International Institute Of Information Technology, Hyderabad

IIIT Hyderabad was the first institute of information technology set up in the country, founded in 1998, and it is a deemed university rather than an IIT or one of the later government IIIT public-private institutes. That status decides the two questions applicants ask most. You enter through the institute's own Undergraduate Entrance Examination or a separate JEE (Main) channel, not through the JoSAA counselling that pools the IITs and NITs, and the fee is a flat annual figure the institute sets for itself. In the government's NIRF 2025 engineering ranking it sits at 38, the highest of any IIIT, and its own filing reports a median salary of Rs 32,00,000 for the 2023-24 graduating batch. Every number below is taken from the institute's admission pages, its NIRF submission or the NIRF tables, and each carries its source.

IIIT Hyderabad, written IIIT-H, is an autonomous deemed university built on a research-led model from the day it opened. It began in 1998 as the first of the information technology institutes, structured as a not-for-profit public-private partnership between the state government and industry, and took its present name in 2001 when it was granted deemed-university status, as its Wikipedia entry records. An IIT is an Institute of National Importance created by an Act of Parliament; IIIT-H is governed by its own society and narrows its teaching almost entirely to computer science, electronics and the computational sciences, so its department list runs deeper and more specialised than a general engineering college. The institute's own library manual states it plainly as a research university established in 1998, the first IIIT set up in India, and that research emphasis carries through its dual-degree structure, its centres and the salaries its graduates command.

The undergraduate offering is deliberately small and pointed at two disciplines. IIIT-H runs single-degree B.Tech programmes in Computer Science and Engineering and in Electronics and Communication Engineering, and a set of five-year dual-degree programmes that pair a B.Tech with a Master of Science by Research, listed on its undergraduate admissions portal as B.Tech plus MS by Research in CSE or ECE, B.Tech in Computer Science with an MS by Research in Computational Linguistics, in Computational Natural Sciences, or in Computing and Human Sciences. The dual degree is the route the institute is known for, because the fifth year is a research year that folds an MS into the undergraduate span.

Tuition is a single annual figure the institute sets and revises each year, identical for the single and the dual degree, with hostel and mess billed on top per month. The 2026-27 figures below are the ones published on the admission pages.

For the dual-degree programmes the same Rs 5,00,000 annual tuition applies, and the institute notes on its dual-degree fee page that fifth-year tuition support is expected from the research advisor, centre or institute for meritorious students, so the research year need not carry the full sticker cost. The binding figure is always the one for your own batch on the current admission page, since the institute states the tuition may be revised annually.

Admission at IIIT-H is not one exam but a set of parallel channels, and which one you use depends on the programme. The single-degree B.Tech seats fill through a JEE (Main) channel, so a candidate applies on a JEE Main rank. The dual-degree programmes admit mainly through the institute's own Undergraduate Entrance Examination, and the UGEE process is two-staged: applicants sit an exam, are shortlisted from it, and are then ranked on an interview panel's judgement rather than on the written score alone. Around those two main routes the institute runs a Special Channel of admission, a lateral-entry route through the Lateral Entry Entrance Examination for candidates entering mid-programme, an Olympiad channel for students who represent India internationally, a Board-marks channel, and Direct Admission of Students Abroad for foreign and NRI applicants, as its admissions portal sets out. A candidate can hold only one accepted seat at a time; the process pages note that a JEE offer can be taken up only after relinquishing an earlier UGEE seat.

There is no single published cutoff to clear at IIIT-H, and the reason is structural rather than secretive. The institute stands outside JoSAA and CSAB, so it is not filling seats against a common all-IIT closing rank; the single-degree seats are decided on JEE (Main) rank through its own channel, and the dual-degree seats on UGEE exam performance followed by an interview, where the final rank comes from the interview panel. Because the deciding number for the dual degree is an interview rank set after the fact, and the JEE channel does not publish a fixed advance mark, any single "IIIT Hyderabad cutoff" quoted before a cycle's allotment is an estimate. The honest plan is a strong JEE Main rank or UGEE showing, and then the official channel result for your programme, not a coaching-page figure.

The figure worth anchoring to is the median salary, because a median is not dragged upward by a few very large offers the way a headline package is, and it is the number the institute actually files with the government. Its NIRF submission reports the medians below by programme and graduating year.

Two things sit behind that table. First, placement is close to complete without being universal: 177 of the 188 four-year B.Tech graduates in 2023-24 were placed, with 11 going instead to higher studies, the pattern you expect at a research-heavy institute where a master's or a PhD is a common next step. Second, the institute does not report a highest or average package in this filing, so any "highest package" figure you meet elsewhere is not something IIIT-H states, and the median is the fair number to plan around.

The intake is small, which is part of why a seat is hard to win. The sanctioned intake the institute declared to NIRF is set out below, and the four-year and five-year lines together are the undergraduate pool split across the CSE, ECE and computational-science streams.

Across the two undergraduate lines the first-year seats are limited and spread over several admission channels, so the field contesting them each cycle runs far ahead of the number admitted. The institute's total undergraduate strength stood at 765 in the four-year programmes and 570 in the five-year programmes in the same NIRF filing.

IIIT-H's standing rests almost entirely on its engineering ranking, where it does best. In NIRF 2025 it is placed 38 among engineering institutions with a score of 58.45, ahead of every other institute of information technology in the country, including IIIT Delhi at 63 and IIIT Bangalore at 69. In the broader tables it ranks 55 among universities and 89 overall in the same year, a wider field where its narrow, computing-focused footprint counts for less. That rank-38 result is the sum of five separate parameters, and IIIT-H's spread across them is unusually wide.

Two lines pull the rank up and one holds it down. Teaching, learning and resources is the strongest parameter and graduation outcomes is close behind, the marks of an institute that admits a small, selected intake and places nearly all of it. Research and professional practice sits far lower, less a verdict on the work than on how a 1998 campus of a few thousand compares by sheer volume with universities many times its size. Perception is the floor, the one measure where the name recognition the older IITs built over decades cannot be closed by a young specialist on a national survey. The engineering lead over the other IIITs is the honest headline here, not the overall rank.

The campus is a compact research park rather than a sprawling engineering ground. IIIT-H occupies a 66-acre campus in Gachibowli, in the western technology belt of Hyderabad, next to the University of Hyderabad and inside the city's IT and startup corridor. What defines the place is its cluster of named research centres, not lecture blocks: the institute's research-centre list runs from the Centre for Visual Information Technology and the Language Technologies Research Centre to the Robotics Research Centre, the Centre for VLSI and Embedded System Technologies, the Kohli Center on Intelligent Systems, the Centre for Security, Theory and Algorithmic Research, and the Centre for Computational Natural Sciences and Bioinformatics, among more than twenty in all. Its technology innovation hub, IHub-Data, anchors applied work with industry and government. The library, opened with the institute in 1998, runs as a working research library described in its own manual.

Teaching at IIIT-H is organised by research centre, and the faculty are overwhelmingly doctoral: the professors and associate professors listed in the institute's NIRF submission carry PhDs and long tenures, many having joined in the institute's first decade and stayed. The doctoral community around them is substantial for the institute's size: the same filing records 128 full-time and 40 part-time PhD scholars in 2023-24, which is what a research-led model looks like in practice, with senior undergraduates and master's students working inside the same labs. The institute does not publish a single consolidated teaching headcount on its public admission pages, so a precise all-faculty number from an aggregator is not one the institute itself states; the reliable reading is the centre a student wants to work in, since the research group is the real unit here.

At a glance

Quick facts