All India Institute Of Medical Sciences, New Delhi

AIIMS New Delhi is the only institution in India to top both the NIRF 2025 Medical and the NIRF 2025 Dental tables at the same time. It was set up by an Act of Parliament as an autonomous institution of national importance that awards its own degrees, and it charges an Indian medical student only a few thousand rupees a year to do it. A leading rank and a nominal, government-set fee together are what make its MBBS seat the hardest to win in Indian medicine.

The All India Institute of Medical Sciences was set up at Ansari Nagar in South Delhi in 1956 as an autonomous institution created through an Act of Parliament and declared an institution of national importance, per the AIIMS about page. Because it holds that status under the AIIMS Act, it grants its own MBBS, postgraduate and doctoral degrees instead of affiliating to a university, and it answers to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare rather than to a state.

It is a hospital, a research institute and a degree-granting body in one, which is what the AIIMS Act set it up to be. Teaching and research run across 42 disciplines, and its clinical departments, including four super-specialty centres, cover practically every disease condition alongside the referral hospital, according to the same AIIMS about page. For a prospective student the consequence is that a small MBBS batch trains inside one of the busiest tertiary hospitals in the country, which is a large part of why it leads the medical table.

AIIMS Delhi teaches the full medical ladder and awards its own degrees at every rung of it: the AIIMS about page records teaching programmes in medical and para-medical courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, alongside a College of Nursing that trains students for the B.Sc (Hons) Nursing. Above the MBBS the ladder forks, and it forks not by subject but by which national paper fills the seat. The INI-CET July 2026 prospectus is headed for "MD, MS, DM (6 yrs), MCh (6 yrs), MDS & MD (Hospital Administration)", while the three-year DM and MCh courses are advertised on their own, in an INI-SS July 2026 prospectus titled "For DM/M.Ch. courses".

The fee is the part that surprises people. AIIMS is fully financed by the central government, so its student charges are set in hundreds and low thousands of rupees rather than the several lakh a private medical college runs to, and the whole first-year outlay stays in the low thousands. The head-by-head amounts for an Indian national are set out in the AIIMS MBBS prospectus.

That nominal total is why the belief that AIIMS is free took hold, and the tuition line is only a small part of it. Foreign nationals are the one exception, paying a large US-dollar tuition fee for the MBBS across the course, per the same prospectus. AIIMS does not publish a single consolidated figure for its MD, MS or super-specialty fees on the same page, so treat any postgraduate total an aggregator quotes as unconfirmed. The place those charges are actually published is Part B of the entrance prospectus, which each institute issues for admission fee, stipend, leave and hostel rules, as the INI-CET July 2026 prospectus states in its own Part A.

Admission to the MBBS is through NEET-UG, the single national entrance test the National Testing Agency conducts, and nothing else. AIIMS ran its own separate MBBS entrance for decades, but retired it after the National Medical Commission Act of 2019 folded all undergraduate medical admission into NEET-UG, so a strong NEET-UG rank is now the only route in. Its NIRF 2025 submission lists a sanctioned MBBS intake of 132 seats, alongside 445 three-year and 103 two-year postgraduate seats for 2023-24, per the NIRF 2025 data submission. Eligibility is a 10+2 pass with the required aggregate in Physics, Chemistry, Biology and English, set lower for SC, ST and benchmark-disability candidates.

Postgraduate entry runs on a different paper, and AIIMS New Delhi is the institute that sets it. Its Examination Section administers INI-CET, the Institutes of National Importance Combined Entrance Test, in consultation with nodal officers from all the INIs, and the INI-CET July 2026 prospectus is headed for "MD, MS, DM (6 yrs), MCh (6 yrs), MDS & MD (Hospital Administration)". The same prospectus asks for an MBBS degree for all of those bar the MDS, which takes a BDS, and for the 12 months of compulsory rotating internship to be completed before the session opens. Because the one paper also fills seats at the other AIIMS, at JIPMER Puducherry, NIMHANS Bengaluru, PGIMER Chandigarh and SCTIMST Trivandrum, a rank on it is struck against the strongest postgraduate field in the country.

The three-year super-specialty courses are not on that paper at all. AIIMS fills them through a second examination of its own, the Institute of National Importance Super-Specialty Entrance Test, whose July 2026 prospectus is titled "For DM/M.Ch. courses" and which the institute's own examination calendar lists separately, as "INI-SS (DM/M.Ch (3yrs.))", on a date of its own. The two are not alternatives, because the people sitting them are not the same: INI-CET eligibility is written against an MBBS, while the INI-SS qualification tables ask for a finished MD, MS or DNB in the parent discipline, so a DM or MCh place there is the rung after a residency rather than a way around one. The super-specialty ladder is no footnote at Ansari Nagar either: the institute recorded 196 students graduating from its DM and MCh programmes in 2023-24, per the NIRF 2025 data submission, which counts them under a single super-speciality head rather than splitting the two routes.

There is no fixed AIIMS Delhi cutoff mark. A seat is allotted on your NEET-UG all-India rank through the Medical Counselling Committee, which has run the counselling for every AIIMS undergraduate seat since 2020, per the MCC about page. The committee publishes round-wise opening and closing ranks after each round, and those lists are the only authoritative record of where a seat actually closed in a given year.

In practice AIIMS New Delhi is the seat most NEET-UG toppers choose first, so its general-category rank closes among the tightest numbers in the whole counselling. Because that closing rank is set by demand rather than by a published threshold, it moves every cycle, and no single number carried over from last year would stay true. Check the current round's closing rank on the MCC portal, and plan against your realistic all-India rank rather than a figure an aggregator quotes.

Placement means something different at a medical institute, and AIIMS Delhi is the clearest case of it. It runs no corporate placement cell and reports no MBBS salary, because the degree does not lead to campus recruitment. Its own NIRF 2025 submission records a median salary of ₹0 for its MBBS graduates and lists every one of them as going on to higher studies, with 96 of 96 in 2020-21, 100 of 100 in 2021-22 and 101 of 101 in 2022-23, per the NIRF 2025 data submission. Before that degree is even conferred, a student completes a one-year compulsory rotating internship inside the institute's own hospital and rural health centres.

The salary numbers only appear later, for the postgraduate leavers. The same NIRF submission records real medians for AIIMS residents, from ₹13,50,000 for its two-year postgraduate programmes to ₹24,00,000 for its three-year MD, MS and DNB residents in the 2023-24 batch, per the NIRF 2025 data submission. The government's own reading of the undergraduate outcome is strong too: AIIMS Delhi scored 98.28 on the Graduation Outcomes parameter of the NIRF 2025 Medical ranking. If you are judging AIIMS by a first-job package, you are using the wrong yardstick; the residency and higher-study pipeline is the outcome it produces.

The Ministry of Education's National Institutional Ranking Framework places AIIMS Delhi at the top of the medical field and near the top of Indian higher education overall. It is the only institution in the country to lead both the medical and the dental tables at once, on scores of 91.80 and 89.12, per the NIRF 2025 Medical ranking and the NIRF 2025 Dental ranking.

Its Overall rank of 8 sits lower only because that table pools it with multi-discipline universities carrying far larger student and programme counts, not because the medicine is weaker. The structured NIRF rank and score for each category it appears in are shown below.

AIIMS Delhi is organised as clinical departments working across 42 disciplines, including four super-specialty centres, per the AIIMS about page. Several of those centres are large enough to run as specialist hospitals in their own right, and the institute's specialty centres page names them.

These centres are large enough that a small MBBS batch and a large body of residents train inside what are effectively specialist hospitals in their own right.

The institute has grown well beyond a single Ansari Nagar block. Its second campus at Jhajjar in Haryana houses the National Cancer Institute, listed among its centres on the specialty centres page, and the Centre for Community Medicine runs a rural hospital and teaching programme at the Comprehensive Rural Health Centre in Ballabgarh, per the AIIMS about page.

That split is the point of the campus for a student: you train in high-end specialty care at Ansari Nagar and in primary rural practice at Ballabgarh, inside the same institution. The tertiary hospital, the apex trauma centre and the named super-specialty centres sit on the main campus alongside the teaching and residential blocks, so the clinical facilities a medical student learns in are the referral facilities patients across India are sent to.

AIIMS runs residential hostels on the Ansari Nagar campus, and the charge is as nominal as the tuition. A first-year student pays ₹4,228 in hostel and other charges, of which ₹1,500 in mess and hostel security is refundable, alongside a room rent, a pot fund and small service charges, so living on campus costs a fraction of what a private hostel bills. The head-by-head hostel amounts sit in the fee table under Courses and Fees, drawn from the AIIMS MBBS prospectus.

The prospectus adds one honest caveat a candidate should plan around: hostel accommodation is provided subject to availability, so a seat in the hostel is not automatic with a seat in the course. For the exact block allotment, current room rules and any updated charge, check the hostel office listing on the official website.

AIIMS Delhi entered 887 faculty members in its NIRF 2025 submission, per the NIRF 2025 data submission, and they teach across the 42 disciplines the AIIMS about page records. These are central-government appointees who carry teaching, research and patient care together rather than teaching alone.

The strength of that base shows in the ranking parameters, where AIIMS scored 93.51 on Teaching, Learning and Resources in the NIRF 2025 Medical ranking. The faculty carry a heavy doctoral load as well: the institute reported 405 full-time PhD scholars in the same NIRF 2025 data submission. The practical meaning for a student is that the clinicians who set your exams are, in many departments, the same people running the referral hospital, which is why a seat here trains a doctor differently from one at a college without that hospital attached.

AIIMS does not publish an open alumni register, so we name only people whose AIIMS training and later record are a matter of published fact. Soumya Swaminathan earned her MD in Paediatrics at AIIMS New Delhi and went on to become the first Chief Scientist of the World Health Organization, per the Indian Academy of Sciences fellowship profile.

The surgeon P. Venugopal trained and spent his career at AIIMS, rose to be its Director, and performed India's first heart transplant here on 3 August 1994, per a tribute in the Indian Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery. That AIIMS produces figures like these is consistent with its own data: because effectively all of its MBBS graduates continue to higher study rather than stop at the degree, the institute works as a feeder into academic medicine, public-health leadership and clinical research rather than into a first job.

AIIMS New Delhi sits at Ansari Nagar in South Delhi, on the Ring Road near the AIIMS junction. The switchboard and postal details below are the ones AIIMS publishes on its own contact page.

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