Indian Institute Of Management, Nagpur

IIM Nagpur is a 2015-founded Indian Institute of Management whose two-year MBA now sits at rank 25 in the NIRF 2025 management list. The programme costs Rs 21,00,000 for the 2026-28 batch under the institute's own fee page, admits through the CAT rather than any in-house test, and runs from a purpose-built campus inside the MIHAN economic zone in Nagpur. The fee, the exact CAT cut-offs, the audited placement salaries and the ranking profile below all come from IIM Nagpur's own filings and the Ministry of Education's tables, so each figure can be checked against its source.

IIM Nagpur was established in 2015 under the mentorship of IIM Ahmedabad, its founding record shows, and the IIM Act of 2017 later made it an Institution of National Importance with the power to award its own degrees. Its defining feature for an applicant is age: it carries a genuine IIM tag and a national ranking, but its oldest MBA alumni are barely a decade into their careers, so the seniority that the first-generation IIMs trade on is still being built here.

Geography is the other distinguishing fact. The institute moved in November 2021 to a permanent 132-acre campus at MIHAN in Nagpur, a multi-modal cargo and special economic hub in the geographic centre of India, as the same record notes. That siting sits behind two of its more unusual offerings, an MBA track in energy management and an Indo-Japan Research Centre, and it keeps living costs and campus life below what a metro posting would cost.

One degree carries the weight here: the two-year, full-time residential MBA that the CAT admits to and that the audited placement report measures. Surrounding it are programmes built for people already in work, a hybrid Executive MBA, an Executive MBA in Energy Management that plays to the campus's MIHAN energy-hub setting, a Blended MBA for working professionals, and both a full-time and an executive doctoral track, listed on its institutional profile.

For the flagship MBA the total programme fee is Rs 21,00,000 for the 2026-28 batch, and an admission offer is held with an acceptance payment of Rs 1,00,000 that is later adjusted against the Term I bill rather than charged on top of it, per the official fee page.

The Rs 21,00,000 figure is the flagship MBA charge alone; fees for the executive, blended and doctoral programmes are set separately and should be read off the relevant programme page before you plan around them.

Admission to the MBA runs in three stages built entirely on the CAT, with no institute-specific entrance exam, as the MBA 2026-28 admissions policy sets out. Stage 1 screens applicants for eligibility: a candidate must hold a bachelor's degree, must have a positive score in every section of CAT 2025, and must clear the category cut-offs the institute fixes.

Stage 2 shortlists candidates who clear those cut-offs and complete the application form, and calls them to a personal interview. Stage 3 then ranks each interviewed candidate on a weighted Final Score in which the CAT is under half the total, so a high percentile opens the door without deciding what happens inside the room.

Two features of that formula are worth reading closely. The interview carries a quarter of the score, more than most applicants expect, and gender diversity carries 10%, one of the heavier such weightings among the IIMs, which is part of why the institute's outreach score sits high in the rankings.

IIM Nagpur does publish an explicit cut-off, but it is a screening threshold for Stage 1, not a final admission bar. For CAT 2025 the general-category applicant needs a 95 percentile overall and a 70 percentile in each of the three sections to be considered further, with lower thresholds for reserved categories, per the admissions policy.

Clearing 95 percentile lands you an interview call, not a seat. Because the Final Score weights the interview, work experience and academic record alongside the CAT, the percentile that admits a candidate is set only after the interview round, so treat the table as the bar to reach the shortlist rather than the bar to reach a seat.

IIM Nagpur's most recent audited final placement report is the most reliable read on outcomes. Of the 264 students in that graduating cohort, 246 sought placement through the institute, and it states salaries as maximum earning potential rather than a plain package.

The recruiter mix leans on financial services and technology. Banking, financial services and insurance took the largest share of accepted offers, followed by IT and IT-enabled services, with consumer goods and manufacturing behind them, and general management and sales roles were the commonest functions offered.

Because the headline salaries describe earning potential and not a flat cash package, read the average of Rs 18,00,076 as an upper-bound measure and weigh it against the median, which is the number a typical graduate is closer to.

IIM Nagpur does publish its MBA seat matrix, in Table 1 of the admissions policy: the incoming batch is set at 340 seats, with the category split shown below. The unreserved General block is the largest at 120, the reserved categories follow the standard central percentages, and DAP places are a horizontal reservation drawn across the categories rather than added as a separate quota.

The institute notes the intake can be revised before the admission process opens, so read 340 as this cycle's sanctioned strength rather than a permanent cap. The category-wise CAT percentile cut-offs in the same policy are what govern who is shortlisted against each of these blocks, so the seat table and the cut-off table are read together, not apart.

IIM Nagpur's line on the 2025 management ranking reads 60.88 overall, good for a national rank of 25. A top-25 slot is a real standing, but that figure still trails the founding IIMs that head the same list by a wide margin, which is the gap a school barely a decade old is expected to show.

Split the overall score into its five parameters and IIM Nagpur's stage of life shows through at once. Graduation outcomes at 87.03 and outreach at 74.65 sit high, the parameters a well-run institute controls directly, while perception at 34.62 and research at 34.91 are the two weakest, the parameters that reward a long reputation and a deep publication record. Those are precisely the measures a school founded in 2015 has had the fewest years to build.

The campus is the piece of infrastructure IIM Nagpur has invested in most visibly. Its permanent home is a 132-acre site at MIHAN in Nagpur, occupied from November 2021, and the first phase was built to house 600 students, as the campus record describes. What the fee buys is a place on that self-contained campus inside a cargo-and-SEZ zone, not a leased floor in a city college, and central India rather than a metro is the location the student accepts in return.

The institute also houses research and enterprise units that shape student life beyond the classroom, including InFED, its foundation for entrepreneurship development, and the Indo-Japan Research Centre, both documented in its profile. For a candidate weighing the campus, the trade is a modern, self-contained residential setup in central India against the pull and the networking density of a metro location.

IIM Nagpur organises its teaching faculty into eight academic areas rather than conventional departments, the standard structure at an IIM: strategy and entrepreneurship; decision science and information systems; economics; finance and accounting; marketing; organisational behaviour and human resource management; production and operations management; and humanities, arts and social sciences, as its faculty listing shows.

The MBA electives and the core teaching in each subject sit inside these eight areas, and each area also guides the PhD scholars attached to it. IIM Nagpur presents its faculty area by area, with an individual profile for every member rather than one headline count, so a candidate who cares about depth in a particular field can weigh that area's own roster instead of a faculty number lifted onto a listing site.

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