Indian Institute Of Management Amritsar

IIM Amritsar screens CAT 2025 at a 90 overall percentile with section floors of 80, 75 and 80 for a general-category applicant, and the same six-row table is reprinted without a single digit changed in the admission documents for the MBA, the analytics MBA and the human resources MBA for the 2026-28 batch. The institute is placed 64th on the Ministry of Education's NIRF 2025 management table on a score of 51.70, with no other IIM below it in that list of a hundred. The figure worth weighing hardest is the one it files rather than the one it announces: a median salary of Rs 12,29,000 for the class placed in 2024-25, in its NIRF 2026 data submission.

The society came first and the campus came last. The IIM Amritsar Society was registered on 27 July 2015, the inaugural MBA batch of 2015-17 began that August, and the Board of Governance and Society was constituted on 14 October 2015, the institute's overview records. It is the 15th IIM, set up under the Ministry of Education with the support of the Government of Punjab, and its administrative work is still partly run out of the Punjab Institute of Technology building while classes sit at the Manawala campus.

Who studies here is documented rather than described. The NIRF 2026 submission counts 579 students on the two-year postgraduate roll, 438 men and 141 women, of whom 19 come from Punjab and 560 from other states. It records 247 students from the Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe or OBC categories and 48 as economically backward.

Rank aside, one line in the ranking table describes the school better than the rank does. Its teaching, learning and resources score of 63.89 is the lowest of any IIM on the 2025 management table, while its graduation outcomes score of 87.93 beats IIM Sirmaur's 83.86 and IIM Sambalpur's 84.61, both of which finish above it overall. The school gets students out the door; it is the inputs behind them that the ranking marks down.

Three of the degrees taught here are two-year MBAs, and they are the smaller part of the list. The flagship MBA is a full-time residential programme in general management with a summer internship in the middle, running three terms an academic year from around June or July to March, per its programme page. Beside it sit two sector MBAs, an undergraduate route, a joint science masters, an executive degree, a doctorate and a post-doctoral fellowship.

The undergraduate route is the one that behaves differently from the rest. The Integrated Programme in Management runs five years to an MBA dual degree, with an exit at the end of year three carrying a Bachelor of Science in Quantitative Finance and Economics, the programme page states. The joint masters splits its four semesters between two campuses, the first two at IIT Ropar and the last two at Amritsar, per its FAQ.

One fee notice covers all three MBAs, headed for the tenth MBA cohort and the fourth of each sector degree, and the analytics and human resources fee pages link that same file rather than one of their own. For the 2024-26 batch that notice sets a programme fee of Rs 9,50,000 an academic year, billed across three terms.

The second year repeats that Rs 9,50,000 and drops the caution deposit, so the schedule reads Rs 10,25,000, and the commitment fee of Rs 50,000 paid on acceptance is adjusted into the Term 1 instalment rather than charged on top of it, in the same notice. Academic support covers textbooks. Separate notices for the 2025-27 and 2026-28 batches sit on the fees page, and the amounts have moved since, so budget off the notice for the batch you are joining. Mess is not inside any of these figures: the institute estimates it at Rs 10,000 a month, payable on actuals.

The other programmes are priced on their own schedules. The Integrated Programme charges Rs 17,75,000 across its first three years, with the fourth and fifth years billed at whatever the Board of Governors sets for the MBA intake of that year, on its fee structure, so an IPM applicant cannot see the full five-year cost at the point of joining. The joint masters costs Rs 3,63,250 a semester, with an offer acceptance fee of Rs 50,000 adjusted into semester one and a caution deposit of Rs 25,000, per its FAQ. The Executive MBA is Rs 12,00,000 plus a non-refundable application fee of Rs 2,950, on its fee page.

Selection runs in two stages and the CAT decides less of it than the cut-off table suggests. A candidate must first post a positive raw score in every CAT section and clear the category percentiles, after which the institute standardises the record and builds a pre-interview score, the 2026-28 admission process explains. The stage-one weights are unusual for how little they leave to the test.

School marks are not read raw. Each candidate's Class 10 and Class 12 percentages are divided by the 90th percentile score of their own board before they count, under the same document, which is a deliberate correction for boards that mark generously and boards that do not. Graduation is treated more bluntly, on a six-band scale that gives 0 to anyone at or below 55%, 1 up to 65%, 2 up to 70%, 3 up to 80%, 4 up to 90% and 5 above that.

Stage two is the interview, and it is weighted the other way round: the interview itself carries 70%, with work experience, gender diversity and academic diversity taking 10% each. The two stages are then combined as 0.7 times the pre-interview score plus 0.3 times the post-interview score, the formula in the admission process reads. Work that arithmetic through and the CAT drives a little over a third of the final ranking, which is why a high percentile carried by a thin school record and a flat interview is not the safe position candidates assume it is.

Both of those weightings belong to the flagship MBA, and the identical cut-off across the three degrees hides the fact that the merit lists behind it are not built the same way. The human resources programme cuts the CAT weight to 40% and adds academic diversity at 10%, so a seventh parameter enters its ranking before anyone has been interviewed, in its own admission process. The analytics programme matches the flagship before the interview and diverges after it, giving work experience 15% and academic diversity 5% where the other two give 10% each, under its document. One percentile, three rankings.

Two practical details are easy to miss. Final-year students must finish every requirement for their degree by 30 June 2026 to hold a 2026-28 seat, per the admission process, and the withdrawal rules are strict once registration opens: a refund before the first registration day costs Rs 1,000 in processing, after that the Term 1 fee is forfeited if the seat stays vacant, and nothing is refundable once Term 1 classes begin, in the withdrawal policy. For the 2026-28 batch, reporting runs on 29 and 30 June and 1 July 2026 and classes begin on 14 July 2026, on the academic calendar.

There is one screen here, not three, which for a borderline candidate is the most useful fact in the whole admission document. Set the three admission PDFs side by side and the minimum-percentile table is character-for-character the same in all of them, so a single CAT score is tested against one bar and the programme a candidate ends up shortlisted by is decided by the composite that follows, not by the screen.

Read the rows against each other and two things stand out. The EWS row is the general row with three percentile points shaved off verbal ability and nothing else, so an EWS candidate is effectively screened at the general bar. And the shape of the reserved rows inverts: a general candidate needs an overall percentile well above any single section, while an SC candidate is asked for the same 55 overall as in quantitative aptitude, meaning one weak section can end the application even when the aggregate clears.

These are thresholds for the first shortlist, not admission marks. The institute publishes no closing percentile for the candidates it finally admits, and because the composite score carries the school record, the interview and work experience, the percentile that converts an offer is set after the interview round rather than before it.

What IIM Amritsar reports about pay has changed shape almost every year, and the change matters more than any single number. Through the batch of 2021-23 each note opened with an average for the whole batch. The three notes since have quoted a highest package on its own, then an average for the top fifth, then a pair of averages cut at the top 50 students and the top half of the cohort. The whole-batch average has not come back.

Only one Amritsar series survives that reshuffling intact. NIRF dictates what has to be counted, so the same three quantities go in every year, and the graduate they describe is the one in the middle rather than the one at the top.

Set the two tables side by side on the same cohort and the gap is the point. For the batch of 2023-25 the institute's own note reports a top-20% average of Rs 19.11 lakh and a highest of Rs 25.86 lakh, on the placement page. The median for that same class was Rs 12,29,000, on 310 placements out of 318 graduating students, the remaining 8 recorded as going to higher studies, in the NIRF 2026 submission. Neither figure is wrong. They describe different parts of the same room.

The 2024-26 note is the first to describe the middle of that room itself. Alongside the top-50 figure it gives a median of Rs 15.25 lakh for the top half of a 256-student batch and a highest CTC of Rs 43.00 lakh, on the same page. A median computed over the better half of a cohort still sits above the median of the whole, so read it as a ceiling on what the NIRF number for this batch will be when it is filed, not as a preview of it.

The recruiter side has held up better than the salary line. The batch of 2024-26 drew ICICI Bank, Moody's, D.E. Shaw, Flipkart, PwC, EY, CRISIL, MongoDB and Tech Mahindra among others, per the same page, and internships have been the stronger half of the story: all 355 students of the 2025-27 cohort secured summer internships from a pool of more than 145 organisations, over 75 of them recruiting here for the first time, with a highest domestic stipend of Rs 3,20,000, on the summer placement page.

Sanctioned strength moved down at the last count. The two-year postgraduate intake was approved at 302 for 2024-25 against 320 in 2023-24, and in 2023-24 the institute admitted exactly the 320 it was allowed, the NIRF 2026 submission records. Cohort sizes since then have been reported through the placement office rather than an intake notice: 355 students in the 2025-27 batch and 256 graduating in 2024-26, on the summer and final placement pages.

Ask any of the three MBA documents for the category split and none of them answers. What they commit to instead is a procedural guarantee: enough candidates will be shortlisted from each social category at every stage to meet the reservation requirement applicable in that cycle, as the admission process states, with the norms themselves following the Government of India requirement, per the joint masters admission note. That is a promise about the shortlist, not a published seat count, and the two are not the same thing. The approved intake is the only hard ceiling on the record.

Rank 64, score 51.70 out of 100, and the last IIM standing on a table that runs to a hundred names: that is the whole of what the Ministry of Education published for 2025. The more useful document is the institute's own NIRF page, which keeps every annual submission from 2020 to 2026 online, because a rank compresses five scores into one and the five say different things.

The research score has a documented basis rather than a mysterious one. Two sponsored projects, one funding agency and Rs 30,00,000 is the entirety of the 2024-25 research income, the NIRF 2026 submission shows. Thirteen doctoral students are on the books full time, and the completions column reads zero for 2022-23, zero for 2023-24 and zero for 2024-25. Consultancy fell off a cliff in the same window, from Rs 1,46,97,502 across eight client organisations to Rs 13,36,000 across three. A research score of 18.35 is what a school with those inputs earns, on the management table, and it is the parameter an applicant should expect to move slowest.

The campus is at Manawala, roughly 14 kilometres from the city centre on the Amritsar to Jalandhar Grand Trunk Road, on 60 acres, the institute's campus record states. Academic buildings, faculty offices, hostels, a health centre and a cafeteria are described as operational; the incubation centre is under development, faculty and staff housing belong to later phases, and the gymnasium and indoor sports complex are planned rather than built. Solar panels and rainwater harvesting are part of the design. Two older pages on the same site describe a different institute, and the campus record is the one to trust. The overview advertises a gymnasium and indoor and outdoor sports facilities in the present tense while putting Manawala 8.5 km from the railway station, and the student life page puts the campus 5 km from that same station. Check what is standing before you count it as a facility.

Construction is being paid for now. The institute spent Rs 45,10,07,935 on creating capital assets in 2024-25, against Rs 8,51,85,032 the year before, alongside Rs 5,18,55,517 on library books, journals and e-resources, in its NIRF 2026 submission. The accessibility questions in that filing all come back positive, and on a part-built site that is worth knowing: more than 80% of the buildings standing today have lifts or ramps, and the same share have specially designed toilets.

The library is where the spending is most visible to a student. It runs on remote access and its subscription list carries Bloomberg, LSEG Eikon Workspace, four CMIE feeds including Prowess and Prowess dx, Euromonitor Passport, EMIS Next, Statista, Scopus and Emerald, as its resource list shows. For an analytics or finance student that inventory is worth more than any campus tour, and it is the one line item where the institute buys well above its rank.

Forty-six people appear on the teaching roster in the NIRF 2026 submission, and the column that repays reading is the one recording whether each is still here. Of the 46, 38 hold regular appointments and 8 are visiting. Sort the regular bench by rank and it narrows to almost nothing at the top: 28 assistant professors, 8 associate professors, the two directorship entries, and no Professor at all. The only two people on the list carrying that rank, Rahul Pandey and Utkarsh Majmudar, are both visiting.

Turnover is the other thing that roster shows. Nine of the 46 are marked as no longer with the institute, their leaving dates falling between May 2024 and April 2025, in the same filing. The directorship is one of them: Nagarajan Ramamoorthy left on 11 March 2025 and Samir Kumar Srivastava joined the same day. Nine exits inside twelve months, off a bench of 38, is a rate an applicant should price in when a brochure names the faculty member teaching a subject two years from now.

Teaching is organised into eight academic groups rather than departments: IT and computational systems, marketing, communications, economics, finance accounting and control, organisational behaviour and human resource management, quantitative methods and operations management, and strategy, as the faculty listing shows. What that bench is being asked to carry has grown faster than the bench has. Management development programmes went from 9 to 16 in one year while the participants they drew moved only from 445 to 459, per the NIRF filing, so the same teachers are now running nearly twice as many, much smaller, executive courses.

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