National Institute Of Technology, Calicut

NIT Calicut, the National Institute of Technology on the Kozhikode-Mukkam Road in Kerala, is a place where the branch you can actually reach turns on where you sat your Class 12 exams. It is also the second-ranked architecture school in the country on the government's 2025 framework, a distinction no other NIT holds. What follows pins the fee sheet, the branch closing ranks and the placement record to sources you can open yourself.

NIT Calicut opened in 1961 as the Regional Engineering College Calicut, one of the Centre-and-state colleges the country raised to staff its new industries, and older graduates still call it REC Calicut or CREC, as the institute record sets out. It was given National Institute of Technology status in 2002 and written into the schedule of the National Institutes of Technology Act in 2007, the step that made its degrees a matter of national importance rather than state affiliation.

The campus is a wooded 285-acre site at Kattangal, 22 kilometres northeast of Kozhikode on the Kozhikode-Mukkam Road, set well outside the city rather than inside it, per the same record. The student body is more national than a Kerala address suggests. The institute's NIRF 2025 data return counts 3,873 undergraduates, 1,822 of them from within Kerala against 2,018 from other states, so a small majority of the B.Tech cohort sits outside the home state its seat pool is named for. Sharing the site with them are 872 postgraduates and 810 full-time doctoral researchers, a research population large enough that masters and PhD work is part of the campus texture rather than a sideline.

The degree almost every applicant is chasing is the four-year B.Tech, and NIT Calicut runs it across eleven branches: computer science, electronics and communication, electrical and electronics, mechanical, civil and chemical engineering, alongside the smaller intakes in biotechnology, engineering physics, energy engineering, materials science and engineering, and production engineering, as its own undergraduate programme list shows. Around it sit the five-year B.Arch, integrated and two-year M.Sc and M.Tech spreads, an MBA under the School of Management Studies, and a large doctoral programme.

Tuition is fixed across the NIT system rather than set in Kozhikode, but the rest of the bill is the institute's own, and the fee sheet is public down to the rupee. The 2025-26 academic fee schedule sets B.Tech tuition at Rs 62,500 a semester, and the opening monsoon semester comes to Rs 1,42,600 once the Rs 61,000 block of one-time caution deposit, admission and campus-development charges that a first-year pays once is folded in. The winter semester then falls to Rs 68,900 and later monsoon semesters to Rs 81,600, and a student who takes a hostel room pays a further Rs 12,000 a semester in seat rent.

That sticker figure is not what every household pays. Under the same fee schedule, an Open, EWS or OBC (non-creamy-layer) student whose family income falls between Rs 1,00,000 and Rs 5,00,000 a year pays a reduced tuition of Rs 20,834 a semester, and the tuition is dropped altogether below that income line and for SC, ST and PwD students, so category and declared income move the real cost far more than the headline does.

The B.Tech has exactly one entrance, JEE Main, run by the National Testing Agency, and the All India Rank it produces is what you carry into JoSAA counselling. Calicut's seats are filled in the same Joint Seat Allocation Authority cycle that allots every IIT, NIT and IIIT, off a single ordered choice list, and the institute adds no test, interview or management quota of its own to the four-year degree. JEE Advanced, the IIT gateway, counts for nothing here, and whatever stays vacant when JoSAA closes rolls into the CSAB special rounds.

Where a Calicut seat turns specific is Kerala domicile. Under the standard NIT rule, half of every branch is held for a home-state quota open to candidates who cleared Class 12 from a school in Kerala, and the other half is thrown open to the whole country, with each half scored only against itself. That single split is why one branch carries two working ranks, the one a Kerala candidate is measured on and the one an applicant from elsewhere faces. Inside each half the OPEN, OBC-NCL, EWS, SC, ST and PwD reservations apply, and a tranche of supernumerary seats is filled by women candidates on top of that. The five-year B.Arch is admitted on the JEE Main Paper 2 score rather than the engineering paper, while the postgraduate programmes run on their own tests, GATE for the M.Tech, the CAT for the MBA and IIT JAM for the M.Sc.

JoSAA sets no cutoff in advance. The closing rank is only the last All India Rank an allotment round still reached for a given branch, quota and category, and it is fixed once the rounds finish. In JoSAA 2025's first round the Kerala home-state pool mostly closed at a looser rank than the all-India pool, and computer science shows the split at its sharpest, admitting Kerala candidates as far down as an All India Rank of 7,971 while an outside-Kerala applicant needed 4,678 or better, on the round-one board.

The order down the column is the useful part. Civil and mechanical close tens of thousands of ranks behind computer science in both pools, so a candidate set on a core branch rather than software reaches a Calicut seat at a far wider rank than the headline CSE figure suggests. Treat these as a snapshot: every rank here is a 2025 first-round number, each loosens as candidates upgrade and withdraw through the later JoSAA and CSAB rounds, and the whole board is redrawn next cycle, so act on the current-year figure for your own quota and category.

NIT Calicut files a placement return with NIRF each year, and the figure that actually describes a typical graduate is the median salary, not the top package a press note leads with. For the 2023-24 B.Tech batch its NIRF 2025 data return records a median of Rs 12,50,000, with 799 of the 902 graduates who finished in the stipulated time placed and 76 more leaving for higher study. Read across the three years the return covers, that median has climbed each year, from Rs 10,80,000 for the 2021-22 batch to Rs 11,70,000 for 2022-23.

The two-year postgraduate programmes sit a notch below the B.Tech. The same return puts the master's median at Rs 11,52,018 for 2023-24, with 381 of 430 students placed. For anyone weighing an offer, the steady rise in the B.Tech median is the number to trust over any single package, because it marks the middle of the class rather than its ceiling and holds a line just short of the topmost NITs.

Every branch is split in half between the Kerala pool and the all-India pool before the OPEN, OBC-NCL, EWS, SC, ST and PwD reservations and the women-only supernumerary seats are layered on, and the exact per-branch, per-category count is set fresh in each year's JoSAA seat matrix. For scale, NIT Calicut's NIRF 2025 return records a sanctioned B.Tech intake of 920 across all branches for 2023-24. That total is only a headline: the list that binds a choice is the live JoSAA matrix at the moment of choice-filling, which is also where any branch added or trimmed this cycle first appears.

NIT Calicut's sharpest result on the 2025 framework is not in engineering. Its architecture programme ranks second in the country on the NIRF 2025 architecture list, behind only IIT Roorkee, a placing no other National Institute of Technology reaches. On the engineering table most B.Tech applicants watch it sits 21st with a score of 63.05 in the NIRF 2025 engineering ranking, and it also appears 45th on the cross-discipline overall list and 85th in management.

The engineering rank is the one that governs a B.Tech decision, and 21st nationally places Calicut in the upper band of the NITs without heading it. The architecture standing is the genuine outlier, and it is the number worth weighing for anyone choosing the five-year B.Arch here over a dedicated school of planning.

Teaching is spread across more than a dozen departments and schools, and the institute's programme pages carry a wider range than an engineering-first campus usually does. Beside the computing and core-engineering departments, computer science, electronics and communication, electrical, mechanical, civil and chemical, sit a full Department of Architecture and Planning, a Department of Bioscience and Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, and the School of Management Studies, taught alongside the science departments of chemistry, physics and mathematics and a humanities and social sciences group. Architecture is the one to single out, because it carries the second-place national standing that the rest of this page keeps circling back to, and a B.Arch applicant is really choosing that department rather than the institute at large.

The wooded 285-acre stretch at Kattangal, off the Kozhikode-Mukkam Road, holds the whole institute, academic blocks and departmental laboratories, hostels and playing fields on one contiguous site well beyond the city edge. A central library and the computing and workshop facilities anchor the academic core, and the department laboratories are the part a branch choice actually rests on. NIT Calicut does not put out one tidy facilities brochure, so for the current, itemised list of centres, laboratories and student amenities its own website is the dependable source rather than a secondhand listing.

Almost the whole undergraduate body lives on campus, and a hostel place is charged on top of tuition rather than folded into it. The fee schedule sets hostel seat rent at Rs 12,000 a semester for a student who takes a room, over and above the academic fees, with mess billed separately by the individual hostels. Rooms are handed out by the hostel administration after a JoSAA seat is locked, a step apart from winning the seat itself, so the figure worth confirming before you count on a room is the current one on the institute's hostel pages.

The dependable way to read Calicut's teaching strength is by department, since each publishes its own staff list by rank, professor, associate professor and assistant professor, and a branch choice is really a choice of which department will teach you. The institute's NIRF 2025 return enters 361 faculty members across those departments, and it counts 810 full-time PhD scholars alongside them, a doctoral population large enough that most senior faculty sit on thesis committees as well as in lecture halls. For the subject you are entering, that one department's faculty and research pages say more than any campus-wide figure.

The alumni whose link to NIT Calicut is a matter of public record cluster in industry and public service. The best known to a general reader is P. C. Musthafa, founder and chief executive of the packaged-food company ID Fresh Food, who studied here, as the institute record notes. The same record names John Mathai, a former Chief Secretary of Kerala, Maruthi Akella, an aerospace engineering professor in the United States, and Appu Prabhakar, a cinematographer who won a National Film Award. Those are the names with a documented connection to the institute; the longer rosters on aggregator sites fold in claims that do not stand up, and this page holds to the ones that do.

No dated notice is copied onto this page, and that is deliberate. Admission notifications, counselling dates and fee revisions all move through the year, and the only place they are authoritative is the institute's own notices board, so a copy pinned here would be stale before it helped anyone. Confirm anything time-sensitive at the source before you act on it.

On the 2025 engineering table Calicut trails three NITs, Tiruchirappalli, Rourkela and Surathkal, and leads Warangal, so its 21st place sits in the upper band of the system without heading it. The comparison that sets it apart from those three is not the engineering rank but the architecture one: its second-place national standing there is something none of the higher-ranked NITs can claim, so for a B.Arch aspirant the order flips outright. Against an IIT, the ranking distance is the least useful number to weigh. What actually moves a Calicut decision is the Kerala home-state pool, which can bring a branch within reach of a rank an out-of-state IIT department would turn away, and above all the architecture standing: no IIT bar Roorkee ranks ahead of Calicut in that discipline, so an applicant who would chase an IIT for anything else has the stronger case here for the five-year B.Arch.

For any binding question on fees, seats or documents, the institute's own admission office and website are the right first contact rather than a third-party listing.

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