Indian Institute Of Management Bangalore

IIM Bangalore charges Rs 26,00,000 for the two years of its flagship MBA in the 2026-28 batch, and it marks you twice before deciding whether you get a seat. Your CAT score carries 55 of the 100 points that build the interview shortlist and 25 of the 100 that decide the offer. The institute runs a second two-year MBA in business analytics off the same CAT scorecard and reads that scorecard differently, so the section you most need to protect depends on which of the two you are chasing. Median pay for the batch that finished in 2026 was Rs 34.75 lakh, and 45% of what that batch was offered came from consulting.

IIM Bangalore is the Bengaluru member of the Indian Institutes of Management, on Bannerghatta Road in the south of the city, and it dates itself to 1973 on its own home page. The IIM Act of 2017 made it an Institute of National Importance and put a degree rather than a diploma on the parchment. The programmes listing shows how far IIMB has since taken that power: nine degree-granting programmes, running from a five-year doctorate down to two four-year BSc Honours degrees and a three-year online BBA.

The institute counts 105 full-time faculty members, about 1,200 students across its degree-granting programmes and nearly 5,000 Executive Education participants a year. Teaching is organised into 11 disciplinary areas and ten centres of excellence, and the same page records a second campus under development at Jigani, about 27 km from Bannerghatta Road. Professor U Dinesh Kumar, from the Decision Sciences area, is Director-in-charge.

One naming detail trips people up. IIMB kept the old programme name and changed the parchment: its flagship is still called the Post Graduate Programme in Management, and the programme page states that PGP is a master's level programme leading to the grant of a Master of Business Administration degree. So PGP and MBA are the same thing here. Four of the nine degree programmes end in an MBA, the public policy one awards a Master of Management Studies, and the doctoral and undergraduate ones award what their names say.

The six postgraduate and doctoral programmes are the ones with a published entry route worth planning around. Two of them cost exactly the same and three publish no fee at all.

Three undergraduate degrees sit outside that table and are newer. IIMB lists a three-year online BBA in Digital Business and Entrepreneurship, and four-year full-time residential BSc Honours degrees in Data Sciences and in Economics, each of the two BSc programmes carrying the other as a minor. Entry to those two runs on a pass in Class XII with at least 60% in mathematics, a national-level entrance examination and an interview, which is a different machine altogether from the CAT route below. The certificate side holds the N. S. Ramaswamy Pre-doctoral Fellowship and the Mahatma Gandhi National Fellowship.

The flagship number is quoted as one figure for the whole degree rather than per year, and two smaller amounts sit outside it.

What that single figure buys is wider than a tuition line. The same page lists tuition, library, internet, case permission royalty, course material, hostel room rent and service charge, medical insurance, personal accident insurance and alumni activity inside it, and excludes service tax or any other tax the law imposes. Food is billed separately through the termly mess advance. The business analytics MBA is priced identically, at Rs 26,00,000 with the same Rs 30,000 caution deposit, so choosing between the two costs nothing either way.

The one-year executive MBA is the expensive one, and it is the only programme at IIMB that prices accommodation as a line you can decline.

Read the international immersion row before you treat the total as fixed. IIMB marks that Rs 5,50,000 as indicative and says the amount will be restricted to the actual expenditure on travel, accommodation and course fees at the foreign university, so it is the one component that can settle lower or higher than the sticker.

No fee appears on the programme or admissions pages for the weekend MBA, the public policy master's or the doctoral programme. The only price PGPEM states is a continuation fee of Rs 25,000 payable for each quarter beyond the eight quarters scheduled for the programme, which is a penalty for stretching the degree rather than the cost of it. For those three the figure has to come from the programme office itself, and the Contact section below lists the desks that hold it.

IIMB publishes its admission arithmetic in full, standardisation equation included, in a four-page PDF issued separately for each of its two full-time MBAs. To apply to the flagship you need a bachelor's degree in any discipline with at least 50% marks or the equivalent CGPA, relaxed to 45% for SC, ST and PwD candidates, or a completed CA, CS, ICWA (CMA) or FIAI qualification, plus a CAT score valid on the day you submit.

Two application requirements catch people out. IIMB asks for a statement of purpose and for two online reference letters, submitted by the referees themselves before the application deadline, with no separate extension, and the form cannot be submitted until the reference section is complete. Line up your two referees before you start, because they, not you, control whether your application closes on time.

Stage one builds a pre-interview score out of 100 from six components.

The gender diversity allocation is a shortlisting device and nothing more. IIMB states plainly that it is applicable only for computing the pre-PI score and is not used in the next stage, so it can help win a call and cannot help win a seat.

Work experience is scored by a published formula rather than a band. Up to three years it runs at 10x divided by 36, where x is your months of experience to July 2026, and it caps at 10 once you pass 36 months. Internships, apprenticeships such as CA articleship, and unpaid work count for nothing. Someone with a CA or CS or ICWA qualification and a job gets the better of the two scores, never both. Every academic component is standardised against the cohort mean and standard deviation and then truncated between zero and its weight, so a very high board percentage in a lenient year is worth less than the raw figure suggests.

Stage two is a personal interview and a Written Ability Test held on the same day in the same place, the note taking about 30 minutes and marked on content and style. The score sheet is rebuilt from scratch at this point.

Work experience survives that rebuild in an altered form. The pre-interview score is scaled down from 10 to 5, then multiplied by a quality-of-experience score that each panel member marks on a five-point scale of 0.25, 0.5, 1, 1.5 and 2, with the panel average applied. Two candidates with identical tenure can therefore finish well apart on this component alone, on what they did in those months and how well they explained it to the panel.

One rule is worth reading twice if you are tempted to round your experience up. IIMB warns that a candidate found to have given incorrect work-experience information will not be considered further and will be barred from applying to any programme at IIMB for the next 3 years.

There is also a route in for specialists. Among candidates who clear the first shortlist, the top ten in each of three lists automatically qualify for the interview stage: total CAT score, adjusted bachelor's degree score for commerce, arts and science graduates, and professional CA, ICWA or CS score. After the interview they are scored like everyone else.

The two executive programmes do not touch CAT at all in the same way. EPGP wants a bachelor's degree at 50%, a minimum of 5 years of full-time work experience after graduation, and a valid GMAT or GRE score, with at-home online test sittings not accepted. PGPEM is built for mid-level and senior executives with at least six years of experience after graduation and is scheduled on weekends so that nobody has to resign; it accepts CAT, GMAT, GRE or IIMB's own test, and a candidate picks one and cannot switch after paying the application fee. It is also the one IIMB programme with no entry bar at all on that score: the institute states that there is no minimum score to qualify and that a low score will not disqualify a candidate, which is the exact opposite of the percentile floors the two full-time MBAs run on.

There is no closing rank to look up here, only a percentile floor that gets you counted. Both two-year MBAs publish that floor as a table, and the two tables are not the same, which is the part most applicants miss.

Put the two side by side and the flagship is the softer entry in the quantitative half. A general-category applicant can reach the PGP shortlist on 75 in data interpretation and 75 in quantitative aptitude, where the analytics MBA demands 80 in all three sections. For SC candidates the advantage reverses in the verbal section, where the flagship asks 65 against the analytics programme's 60. Only candidates with a positive raw score in every CAT section are considered at all.

The point split inside the CAT weight tells the same story from the other side.

The flagship pays most for data interpretation and logical reasoning and least for quantitative aptitude; the analytics MBA inverts that and pays most for quant. The analytics programme also swaps the school component: after the interview it scores your Class 10 board result in mathematics rather than your overall Class 10 result. Applying to both is allowed, and a candidate shortlisted for both attends a single common interview.

Neither floor is an admission mark, and IIMB says so in its own footnote. Under the flagship table it records that these are the cut-offs used for preparing the first shortlist and that the scores of those called for interviews were higher; the analytics table softens the same sentence to say those scores may be higher. Treat the published percentile as the price of being read, not the price of a seat.

The Career Development Services office publishes a placement report each year, and its 2026 edition covers the flagship and the analytics MBA as a single cohort.

Two things in that table are worth more than the headline. IIMB made 283 pre-placement offers and 219 were accepted, so 219 of the 605 students were hired off the summer internship rather than in the final process, which makes the internship the real interview. And the median of Rs 34.75 lakh sits close to the average of Rs 35.35 lakh, a narrow gap that suggests the distribution is not being dragged by a handful of very large offers.

Where the offers came from is concentrated to a degree few brochures admit.

Nearly half of everything offered was a consulting role, and one firm dominates the list: Accenture Strategy made 94 of the 665 final offers, ahead of Boston Consulting Group on 27, Bain and Company on 23 and EY-Parthenon India on 22. The same firm made 132 of the 601 summer offers to the following batch. In both processes Accenture Strategy alone made more offers than Boston Consulting Group, Bain and Company and EY-Parthenon India put together, which is worth knowing before you picture recruiting week as an even spread of firms.

The one-year executive MBA is the quieter surprise. Its 2025-26 cohort of 73 students drew 22 companies and accepted 61 offers, at a median of Rs 36.50 lakh and an average of Rs 37.10 lakh, which is above the flagship's median. These are experienced hires with at least five years behind them, so the two figures measure different people rather than a better programme.

Longer-run figures come from a different document and a different definition. IIMB's data filed with NIRF for 2026 records, for its two-year postgraduate programmes, a median salary of 3261000 rupees for the students graduating in 2024-25, 3250000 for 2023-24 and 3300000 for 2022-23, with 588 of the 589 students who graduated in minimum stipulated time in 2024-25 placed and one going on to higher studies. Those medians are computed on the students placed in a given year and are not the same measure as the placement report's cohort summary, so line them up as separate records rather than as a trend.

IIMB does not publish a category-wise seat chart the way a counselling authority does. What it does file with the Ministry of Education is an intake line and a full breakdown of who is actually on campus, and the two together answer most of what a seat chart would.

The 2023-24 row is the one to notice: 604 students were admitted against a sanctioned intake of 598. The intake also moved up from 528 in 2021-22 and 525 in 2022-23 to 602, so the class you would sit in is roughly a seventh larger than the one admitted three years earlier.

The composition of the students actually on campus is filed too.

Only 72 of 1206 students come from Karnataka, which is worth knowing if you are picking Bengaluru for the city as much as the school: almost nobody in the room is local. The doctoral programme runs alongside with 80 full-time students and no part-time enrolment. Reservation is applied for EWS, NC-OBC, SC, ST and PWD in accordance with the law, with the year's category-wise split settled internally before the shortlist rather than published in advance.

IIM Bangalore holds rank 2 in the NIRF 2025 Management ranking with an overall score of 81.56, and its five parameter scores are unusually lopsided for a school that high.

Perception is at the ceiling. A score of 100.00 is the maximum the parameter allows, and IIMB is the only management institute in that year's table to reach it, ahead of the 93.26 recorded by the school ranked first. What keeps it second is the research parameter at 59.04, its own weakest of the five by a wide margin and the lowest of the top three. Employers and academic peers rate this school as highly as any in the country; the research output behind it does not yet match.

The international picture is stronger and comes from bodies that rank Indian programmes against foreign ones. IIMB reports that the flagship MBA was ranked #28 worldwide and #1 in India in the Financial Times Masters in Management ranking for 2025, up from #41 in 2024, which it describes as the only Indian entry in the global top 30. In the QS 2026 cycle it reports the flagship at #30 globally and #2 in Asia in the Master's in Management ranking, the one-year EPGP at #52 globally with an overall score of 70.2 in the Global MBA ranking, and the analytics MBA inside the global top 60 on its first appearance, with an employability rank of #14 worldwide. The weekend MBA was placed 50th worldwide in the 2025 QS Executive MBA ranking.

Teaching and research are split into 11 areas rather than departments, and an area is what you pick electives and a specialisation from. The areas listing names them.

Two of those eleven carry a standing institution rather than just a course list. The public policy area anchors the Centre for Public Policy, established alongside the PGPPM in 2001 with initial support from the Department of Personnel and Training and the UNDP, and the entrepreneurship area sits with NSRCEL, which IIMB describes on its home page as its startup incubator and accelerator. The centres of excellence are described by the institute as virtual centres that draw on stakeholder resources rather than as separate faculties, so a student meets them through courses and projects rather than by enrolling in one.

The campus is a piece of architectural history and is treated as one. The Life at IIMB page records a 54,000 square metre complex on a 100-acre site, designed by B V Doshi on the plan of the town of Fatehpur Sikri and completed in 1983, with the original stone architecture now grown over by the greenery Doshi intended. Architecture students visit it as a case study.

Day to day, the home page lists sports facilities for soccer, cricket, tennis, basketball, volleyball, throw ball, badminton and indoor games, a library, computing facilities and a music room. Sustainability is built into the estate rather than bolted on: the same Life at IIMB page describes rooftop solar installations, motion-sensor lighting, water management systems and zero-waste initiatives.

Retrofitting a stone campus completed in 1983 for accessibility is a harder job than designing it in from the start. IIMB's NIRF filing reports ramp and accessible-toilet coverage as a threshold rather than a total, more than 80% of buildings in each case, and answers outright yes on wheelchairs, walking aids and transport between blocks.

Living on campus is not an optional extra for the two-year MBAs; it is inside the price. The PGP fee page folds hostel room rent and service charge into the Rs 26,00,000 programme fee and confirms that accommodation on campus is provided, with students free to move off campus in the second year by making their own arrangements. Food is the separate line, at Rs 30,000 of mess advance each term. The analytics MBA is housed on the same terms.

The executive programme handles it differently and more flexibly. EPGP participants can take hostel accommodation at Rs 80,000 with a hostel mess charge of Rs 63,000, or decline both and pay Rs 32,20,000 instead of Rs 33,68,000, and the institute notes that hostel accommodation is provided for the student and their spouse only. That spouse provision is a practical detail for a mid-career applicant deciding whether a year in Bengaluru is workable.

IIMB does not publish a room-by-room hostel tariff or a block-wise capacity for any programme, so the fee lines above are the whole of what is on the record.

Three different faculty numbers circulate for IIMB and only one of them can be audited line by line. The 2026 NIRF filing names 113 people with designation, qualification and joining date against each. Seven of those rows close with a leaving date between June 2024 and March 2025, leaving 106 in post when the form was filed. Of the 113, 108 are regular appointments and 5 adhoc or contractual, and 112 hold a doctorate; the exception is a contractual entry holding a PGDM.

Forty-four assistant professors against forty full professors is the shape of a roster being rebuilt from the bottom, and the joining dates say when it happened: all but one of the assistant professors joined in 2017 or later, and most of them from 2020 onwards. The same filing shows what that intake has begun to produce: 44 sponsored research projects in 2024-25, against 18 the year before and 16 the year before that.

The site itself carries two other counts, and they do not agree. The About IIMB page says 105 full-time faculty members, while the PGP programme page describes a 140-plus group of researchers, academicians and practitioners, a figure that plainly reaches wider than the full-time roster.

Gender is one field the roster settles directly. Counting the named rows in the NIRF 2026 filing gives 27 women against 86 men, which squares with what IIMB told the Financial Times panel in September 2025, that the proportion of female faculty had risen from 22% to 25% over the year.

IIMB names alumni itself, through the Distinguished Alumni Awards it has run since 2007, so there is no need to rely on lists compiled elsewhere. Five graduates were named for the 2026 award.

The spread is a fair reading of where an IIMB degree actually goes. Alongside the corporate and venture careers sits a civic one: the award citation records that Arun Pai founded Bangalore Walks in 2005 and India Rising Trust in 2014, and that his work on footpaths and public space has been recognised by the city corporation. The awards are presented at the reorientation of the flagship and analytics batch entering its second year, so the recipients meet a cohort with a year still to run rather than one on its way out of the door.

IIMB posts programme notifications, ranking results and award announcements on its own site, and the dated items worth knowing this cycle are the Financial Times Masters in Management result of September 2025, the QS 2026 portfolio result of September 2025 and the Distinguished Alumni Awards announced in June 2026. Both admission PDFs open with a footnote saying their contents bind that cycle alone and that IIMB reserves the right to change, modify or adopt any new admissions process at any point, so treat a deadline read anywhere else as stale until the current PDF agrees with it.

IIM Bangalore's 81.56 sits between IIM Ahmedabad's 83.29 and IIM Kozhikode's 79.85, which is how tight the top of this table is. Read across the five parameters and the ordering stops looking settled: IIMB trails Ahmedabad on research and professional practice while taking perception at 100.00 against Ahmedabad's 93.26, so the two schools are separated by less than the margin IIMB wins on reputation. The fourth row deserves a second look for a different reason. The management school at IIT Delhi scores 87.50 on research and professional practice against IIMB's 59.04 and still finishes two places lower, because IIMB takes teaching, graduation outcomes and perception. Anyone weighing a doctorate here should be reading the columns, not the rank.

The campus is on Bannerghatta Road in south Bengaluru, and each programme runs its own admissions desk rather than a single central one.

A second campus is being built at Jigani, about 27 km from Bannerghatta Road, so check which site a programme is taught on before you plan a commute.

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