University Of Lucknow

University of Lucknow sets and marks the entrance papers for most of its seats itself, then puts the closing rank of every allotment round on its own website, so a candidate can read the exact band a subject shut at before choosing where to apply. Its record in the government's 2025 rankings pulls in two directions: 29th for law and 27th among state public universities, against 98th among universities and 100th in management. Which of those four numbers applies to you depends entirely on the faculty you are applying to, and so does almost everything else here.

Lucknow University is a state university in Uttar Pradesh, and its founding document is unusually precise about what it was meant to be. The University of Lucknow Act, No. V of 1920, was assented to by the Lieutenant-Governor on 1 November and by the Governor-General on 25 November 1920, and teaching began on 17 July 1921. At the conference that set it up, held at Government House in Lucknow in November 1919, the resolution was that it should be a unitary, teaching and residential university, with faculties of arts, science, medicine and law, and a faculty of commerce added later by the select committee that reviewed the bill.

A century on it is the opposite of unitary. The university's own admission portal for 2026-27 runs a centralised process covering 575 participating colleges alongside its campus departments, and the university counts 556 associated colleges in its own summary. Three institutions provided the original nucleus: King George's Medical College, which is now a separate medical university, Canning College and Isabella Thoburn College.

The accreditation is worth reading precisely, because it is the strongest single credential the university holds. NAAC accredited it at the A++ level in July 2022, and the university's NIRF 2025 return records the grade as a CGPA of 3.55, valid until 2027.

There is no single price for a Lucknow University degree, and the widest gap sits inside one programme rather than between two. The counselling schedule prices the four-year B.A. at Rs 3,727 on a regular seat and Rs 16,330 on a self-financed one, more than four times as much for the same degree taught by the same department, and a candidate commits to one or the other at choice filling rather than after admission.

The first table below is the fee attached to each programme in the counselling schedule for the university campus. That figure is what a candidate pays to take the seat, collected in stages: an advance of Rs 500 at registration, the balance as a confirmation fee, and a further Rs 200 registration charge that is never refunded.

Engineering and computing sit in a different world of cost, because the Faculty of Engineering and Technology on the second campus at Jankipuram Extension runs on self-financed fees rather than state-subsidised ones.

The BCA and B.Pharm rows come off an older course-fee sheet than the B.Tech, MCA and M.Tech ones, so confirm them against the faculty's current notice before you budget on them. Every one of those sheets adds the same two charges at admission on top of the semester bill: an enrolment fee of Rs 1,000 that is not refundable, and caution money of Rs 5,000 that is refunded when the student leaves the university. The part-time M.Tech is the one exception, enrolling at Rs 500.

The two tables describe two institutions sharing a name. A regular B.Sc. in physics, chemistry and mathematics is billed at Rs 7,827 for the whole seat, while on the second campus the B.Tech tuition line by itself is Rs 30,000 a semester. Which faculty admits you, not which university, sets what your degree costs here.

The teaching itself spans 13 faculties, from arts, science, commerce and law through to agriculture, fine arts, yoga and alternative medicine, ayurveda and unani.

A third price list sits outside both campuses. The Lucknow University Centre for Online and Distance Education teaches B.Com, BBA, M.Com, MBA, MSW and MA in English, economics, political science and Sanskrit under Distance Education Bureau approval from the University Grants Commission, and it charges Rs 5,000 a semester for B.Com, Rs 15,000 for BBA, Rs 25,000 for the MBA and Rs 8,000 for the M.Com, MA and MSW degrees, with examination fees on top of that.

Most candidates here sit a Lucknow University paper, not a national one. The university runs its own UG Entrance Test, UGET, and PG Entrance Test, PGET, for the 2026-27 session, publishing the date sheet, answer key, merit list and cut-off list for each itself. PGET-2026 ran from 16 to 22 July, morning and evening, with every subject pinned to one slot, so anthropology and biotechnology sat on the opening morning and MBA and MTTM on the evening of 19 July.

The sequence is the same at both levels. You first generate a Lucknow University Registration Number, then apply programme by programme on the Samarth admission portal, sit the entrance paper, and enter counselling. Registration for counselling costs Rs 700, made up of an advance of Rs 500 and a non-refundable registration fee of Rs 200, and the advance is returned if no seat is allotted and adjusted against the fee if one is. Allotment then runs strictly on your rank and the order of your preferences, with upgradation offered in later rounds.

Three sets of programmes sit outside that. The five-year integrated LL.B. is filled on Common Law Admission Test ranks, and the university's own first allotment sheet prints "Only CLAT" beside the programme.

Engineering and pharmacy are counselled by somebody else entirely. They go through Uttar Pradesh Technical Admission Counselling, run by Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technical University, and the score UPTAC reads differs from one programme to the next: JEE Main for first-year B.Tech, CUET (UG) for lateral-entry B.Tech and for B.Pharm, and CUET (PG) for MCA. So this is a CUET institution for part of its intake and not for the rest, and the entrance that binds you is the one named against your exact programme rather than against the university. Part-time M.Tech entry runs on the faculty's own written exam and interview, and Ph.D. admission on the university's separate doctoral notifications.

Direct admission is the question applicants ask most often about this university, and the honest answer changes with the calendar. There is no standing back door into a regular seat, but when seats are left vacant after counselling the university opens an application route for them. On 27 August 2026 it invited direct applications for B.A. and B.Sc. yoga, Shastri and lateral-entry B.Pharm, to be decided on intermediate marks if applications outnumbered the vacancies. A notice issued the same day opened 44 postgraduate programmes the same way, from MA Arabic and MA jyotirvigyan through to M.Sc. cyber security and three part-time M.Tech streams. Those windows are short and they close without a second announcement, which is why the notice feed matters more here than a general enquiry.

Lucknow University publishes real closing ranks, round by round, and they are worth reading before you fill a preference. The table below is the first allotment for 2026-27, and every band is the rank range within which candidates were selected in that category.

The postgraduate sheets tell you something the undergraduate ones do not, which is that an MBA at this university is not one programme but several, taught in different units and closing at very different ranks.

Two cautions come with those numbers. They are first-round figures, and the bands loosen a long way as rounds go on: by the start of September the undergraduate cut-off page carried nine allotment rounds for some programmes and the postgraduate page seven. And reserved-category bands run differently from the open ones, sometimes far wider, so the row that binds you is the one against your own category on the sheet for the round you are in.

The university's placement record has two published versions and they do not say the same thing, so it is worth knowing which one you are reading. The figures the university files with the government are the broader of the two, because they cover every graduating student rather than the candidates who came through campus drives.

The Central Placement Cell's own report is the other version, and it reads much higher because it counts only what passed through the cell. That report gives a highest package of 23.61 LPA, a median of 14.40 LPA and an average of 8.6 LPA, with the top offer going to two M.Sc. geology students recruited by ONGC. The same document elsewhere describes that ONGC offer as 24.8 LPA, a discrepancy inside one report, and it is dated 2023, which makes the NIRF filing both newer and wider in scope. If you are weighing an offer of admission, the government filing is the safer number to plan on.

Where placement happens is more revealing than how much it pays. The cell's report breaks its placed students down by faculty, and the split is not what the university's rankings would lead you to expect: commerce accounts for 25%, engineering 24%, arts 18%, science 17%, education 13% and fine arts 3%, with women making up 48% of those placed. Commerce, not engineering, is the largest single source. The recruiter list in the same report names ONGC alongside Genpact, Hexaware Technologies, Concentrix, NIIT, HDFC, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, Yes Bank, Colgate Palmolive, MRF Tyres and Shoppers Stop.

The intake the university filed with NIRF is the clearest count of what it teaches on its own campuses, and it is heavily weighted towards the four-year undergraduate degree and the two-year master's.

Law is the one faculty whose seats are separately visible, and it files its own return: 320 seats on the three-year LL.B., 160 on the five-year integrated LL.B. and 60 on the LL.M, while management files 180 postgraduate seats.

Beyond the campus, the centralised admission publishes a separate seat list for every programme taught in the affiliated colleges, and the numbers there dwarf the campus intake. The five-year integrated LL.B. alone is taught at thirteen affiliated colleges, every one of them self-financed and every one of them inside Lucknow district, with seats running from 60 at the three smallest up to 300 at Central Law College. Those programme-wise college seat lists are the document to read if you are willing to take a seat outside the campus, because the odds there are entirely different.

Four NIRF tables rank this university and they disagree sharply, which is the single most useful thing to understand about its reputation.

The gap between 27th and 98th is not a contradiction. The university table pools state universities with central and deemed ones, which are funded very differently, while the state public university table compares like with like. Both are official; the second is the more honest peer group for a state institution.

Breaking the university score into its five parameters shows where the drag is.

A graduation-outcomes score of 88.79 against a research score of 14.87 is a wide spread, and it says something specific: students who enrol here finish and progress, but the research output behind their degrees is thin by national standards. The law faculty shows the same shape at a higher level, scoring 88.15 on graduation outcomes and 19.50 on research, while management is dragged down by a perception score of 2.90, close to the floor of that table. An applicant heading for a taught degree and a job should weigh the outcome scores; one planning doctoral work should read the research score as a warning and then judge the individual department rather than the university.

The university is organised into 13 faculties and 51 departments, with 16 institutes and centres alongside them. Arts is the widest of the faculties, and the range of it shows up plainly in the university's own vacancy lists, which carry master's programmes in ancient Indian history and archaeology, defence studies, jyotirvigyan, linguistics, vastu shastra, Arab culture, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, French and western history beside the more familiar ones.

The institutes are where the specialised teaching sits, and several of them are the actual home of a programme a candidate assumes belongs to a faculty. The university's list of institute directors names the Institute of Management Sciences, the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, the Institute of Tourism Studies, the Institute for Wildlife Sciences, the Institute of Women's Studies, the Institute for Food Processing and Technology, the Institute of Hydrocarbon, Energy and Geo-Resources, the Institute of Advanced Molecular Genetics and Infectious Diseases, the Institute of Developmental Studies, the Dr Giri Lal Gupta Institute of Public Health and Public Affairs, the Dr Shanker Dayal Sharma Institute of Democracy, the APJ Abdul Kalam Centre for Innovation and the ONGC Centre of Advanced Studies. Every director on that list is a serving professor from a teaching department, so an institute here is a research and teaching unit staffed out of the faculties rather than a separate school with its own establishment.

Two of those units carry real history. The Faculty of Commerce dates from 1921, calls itself the gateway to commerce education in India, and turns out more than 300 postgraduate and 1,000 undergraduate students a year; its self-financed management degrees run under the Institute of Management Sciences banner, and that is the IMS tag sitting against four of the MBA rows in the first postgraduate allotment sheet, with the LUMBA rows beside them carrying regular and self-financed bands of their own. The Faculty of Law also began in 1921, with three teachers and Jag Mohan Nath Chak as its first dean, and introduced its five-year LL.B. (Hons.) course in 1995.

The university occupies 219.01 acres across more than one site, and which site you study on depends on your faculty rather than your year. Engineering and technology sit on the second campus at Jankipuram Extension; the Faculty of Law moved out to its own campus on Sitapur Road in 2002-03, on more than 75 acres, in a three-storey building with 24 lecture rooms, two model classrooms with smartboards, a legal aid hospital, hostels for both men and women, a bank and a police outpost, about 12 kilometres from Lucknow railway station; and the arts, science and commerce departments stay on the old campus, the one the university's own health centres are still named against.

The Tagore Library is the university's most substantial single asset and its collection is old enough to be genuinely unusual.

Alongside the library the university lists the Radhakamal Mukerjee Art Gallery, indoor and outdoor sports facilities and a gymnasium, health centres at Arogya Bhawan on the old campus and Shushrut Chikitsalaya on the new one, a child care centre, a yoga centre, an incubation cell, a consultancy clinic and a university data resource centre. Accessibility appears nowhere on the university's own site; the whole record of it sits in a NIRF form. There the university confirmed walking aids and transport between blocks, and placed both lifts or ramps and specially designed toilets in its top band, above 80% of buildings. Since the three campuses are never described apart, a student who needs either should confirm it with the faculty office that will actually teach them.

Accommodation is organised as named halls rather than numbered blocks, split by gender and by campus. On the main campus the women's halls are Chandra Shekhar Azad, Golden Jublee, Kailash, Nivedita and Tilak, and the second campus adds Dr B.R. Ambedkar, Ganga and Lavanya. The men's halls on the main campus are Acharya Narendra Dev, Balrampur, Birbal Sahani, Habibullah, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Mahmudabad, Prof. Ranveer Singh Bisht and Subhash, with Kautilya and Homi J Bhabha on the second campus. Allotment and reallotment run through the university's hostel management system rather than through a department.

One of those names closes a loop with the university's own founding. The idea of a university at Lucknow was first argued in print by Raja Sir Mohammad Ali Mohammad Khan of Mahmudabad, who went on to give a lakh of rupees towards it, and a men's hall on the main campus carries the Mahmudabad name today. What the university does not publish in one place is a current room rent, mess rate and capacity per hall, so confirm those on the hall's own allotment notice for the year you are joining.

The teaching body is large and unevenly distributed, which matters more than any single ratio. The university entered 746 faculty members in its NIRF 2025 return, of whom 66 are in law and 43 in management, so the department you join, rather than the university, determines who teaches you.

Doctoral work is where the volume sits, and it looks stronger in the filings than in the rankings. In its NIRF return the university counted 1,025 research scholars in full-time doctoral programmes and 90 part-time, awarded 459 doctorates in 2023-24, and ran 188 sponsored projects on money from 22 separate funding agencies. Hold that beside the research parameter score of 14.87 NIRF awarded it and the reading is volume without citation weight, which a prospective research student should test department by department rather than accept at university level.

Law again reads differently from the university as a whole. The faculty's own record names Prof. R.U. Singh, its dean until 1956, who also structured the law faculties at Delhi University and Banaras Hindu University and drafted the Constitution of Nepal, and it runs a centre of excellence on litigation-free villages and hosts the Dr R.U. Singh Memorial National Moot Court.

One faculty here keeps a published roster of its graduates, and it is the law faculty. Its page names Dr Shanker Dayal Sharma, a former President of India, Justice A.S. Anand, a former Chief Justice of India, Justices Saghir Ahmed and Brijesh Kumar of the Supreme Court, Ram Krishna Hegde, a former Chief Minister of Karnataka, Surjeet Singh Barnala, a former Governor of Uttaranchal and Tamil Nadu, and N.K.P. Salve, a former Union Minister among its law graduates, alongside a run of vice-chancellors and professors of law.

The same page records two academic firsts worth knowing about. Dr V.N. Shukla was the university's first LL.M., and his book on the Constitution became a standard authority; Dr A.T. Markos was the faculty's first LL.D. and went on to direct the Indian Law Institute. Outside law the picture goes dark: the alumni link on the university site opens a registration portal rather than a roster, so a name that does not appear on a faculty page is a name the institution has not confirmed.

Lucknow University runs its admission year through a notice feed rather than through announcements, and the documents on it are the ones worth watching. Through August 2026 that feed carried allotment cut-off lists round after round, direct-admission invitations against vacant undergraduate and postgraduate seats, hostel reallotment lists for law and postgraduate students, the application window for the Shodh Medha research scholarship for 2026-27, and details of the Uttar Pradesh post-matric scholarship and fee reimbursement scheme.

That last item connects to a provision most applicants miss. Scheduled caste and scheduled tribe candidates who choose the zero-fee option and upload an income certificate can download the provisional allotment cum confirmation letter without paying the balance fee, subject to verification of the certificate at the university or the allotted college. If the certificate is later found to be incorrect, the balance falls due. That is a real route through counselling without an upfront payment, and it is written into the counselling procedure rather than announced separately.

Comparison here works at the faculty level, not the university level, and law is where it does best. In the NIRF 2025 law table this university sits at 29 with 55.85, eight places behind Dr Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University in the same city at 21 with 60.12. That is a narrow gap for a general university's law faculty measured against a dedicated national law university, and the two are not chasing the same applicant in any case: the national law university takes CLAT ranks into one stream, while this one puts only its five-year integrated LL.B. on CLAT and admits the three-year LL.B. and the LL.M on its own PGET ranks.

Among state public universities, the table where its funding and its mandate match its peers, it places 27th with 55.97. That is the figure to hold when somebody quotes the 98th place in the all-universities table at you. The honest caveats sit on the other side of the ledger: management at 100th with a perception score near zero, and research output that ranks low across every table it appears in. A candidate choosing between this university and a smaller specialised institution should compare the two on the specific subject table both appear in, and on the fee and cut-off documents each publishes, rather than on an overall name.

At a glance

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