Indian Institute Of Management Lucknow

IIM Lucknow admits to three separate two-year MBAs off a single CAT scorecard, and each one reads that scorecard differently. A general-category candidate needs 90 overall and 85 in every section to be considered for the flagship, and five percentile points less for the agri-business and sustainability versions. The batch that finished in 2025 took 604 offers at a median of Rs 31 lakh. Since 2026 the institute also admits school-leavers, on JEE Advanced, into a four-year undergraduate degree.

Two addresses do different jobs here, and which one you end up on is decided by the programme you apply to rather than by preference. The Lucknow campus at Prabandh Nagar teaches the flagship MBA, the agri-business MBA and the doctoral programme, while the Noida campus teaches the one-year executive MBA, the two-year MBA-WE for working executives, the sustainability MBA and the executive doctorate.

The institute was set up in 1984, fourth in the family after Calcutta, Ahmedabad and Bangalore, and its history page records that in 2005 it became the first IIM to open a satellite campus devoted entirely to executive education. That decision is why the programme list below is longer and stranger than most IIMs', and why four of the nine entries on it are taught several hundred kilometres from the main gate, on the edge of Delhi. Prof. M. P. Gupta is Director.

One naming habit trips people up in search results. The degrees are now titled MBA, MBA-ABM and MBA-SM on the programme pages, but the older Post Graduate Programme labels survive inside the institute's own paperwork: the placement report for the class of 2025 calls it the 39th batch of the Post Graduate Programme and the 20th batch of the Postgraduate Program in Agribusiness Management. PGP and MBA are the same degree here.

Who is actually in the classroom is a matter of record, and the home-state column is the surprising one. Of the 1234 students on the two-year programmes, only 149 gave a Uttar Pradesh address against 1085 from outside the state, and the gender split runs 843 men to 391 women. Roughly one student in eight is local. Choose this school for the school, in other words, not because you already live in Lucknow.

Nine degree and fellow programmes sit under the two addresses, and only three of them are the CAT-route MBAs most applicants mean.

The undergraduate degree is the newest and the least expected. IIM Lucknow now runs a four-year residential BS in Artificial Intelligence and Business Analytics for candidates who have cleared JEE Advanced and finished 10+2 in 2025 or 2026 with physics, chemistry and mathematics, which makes a Class 12 pass a route into an IIM for the first time here. The institute frames it against Lucknow's push to become an artificial-intelligence hub.

Four programmes publish an exact price.

Read the executive fees as floors rather than totals, because the overseas module sits outside both. The IPMX price already covers academic inputs, visa and stay during the overseas module, with boarding, local transport, internet and stationery abroad left to the student, and airfare charged separately on actuals. MBA-WE is stricter about it: international immersion is mandatory and its approximate cost of Rs 4.50 lakh is borne by the student on top of the programme fee, with Rs 2.00 lakh payable alongside the Term IV fee and the balance with Term V.

The blended MBA prices campus time as a variable. Tuition covers reading material and working lunch during immersion, while a candidate who names the Lucknow or Noida campus as the test centre for Terms I, III and V and takes campus accommodation for those examinations pays an extra Rs 10,000 per term.

The flagship is the awkward one. IIM Lucknow publishes the fee for the two-year MBA and MBA-ABM as a signed, stamped scan rather than as text, in a fee structure sheet linked from both programme pages, so no figure can be lifted out of it the way the executive fees can be lifted off their pages. The sheet itself is complete and legible once you open it: a term-by-term grid running Term-I to Term-VI, with an admission fee charged once at the start, tuition and an infrastructure fee charged in every term, refundable library, computer and mess deposits taken in the first term, an alumni membership fee in the fourth, and mess charges billed on actuals throughout. Hostel maintenance sits inside that infrastructure line rather than being billed separately. The MBA-SM sheet uses the same grid, adds a second-year international immersion cost, and carries the sting that the flagship sheet does not: an extra monthly charge for a student who runs an air conditioner in their room. Open both before you trust any figure an aggregator quotes.

What the money buys academically is set out in text. The flagship runs six terms across two years: three terms of 22 core courses and a compulsory two-month summer training in the first year, then two compulsory integrative courses and 15 electives in the second. The agri-business MBA shares that first-year core, then locks its second year down hard. Of the 17.5 credits taken in the second year, 6.5 must come from compulsory agribusiness courses, at most one credit may be taken from the general management electives, and everything else has to be an agribusiness elective. Read that ceiling before you treat MBA-ABM as a back door into the flagship curriculum: it is not one. The one-year executive MBA is denser again, at 23.5 credits made up of 14.5 credits of core courses, 2 credits during the overseas module and 7 credits of electives, with non-credit workshops of 40 hours and 745 classroom contact hours in all.

Every full-time MBA seat here is decided by a published points formula, and the formula runs on the same document for all three programmes. The admission policy for the batch of 2026-28 sets a percentile floor first, then builds a composite score out of 100 for the shortlist, then rebuilds the score from scratch after the interview.

Clearing the floor only gets you counted. The shortlisting score is where candidates separate.

The agri-business column is the one worth staring at. Academic diversity is worth 20 points for MBA-ABM candidates whose bachelor's degree falls in one of the listed disciplines, against 5 for the other two programmes, and the listed disciplines are agriculture, agronomy and soil science, biology and biotechnology, veterinary science and dairy science, agricultural engineering and food technology, forestry and horticulture, and rural studies and rural banking. If you hold one of those degrees, MBA-ABM is arithmetically the easier door at IIM Lucknow, and it is the only one of the three that scores your work experience at zero. The two diversity awards together are also capped at 20 for MBA-ABM, so a woman from an agriculture discipline cannot stack them past that ceiling.

Work experience is scored by formula, not by band, and the formulas start counting at different points. For the flagship, only months beyond the sixth count, at 0.50 a month, capped at 10, so anything under seven months of full-time work is worth nothing and the component tops out at twenty-six completed months. For MBA-SM the clock starts only after 24 months, which are an eligibility condition in their own right, and the same rate then applies. Only full-time work after graduation counts, and the months are those completed as of 31 July 2025 as declared at CAT registration.

The academic components are not read raw. Class 12 marks are converted from a percentile computed on CAT applicants' pooled data of the past five years for the respective boards and disciplines, and graduation marks are normalised separately for engineering, science, commerce, arts and other disciplines before being scaled onto a range of zero to ten. A high raw percentage from a lenient board or a generous department is therefore worth less than it looks.

After the Writing Ability Test and the interview the sheet is torn up and rebuilt.

CAT falls from 60 points to 30 the moment you sit down in front of the panel, and the interview alone carries 40. One line in the policy matters more than any of the weights: the minimum requirement for getting a pass in the personal interview is 12 out of 40, and candidates who do not pass are left off the final merit list whatever their composite. That is a hard gate, not a weighting.

Two administrative details cost candidates seats every year. Applicants to MBA-ABM or MBA-SM must submit a separate special form by the stated deadline or they will not be considered for those programmes' interview process at all, and shortlisted candidates must submit the online interview form in time or lose the slot. Reservation follows the Government of India policy for Central Educational Institutions, and disputes fall to the courts of Lucknow.

Final-year students can apply. They must complete every requirement for the bachelor's degree by 30 June 2026 and secure the minimum percentage set by the CAT eligibility criteria, and the joint IIM process gives them until 31 December 2026 to submit the qualifying mark sheet, failing which the provisional admission is cancelled automatically.

The Noida programmes never weigh CAT the same way. IPMX shortlists on GMAT or GRE and then scores 30 per cent GMAT or GRE, 30 per cent academic and professional profile, 10 per cent Writing Ability Test and 30 per cent personal interview, with two letters of recommendation submitted by the referees themselves and an application fee of INR 5000. MBA-WE uses the same four weights but accepts GMAT, GRE, CAT, GATE or its own entrance exam, a 120-minute paper of 100 multiple-choice questions in verbal, data interpretation and quantitative ability held at the Noida campus.

There is no closing rank to look up. CAT reports percentiles, and IIM Lucknow converts them into three separate eligibility tables, one per programme, published together in the same policy document. Within any one programme, verbal, data interpretation and quantitative ability carry an identical floor, so no single CAT section is treated here as the one that decides eligibility.

Put the columns side by side and the specialised MBAs are consistently five percentile points cheaper to enter than the flagship at the top of the table. A general-category applicant needs 90 overall for the MBA and 85 for either MBA-ABM or MBA-SM, and the same five-point gap holds for EWS and NC-OBC candidates. The pattern breaks in exactly one cell: an SC candidate needs 60 in total for MBA-SM against 65 for the other two, the single place where the sustainability programme sets a softer bar than agri-business.

None of these numbers is an admission mark. They decide who enters the composite queue described above, where CAT is worth 60 of 100 points before the interview and 30 of 100 after it. Two candidates who both clear the floor can therefore finish far apart on boards, normalised graduation marks and months of work alone, and both still have to pass the interview.

The most striking number in IIM Lucknow's recent record is not a salary. In its filing for the 2026 India Rankings the institute reports, for its two-year postgraduate programmes, 591 of 591 graduates placed in 2022-23, 614 of 614 in 2023-24 and 612 of 612 in 2024-25, with nobody recorded as going on to higher studies in any of the three years. On the Ministry of Education's own definition, that is three consecutive years of complete placement.

The salary picture comes from the student placement committee's own report.

The gap between the mean of Rs 32.3 lakh and the median of Rs 31 lakh is a little over a lakh, narrow enough to say the average is not being dragged upward by a handful of outsized offers. Set that against the medians the institute filed with NIRF, which are computed on the students placed in a given year rather than on the reporting cohort: 3100000 rupees for 2024-25, and 3000000 for each of the two years before it. Two documents, two definitions, and they agree closely.

Where the offers went is concentrated, though less so than at some peers.

Consulting mean pay ran ahead of the batch mean while its ceiling sat well below finance's, which is the shape of a domain that pays a lot of people well rather than a few people spectacularly.

One recruiter dominates the list. Accenture made 54 of the offers, ahead of Deloitte on 29, PwC on 24, Boston Consulting Group on 23, American Express on 21 and EY on 18, with McKinsey and Company on 11, Kotak on 9, and Bain and Company and Zomato on 7 each. If consulting is not what you want, read that ordering as a warning about who turns up in volume.

Summer placements are the leading indicator for the batch still on campus, and the distribution is published rather than just the headline. The batch of 2026 took 576 internship offers at a median stipend of Rs 1.50 lakh a month and a mean of Rs 1.43 lakh, with the highest domestic stipend at Rs 3.95 lakh a month. The distribution matters more than the peak: 409 students were placed above Rs 1 lakh a month and 279 above Rs 1.5 lakh, and the top ten per cent averaged Rs 2.92 lakh a month. Accenture again led, with 57 offers.

The one-year executive MBA at Noida reports separately and reports honestly. Its 18th batch of 114 students had 108 seeking employment, 6 opting out as company-sponsored candidates, 92 offers from the campus process and 8 from other means, and 8 students still without employment as of 15 April 2026. Median CTC was Rs 27.00 lakh and average Rs 27.65 lakh, excluding joining bonus, retention bonus and stock. The figure that actually describes what an executive MBA is for sits elsewhere in the same report: an average increase of 54 per cent from pre-MBA to post-MBA CTC, with 79 per cent of the batch shifting function and 78 per cent shifting industry.

IIM Lucknow does not publish a category-wise seat chart for its MBAs the way a counselling authority does, but its NIRF filing gives the intake and how closely it is filled.

Intake has been flat at 621 while admissions crept from 607 to 617, so the institute is filling more of a fixed pool rather than growing it. That figure covers the MBA, MBA-ABM and MBA-SM together; the institute does not break it into the three.

Count the doctoral side and the institute looks bigger than the MBA figures suggest. Registrations stand at 117 on the full-time route and 92 on the part-time one, and 2024-25 closed with 21 completions on the first and 5 on the second. Neither route is published as a fixed category grid in advance; reservation is applied under the Government of India policy for Central Educational Institutions when the offers go out.

The undergraduate programme is the exception, because its first admission round was published in full, offer list by offer list, with a waiting list attached. Three successive lists were released for the BS (AI & BA) batch of 2026-30.

Every round carries the same number of names, so what moves is the mix rather than the size. Open offers climb round on round while the SC and ST columns fall away to 4 and nil by the third list and the EWS column never moves off 6, which is what an untested programme looks like when it has to keep reaching further down the open merit list to fill the same seats.

IIM Lucknow holds rank 5 in the NIRF 2025 Management ranking with an overall score of 77.97, and its five parameter scores explain both why it is top five and why it is not top three.

The parameter IIM Lucknow wins on is graduation outcomes, 96.96, which is what three straight years of every graduate placed looks like once NIRF converts it to a score. Research and professional practice at 59.80 is the drag, and the institute's own accounts show why. In 2024-25 it ran 171 executive and management development programmes for 6483 participants and earned 1101071862 rupees from them, while three sponsored research projects brought in 1161929 rupees and 80 consultancy projects brought in 22711493. Executive education is the engine here by a wide margin over sponsored research, which is a strategic choice with a ranking cost attached.

Abroad, the picture is steadier. The institute reports that in the Financial Times Masters in Management ranking for 2025 it placed 57th overall with a career progression rank of 53, fourth among the IIMs and fifth among Indian business schools, and that IPMX took 58th place in the FT Global MBA 2026 list announced on 17th February 2026, sharing the position with the University of St Gallen, a rise of 13 places. Its home page also claims a QS 2025 placing of top 10 in Asia and 4th in India for the flagship.

Teaching and research run through twelve areas, and an area is the unit you pick a specialisation and a doctoral supervisor from. The faculty listing by area names them.

Two entries on that list are not standard equipment at an Indian business school. Agribusiness Management exists as a full area because the MBA-ABM does, and Business Sustainability exists because MBA-SM does, so the two specialised MBAs are backed by faculty groups rather than by a handful of electives borrowed from strategy. Legal Management as a standing area is rarer still.

Six named centres of excellence sit alongside the areas and repeat the same emphases: Food and Agribusiness Management, Leadership and Human Values, the Centre for Business Sustainability, the Internet Commerce Research Centre, Marketing in Emerging Economies and the Enterprise Incubation Centre. If you want a doctoral supervisor or a second-year elective in agribusiness or sustainability, this is the part of the institute that supplies both.

The estate is large and the buildings are named in Hindi, which tells you something about how the place sees itself. The campus page puts the Lucknow site at 200 acres at Prabandh Nagar, about 21 kms from Lucknow Railway Station and 31 kms from the airport. Its blocks are called Chintan for the faculty, Bodhgriha for the PGP block, Manthan for management development programmes, Gyanodaya for the library and Samadhan for administration.

Gyanodaya is a two storied, 30000 square foot library open 24 hrs, which for a case-method school is less a convenience than a working assumption about when the reading gets done. Sport sits in a purpose-built block: alongside football, cricket, squash, lawn tennis, basketball, volleyball and indoor badminton, the UMANG complex holds a swimming pool, jacuzzi and sauna bath, a billiards court and a gym.

Health cover is documented rather than asserted. The campus health centre operates with 4 beds, a resident doctor and nursing staff round the clock, three part-time doctors covering general medicine, gynaecology and homeopathy, four paramedic professionals, an ambulance available round the clock and accredited diagnostic labs. A shopping complex, post office, bank, cafeteria and a Kendriya Vidyalaya sit on site, and the facilities page notes the campus is about 8 km outside the city with scheduled transport into town.

Accessibility is filed with the Ministry of Education rather than advertised. What a wheelchair user needs settled first on a 200-acre site is whether anything carries them across it, and the filing settles that plainly: transport between buildings is provided, and so are wheelchairs and walking aids. The two questions about the buildings themselves come back bracketed instead. Lifts or ramps and specially designed toilets are each recorded at more than 80% of buildings, which leaves up to a fifth of the blocks unaccounted for on both counts, and nothing in the filing says which blocks those are. Ask before you accept a seat.

The Noida site is a different proposition: a 20-acres campus in Sector 62 with a state-of-the-art library, computer center, classroom block, hostels, Wi-Fi network and facilities for indoor and outdoor games, close to commercial complexes and corporate offices, with in-campus residences for its own faculty.

Residence comes with the full-time programmes rather than as a separate bill, which is why no hostel rent appears anywhere in the fee grid. On capacity, though, two of the institute's own pages disagree. The life page says the campus houses more than 1000 students and 75 faculties; the older facilities page still says housing capabilities for 500 students and 75 faculty. The larger figure sits on the page the institute currently maintains, and it is the one the student numbers support.

The executive programmes are each handled differently, and the difference is worth checking before you plan a year. IPMX participants get accommodation in hostel in single occupancy room with a shared washroom, with attached toilet, furnished room and common kitchen options available with additional charges. MBA-WE is non-residential in nature, with campus accommodation made available on request, on a case-to-case basis, subject to availability and paid for at prevailing rates, since students travel in on alternate weekends rather than living on site.

Doctoral students get the best of it. The programme provides semi-furnished free of cost hostel accommodation to all the Doctoral students, and campus hostel facility is available for married students to stay with their spouse and children.

Prefer the roster IIM Lucknow filed with NIRF to any headline number, because it can be counted rather than taken on trust. Count the named rows in the 2026 filing and you get 133, each with a designation, a gender, a qualification, an experience figure in months, a joining date and, on two of them, a leaving date. Subtract those two and 131 were in post when the file went in.

Almost a quarter of the teaching body is adhoc or contractual rather than regular, and every non-doctorate row on the roster sits inside that block, each one carrying an MBA or a PGDM instead, and most of them a long industry record in the experience column. Read one way, that is practitioner teaching in a school whose executive-education business is enormous; read another, it is a large share of the roster on non-permanent terms.

The regular faculty is renewing itself quickly. Of the 100 regular appointments, 41 joined in 2019 or later, and 45 of them hold assistant professor rank against 35 full professors. That is the pipeline sitting behind a research and professional practice score of 59.80: young, and still building a publication record. Thirty-two women across the whole roster is the gender picture, and it is not a flattering one.

There is no annual distinguished-alumni award to reproduce here. The alumni network's own Distinguished Alumni menu resolves to a single page, an Alumni in Focus series of write-ups the network itself commissions, and its archive index runs out in October 2020. Nothing has been added since.

The people it profiles are real and checkable. Shreya Sachdev of the PGP batch of 2015 is described there as head of marketing and strategy at Puma; Prerna Bhutani as a partner at India Quotient; Neha Prakash of the 2011 batch, an IAS officer, as honorary advisor to the steering committee of the BRICS CCI Young Leaders Programme. What the page cannot tell you is where the degree usually leads, because the network picked every name on it and stopped picking in 2020. The director's message puts the alumni body at 4500 plus, so the sample you are reading is a handful of them.

The dated items worth knowing this cycle are all on the institute's own pages. IPMX's 58th position in the FT Global MBA 2026 rankings was announced on 17th February 2026. The first BS (AI & BA) cohort has been offered seats in three rounds, each published in full with a waiting list behind it. The home page currently leads with an EQUIS accreditation, an AACSB re-accreditation and the NIRF 2025 fifth place.

The live deadline as this cycle stands is the executive one. MBA-WE takes Phase 1 applications for the 2027-29 session until 5:00 PM IST on November 18, 2026, against a non-refundable application fee of INR 1,000, with a second phase after it. Dates on the Lucknow-campus MBAs follow the CAT calendar instead, so check the admission page for whichever of the three you are applying to.

On the official record, IIM Lucknow sits fifth in a table whose top five are separated by narrow margins and by one outlier.

Five and a bit points separate first place from fifth, which is thinner than the ordering suggests. The row that should change a decision is the fourth: the management school at IIT Delhi scores 87.50 on research and professional practice against IIM Lucknow's 59.80 while finishing one place higher overall. If you intend to do a doctorate, or you want to be taught by people publishing heavily, the rank order and the research order point in different directions. On perception, IIM Lucknow at 75.51 sits above Kozhikode's 74.26 despite finishing two places below it.

The directory is split by campus and then again by programme, which saves a wasted call: the Noida programmes each answer their own line rather than a shared admissions desk.

The Noida numbers are worth using directly. Fee schedules, immersion costs and interview dates differ from one Noida programme to the next, and the office that owns each of them is the one listed against it above.

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