Senior Secondary examination taken with at least five subjects including English, and the H.S.C. Vocational examination approved by NCVT and SCVT of the state or union territory concerned.

Age, and the Bar That Was Removed

On age the NCHM JEE 2026 Information Bulletin is unambiguous: "There is no age restriction for appearing in NCHM JEE as per the New Education Policy." NCHMCT says it twice more in its own literature, as "Age Limit: No Age Bar" in the NCHM-JEE 2026 brochure and as "There is no age bar to get admission in the Programme" in the Counselling Information Brochure 2026. That is a change rather than a constant: NCHMCT's 2022 notification fixed the limit at "25 Years for General/ EWS / OBC Categories and 28 Years for SC/ST/PwD Categories as on 01.07.2022". Anyone still working from an older prospectus is reading a rule that has gone.

Reservation and Fitness

Reservation in centrally run institutes follows the Government of India pattern, set out in the NCHM JEE 2026 Information Bulletin: 15 per cent of seats for Scheduled Castes, 7.5 per cent for Scheduled Tribes, 27 per cent for OBC non-creamy layer as per the Central List, and 10 per cent for General EWS, with a further 5 per cent inside each category for candidates carrying 40 per cent or more disability under the RPwD Act, 2016. Above that pattern the bulletin adds one seat, on a supernumerary basis, at every central institute, covering two groups it documents separately: wards of Kashmiri migrants, who upload a migration certificate with the application, and Kashmiri Pandit or Kashmiri Hindu families still resident in the valley, who upload a domicile certificate in the same field. Both still have to qualify in NCHM JEE. That pattern stops at the central institutes: an IHM which a State Government runs, aids or recognises applies its own state's reservation policy in place of it. Every qualified candidate must also produce a physical fitness certificate from a registered medical practitioner at admission, confirming they can carry out the practical work the course demands.

Step by step

Application process and fee

Applications are online only, through the exam page, and a candidate may submit exactly one. The bulletin is blunt about what happens otherwise: more than one application form "will not be accepted". Registration, upload and payment can be done together or at separate sittings, but the form is incomplete until the fee is paid, and only then does the confirmation page generate.

Service and processing charges plus GST sit on top of that and go to the bank or payment gateway, not to NTA. The bulletin's upload rules are equally exact: a photograph in JPG between 10kb and 200kb showing 80 per cent of the face without a mask, ears included, against a white background, a signature in running hand between 10kb and 100kb, and PDF certificates for PwD and category claims between 10kb and 300kb. A signature written as capital letters is rejected outright.

Two things catch applicants out. Choosing four examination cities is mandatory, not optional, and the choice cannot be changed once the correction window shuts. And NTA verifies none of it: the bulletin states that it "does not verify the information filled by the candidates in the Application Form nor verifies any certificate of category/educational qualification for deciding the eligibility of candidates", leaving that to the institute at admission. Fee, once remitted, is not refunded under any circumstances.

Before the exam

Admit card and exam day

A candidate's admit card exists only as a download; the bulletin's note says admit cards will not be sent by post, so the card has to come off the NTA website. It is issued provisionally, and the bulletin warns that issuing it "shall not necessarily mean acceptance of eligibility which shall be further scrutinized at subsequent stages of admission process". No duplicate is issued at the centre. Candidates who cannot download theirs, or who find a discrepancy in it, are told to call the help line between 09:00 am and 6:00pm or write to nchm@nta.ac.in, and to sit the paper on the card they already have while NTA corrects its record later.

Five things are allowed into the venue and nothing else: the printed admit card with the self-declaration filled in, a simple transparent ball point pen, an extra photograph for the attendance sheet, a personal transparent water bottle, and sugar tablets or fruit for a diabetic candidate. Candidates must also carry one original government photo ID and, where a PwD claim is made, the certificate. Biometric information is captured at the centre, friends and relatives are not allowed inside, and rough sheets are collected by the invigilator at the end.

Read the reporting time off the admit card rather than the bulletin, because the bulletin does not agree with itself. Its schedule times the paper from 11:00 AM to 01:00 PM, while its conduct section carries a separate clause saying candidates shall not be permitted to enter the examination centre after 09:30A.M. The same section settles the question by deferring to the card: a candidate appears at the centre on the date and time indicated on the admit card, has to reach it on or before the reporting time, and late entry to the examination premises is "not permitted under any circumstances".

Structure

Exam pattern

NCHM JEE is a single computer-based paper of 120 objective questions, taken in one shift, with the question paper available in English and Hindi only. The medium is chosen on the application form and cannot be changed afterwards; where a translated question is ambiguous, the English version is treated as final.

Two of those five subjects carry the paper. English Language is much the largest block of questions and Aptitude for Service Sector the next largest, and the same two, in that order, are the first tie-breakers when ranks are drawn up.

The bulletin sets the marking in its own words: each question carries four marks, a correct response earns those four marks, an incorrect response costs one mark off the total score, and an unattempted question scores nothing. It also prices two outcomes that can only arrive after the paper. Where the challenge process leaves a question with more than one correct option, or changes its key, the four marks go to the candidates whose attempt matches the revised key and to nobody else. The generous case is a withdrawn question. When a technical error takes one out of the paper, the bulletin directs that "full marks shall be given to all the candidates irrespective of the fact who have attempted it or not".

Be careful which document you take the pattern from. NCHMCT's own NCHM-JEE 2026 brochure prints the same five rows and the same figures under a column headed "Marks" rather than "No. of Questions", so read on its own it looks like a paper worth 120 marks in total. NTA's bulletin, which governs the examination, heads that column "No. of Questions" and then prices each question at four marks.

The shape of the paper also changed at some point after 2022. NCHMCT's 2022 notification set 200 questions across 3.00 hrs, split 30, 30, 30, 60 and 50 between the same five components, so a candidate working from an old paper or an old coaching handout is practising for a test that no longer exists in that shape.

What to study

Syllabus

There is no published syllabus for NCHM JEE. The word "syllabus" does not occur anywhere in the NCHM JEE 2026 Information Bulletin, front matter to final annexure. What it gives, under Scheme of Examination, is the list of five subjects and the number of questions drawn from each, and nothing below that level: no topic list, no weighting inside a subject, no prescribed standard.

That is not a lapse in one cycle. NCHMCT's 2022 notification set out the same five components the same way, calling them the exam scheme rather than a syllabus. So a detailed topic breakdown for this paper cannot have come from either body. Neither has published anything below the level of those five subject names, and that is as far as a candidate can hold either of them to anything.

How to prepare

Preparation and books

The official preparation material is thin, and worth naming precisely so nobody goes looking for more of it. The bulletin points candidates to the CBT guidelines at Annexure-VIII and says a sample or mock test "will be available on NTA website: www.nta.ac.in for hands on practice". NTA's exam page links its National Testing Abhyas platform. Neither the bulletin nor that page carries a reading list, a recommended book or any guide to difficulty.

Past papers are not there to work through either. NCHMCT's Old Question Papers page, under Student Zone, holds NHTET papers with answer keys rather than NCHM JEE papers. The one NCHM JEE paper a candidate gets to see is their own, and only briefly. NTA's notice declaring the NCHM JEE 2026 result records that the challenge window ran alongside a display of the question papers and the recorded responses, and the bulletin puts that display at two to three days before it comes down.

Where it is held

Exam centres

Centres are allotted by city, and the city is chosen by the candidate at application. Annexure-VII of the NCHM JEE 2026 Information Bulletin lists the eligible cities state by state, each with its own city code, and it reaches as far out as Sri Vijaya Puram in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Kavaratti in Lakshadweep. Selecting four of them is mandatory.

NTA says it will try to allot a centre in the order of the cities a candidate has chosen, but reserves the position that "due to logistic & administrative reasons, a different city of nearby area may be allotted", and Annexure-VII closes with a disclaimer that NTA may change the centre and city at any time subject to availability. Once the correction window shuts the city is fixed and no request to move it is entertained.

The list is not static between cycles. NTA's extension notice for 2026 gave the recent addition of examination cities as one of its reasons for holding registration open longer, which is a reminder to read the current bulletin's annexure rather than last year's.

After the exam

Answer key

NTA publishes the recorded responses first, on the exam page, before the result, and they stay up for roughly two to three days. The provisional answer key follows, with a public notice, and is open for challenge for a similar window.

Challenging costs Rs 200 per question as a non-refundable processing charge, paid online through the key challenge link, per the NCHM JEE 2026 Information Bulletin. Only paid challenges made inside the stated window are considered. Subject experts review each one, the key is revised where a challenge is upheld, and the result is then compiled on the revised final key. The bulletin then shuts two doors in its own words: "NTA will not inform the Candidates individually about their challenges", and once the NCHM JEE-2026 result has been declared, no grievance about an answer key "will be entertained".

The 2026 round is instructive about the odds. NTA's result declaration notice records that every challenge received was examined by subject experts against the administered question papers, the provisional keys and item analysis data, and that after that scrutiny none of the challenges was found valid: no answer key was changed, no question was dropped, and the final answer keys remained unchanged from the provisional ones. The final answer key for NCHM JEE 2026 is published as a plain list of question IDs against correct option IDs for the single shift held on 25.04.2026, with no question text, so it is useful for verifying a score and useless as practice material.

Scores

Result and scorecard

Scores are raw. The bulletin states that "the raw (actual) marks obtained by a candidate will be considered further for computation of the Result", so there is no normalisation and no percentile: one shift, one paper, marks as earned. There is also no provision for rechecking, re-evaluation or re-totalling, and no query about it is entertained.

The score card is downloaded from the exam page with the application number and password; NTA's score card page for the 2026 cycle carries a publish date of 22 May 2026. The bulletin also sets two limits worth noting before you need them: NTA preserves the examination record for 90 days from the declaration of result, and any legal question arising out of the examination must be raised within 30 days of the result, in the jurisdiction of Delhi and New Delhi only.

Ties are broken in a fixed order, and it is worth knowing before the paper rather than after. NCHMCT's Counselling Information Brochure 2026 sets out that where two or more candidates secure equal marks, the candidate with higher marks in the English component ranks higher; if the tie persists, the candidate with higher marks in the Service Aptitude component ranks higher; and if it still persists, the older candidate ranks higher. NTA's result declaration notice states the same three rules for the All India Rank. English is therefore doing double duty, as the largest section of the paper and as the first tie-breaker, which is an argument for spending preparation time there that no section weighting on its own would make.

Scores you need

Cutoff

There is no cutoff score to hit. Neither the NCHM JEE 2026 Information Bulletin nor NCHMCT's counselling brochure sets a qualifying mark or a minimum of any kind, because the merit list is a straight ranking of raw marks and the seat is then decided by that rank against the choices a candidate filled in counselling.

What does exist is a rank record, published after each cycle closes. The Opening and Closing Rank reports on NCHMCT's counselling portal cover the B.Sc. HHA programme for every session from 2021 to 2026, served through the counselling system under eServices rather than as a file to download. That is the only honest place to look for the rank an institute has actually closed at, and it is institute by institute rather than a single number for the exam.

The rank that gets a seat also moves a very long way between institutes. NCHMCT's B.Sc. HHA seat vacancy statement for 2026, which the council's home page dates 17.08.2026 and labels as the position after the fourth OET round allotment, still recorded 50 open-category seats vacant at IHM Shillong and 49 at IHM Guwahati, while IHM Delhi, Pusa and IHM Chennai's Chennai campus had none left in either column listed. A rank that is nowhere near enough for one institute can be comfortable at another in the same cycle.

Getting a seat

Counselling and seat allotment

Counselling is NCHMCT's, not NTA's, and it runs on its own portal with its own fee. Candidates on the merit list register at nchmcounselling.nic.in, pay a one-time non-refundable registration fee of Rs 2,000, and fill institute choices; the system then allots on merit-cum-choice against the All India Rank, reservation category and preferences, per the Counselling Information Brochure 2026. There are two rounds on the NCHM JEE merit list, and the brochure is explicit that the second is the final one. It also tells candidates to select only the institutes they are actually willing to join, which matters because an accepted seat is automatically treated as frozen.

The 2026 Schedule

The Seat Acceptance Fee and What Comes Back

Confirming a seat means paying a Seat Acceptance Fee of Rs 20,000 and completing online document verification inside the round's window. The SAF is not an extra charge: it forms part of the first semester fee and is transferred to the finally allotted institute. Miss either step and the allotted seat is cancelled automatically, though the candidate can still enter the final round. The refund rules in the Counselling Information Brochure 2026 then split three ways: a candidate who accepts a seat in round one and withdraws online before the final round's processing gets 95 per cent of the SAF back; one who enters only the final round, pays, and is then not allotted a seat or found ineligible gets 100 per cent back; and in most other cases, including keeping a round-one seat that was not upgraded, there is no refund at all. For the 2026 cycle the brochure closes refund requests on 31 October 2026 and processes them by 30 November 2026. NCHMCT allows no inter-institute transfer or migration at any point in the three years, on the ground that the institute was allotted on merit-cum-choice in the first place.

The Online Entrance Test, for Seats Counselling Did Not Fill

The two counselling rounds are not the end of admissions. Seats still vacant after them go to NCHMCT's own Online Entrance Test, run in successive rounds against what the OET Round-5 notice of 13.08.2026 calls "the residual seats remaining vacant after completion of the NCHM JEE-2026 counselling process and various rounds of OETs". The council's home page carries the result of that round's examination, held on 31.08.2026, next to a notice on admission to residual seats in the three-year B.Sc. HHA for 2026. The Round-5 notice sets out the format: a separate online test of 60 multiple-choice questions in 60 minutes, split 10, 10, 10, 20 and 10 across the same five subjects, one mark a question with 0.25 deducted for a wrong answer, taken from any location on the candidate's own computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone. Registration costs Rs 2,000 for each round, is non-refundable and non-adjustable, and is not carried forward to the next round, so a candidate who sits three rounds pays three times. Seat allotment again runs on merit and institute preferences against residual seats, and the same Rs 20,000 Seat Acceptance Fee applies.

Where it is accepted

Participating institutes

Every affiliated institute admits on the same score. Annexure-II of the NCHM JEE 2026 Information Bulletin lists them with an institute code and a type against each: Central IHM, Central PSU IHM, State IHM and Private IHM, with codes running in blocks by category.

The headline counts do not quite agree between documents, which matters if you are trying to work out how large the field is. The NCHM JEE 2026 Information Bulletin describes an academic network of 21 Central Institutes of Hotel Management, 33 State Government Institutes, 01 Public Sector Undertaking, 2 PPP run State IHMs and 25 Private Institutes, and says the council offers 11 different professional programmes in all. NCHMCT's Counselling Information Brochure 2026, published five months later, gives 21 Central Institutes, 30 State Institutes, 1 PSU Institute, 2 PPP State IHMs, 26 Private Hotel Management Institutes and 13 Food Craft Institutes, the last group offering diplomas and certificates rather than the degree.

Seats and What They Cost

Intake is published institute by institute, not as a national total. The revised B.Sc. HHA seat matrix, carried on NCHMCT's counselling portal for the 2026 session, shows IHM Mumbai as the largest at 456 seats, followed by IHM Kolkata at 380, IHM Chennai at 347 and IHM Lucknow at 342, while several state institutes are listed at 30. Each institute's figure is then carried at a higher number in a second column described as total intake with 5 per cent extra to take care of no-shows, so the allotment pool is deliberately slightly larger than the sanctioned intake.

Fees are set by category of institute rather than by the exam. For government-sponsored institutes the Counselling Information Brochure 2026 publishes a full six-semester schedule: a first semester of Rs 72,915, which bundles a one-time admission fee of Rs 1,600, an NCHM enrolment and parchment fee of Rs 3,600, a JNU registration fee of Rs 10,215, caution money of Rs 8,000, an examination fee of Rs 3,000 and tuition of Rs 46,500, followed by Rs 53,000 for each of the five semesters after it. Institutes in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad may add up to 40 per cent on the tuition component alone, those in Gandhinagar, Jaipur, Lucknow, Bhopal and Chandigarh up to 24 per cent, and everywhere else the brochure allows no discretion. Private affiliated institutes may charge tuition up to double the standard rate. Reserved-category candidates get no fee concession; the brochure directs them to government scholarship schemes instead.

One route to these institutes bypasses the exam entirely. NCHMCT's 2022 notification set out a separate direct-admission scheme for Foreign Nationals, Non-Resident Indians and Persons of Indian Origin or Overseas Citizens of India, who "need not to appear in the NCHM JEE", and the council's site still carries direct-admission pages for that group and for nationals of SAARC and least developed countries.

Get help

Contact

Application, admit card, answer key and result questions go to NTA. The NCHM JEE 2026 Information Bulletin gives nchm@nta.ac.in as the address for all correspondence and lists the NTA helpdesk on 011-40759000 and 011-69227700. It also warns that anonymous queries, queries already answered in the bulletin, and queries from anyone claiming to represent a candidate will not be addressed.

Counselling, seat allotment, fees and refunds are NCHMCT's. The NCHM-JEE 2026 brochure gives a helpline of 18001803151 and 0120-2590608, and the council's address as A-34, Sector 62, Noida. Refund requests go by email to jeenchm@gmail.com, per the counselling brochure.

The OET rounds run on a separate line. The OET Round-5 notice lists a helpline on 0120-2590603, 0120-2590613 and 0120-2590602, open on all working days between 9:30 AM and 5:30 PM.

Source

Official links

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Disclaimer

Disclaimer

Exact notification, registration, exam, answer-key, result and counselling dates, cut-offs, fees and the affiliated-institute list are per-cycle. The pattern differs from the 2022 notification's 200 questions over 3.00 hrs; no document dates the change to a particular cycle, and none prints a total mark figure. 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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