CAT 2026 dates in one table
CAT 2026 is on Sunday 29 November 2026, in three sessions, with admit cards available from 4 to 29 November and the result due in the first week of January 2027 (tentative). Every one of those figures is from the CAT 2026 advertisement the IIMs published "in several newspapers in multiple languages" (the English PDF is hosted on iimcal.ac.in; we rendered and read it on 20 October 2026 and again on 21 October). The advertisement also says plainly that "the information contained in the CAT website shall be considered as final", so when iimcat.ac.in and this page disagree, the site wins and we fix the page. Registration closed on 15 September, so if you are reading this you are either registered or planning for CAT 2027. The rest of this page is for the first group: what happens on the day, how the result is reported, and the part most candidates underestimate, how the IIM shortlists and interview calls actually arrive.
| Stage | Date | Source and status |
|---|---|---|
| Registration opened | 3 August 2026, 10:00 am | CAT 2026 advertisement; closed |
| Registration closed | 15 September 2026, 5:00 pm | CAT 2026 advertisement; closed |
| Admit card download | 4 November to 29 November 2026 | CAT 2026 advertisement |
| Test date | Sunday 29 November 2026, three sessions | CAT 2026 advertisement; session times will come with the admit card |
| Result declaration | First week of January 2027 (tentative) | CAT 2026 advertisement, the IIMs' own word "tentative" |
| IIM shortlists | January 2027 | Pattern from past cycles; each IIM publishes its own list |
| WAT and PI rounds | 1 February to 31 March 2027, expected | Pattern; our dates block marks it expected |
- Fee: Rs 2,700 for most candidates, Rs 1,350 for SC, ST and PwBD candidates, paid once however many IIMs you apply to, and not refundable.
- Around 170 test cities; candidates chose any five in order of preference; the city list "may be subject to changes based on the discretion of the CAT authorities".
- 22 IIMs listed, from Ahmedabad to Visakhapatnam; CAT scores may also be used by listed non-IIM institutions, and "IIMs have no role in the selection process of non-IIM institutions".
- No change of category after registration. The courts named for any dispute are those of Indore.
- "Candidates must declare and maintain a valid and unique email account and a mobile phone number throughout the selection process." This is the line that decides whether your shortlist mail reaches you.
Exam day, 29 November 2026: three sessions and the admit card
The advertisement says three sessions and nothing more about timings; the session start times, the reporting time and the gate-closing time will be printed on your admit card, and the CAT website publishes them with the admit card release. We will add them to this page the week they appear. What is already certain is the shape of the day: one session per candidate, assigned not chosen; a computer-based test; a test centre in one of the five cities you ranked, usually but not always your first choice.
What the admit card tells you, and what to do about each line
| Line on the admit card | Check | If it is wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Name, date of birth, category, photo | Match them to the ID you registered with. The category cannot be changed now: "No change in the category will be entertained after CAT registration", per the advertisement. | Raise it through the CAT helpdesk on iimcat.ac.in at once; do not wait for test day. |
| Test city and centre address | Open the address on a map the day you download the card. Plan to reach early; finding an unfamiliar campus gate takes longer than the drive. | Do not assume a centre can be changed. If the city is not one of your five, contact the helpdesk at once. |
| Session and reporting time | Note the gate-closing time, not the start time. | Follow the instructions printed on the card and on iimcat.ac.in. |
| Documents to carry | Printed admit card plus the original photo ID the card specifies, and the PwBD certificate if applicable. | Do not rely on a copy on your phone; print two copies and follow the card's own list of what to carry. |
One practical point for our readers in particular. The admit card and the scorecard are both tied to the email and mobile number from registration. If you changed phones, moved cities or let a college email lapse between September and November, recover access to that email now. Every IIM shortlist, every WAT-PI call letter and every waitlist movement in February and March will go to those two addresses.
The result: first week of January 2027 (tentative)
The IIMs wrote "first week of January, 2027 (Tentative)" in the advertisement and have not narrowed it. Do not plan around a rumoured day; plan around the week. The scorecard appears on iimcat.ac.in behind your login, and it is the document the IIMs and every non-IIM institution read, so download it and keep a PDF.
What matters on the scorecard
The IIMs do not shortlist on the overall percentile alone. The clearest public evidence is IIM Calcutta's MBA 2027-29 admission procedure, which sets Stage I minimum percentiles in each of the three sections as well as overall: for the open category, VARC 80, DILR 80, QA 75 and overall 85 (per IIM Calcutta's 2027-29 admission procedure, read 20 October 2026). A candidate with an overall 96 and a VARC of 78 does not clear IIM Calcutta's first filter. Other IIMs publish their own sectional floors in their own policy documents; we quote only what we have read, and our selection criteria page lays out the IIM Calcutta tables in full and describes the rest without numbers.
So on result day, read four numbers, not one: VARC, DILR, QA and overall. Then read them against the sectional floors of the IIMs you care about. That tells you within an hour which calls are possible, and that is the day your interview preparation becomes specific.
The result is not the finish line, and the weights prove it
At IIM Calcutta, the CAT score is 30 of 100 points in final selection; the personal interview is 48 and the writing test 8 (per its 2027-29 admission procedure). The exam that took a year of preparation is worth less than the interview that lasts twenty minutes. The weights differ at other IIMs and by year, but the direction is the same everywhere we have read: the result gets you into the room, and the room decides.
How IIM shortlists arrive
There is no single IIM shortlist. Each institute runs its own admissions process on its own website, applies its own cutoffs and composite score, and publishes its own list. This is how it has worked in every recent cycle and it is why the advertisement sends candidates to the CAT website for "rules and procedures regarding CAT and the admission process of various IIMs". What follows is the pattern, not an announcement.
- The older IIMs publish first, usually within days of the result. In past cycles IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore, IIM Calcutta, IIM Lucknow, IIM Kozhikode and IIM Indore have each posted a shortlist on their admissions page or candidate login and sent an email. Expect this in January 2027; the exact days are set by each institute.
- Each shortlist comes with its own WAT-PI schedule. The call letter or the admissions page names your interview city, date and reporting time, and the documents to carry. In past cycles some institutes let candidates choose from a set of cities and some assigned them. IIM Ahmedabad calls its written round the Analytical Writing Test (AWT) rather than WAT, as reported by candidates in past cycles; the task is similar, a short timed piece of writing before the interview.
- Several newer IIMs run a common admission process. In past cycles a group of newer IIMs has conducted one combined WAT-PI round coordinated by a convening institute, with one shortlist and one interview feeding every participating IIM's final list. Which IIMs take part and who convenes it is announced with the shortlist each year; do not assume last year's grouping.
- Final lists follow in April and May, with waitlists moving into June. Again pattern, not announcement. The point for now is that the interview season is February to March and the decisions you make in the first week of January set it up.
Why two candidates with the same percentile get different calls
Because the shortlist is built on a composite score, not on the CAT percentile. IIM Calcutta's Stage II composite for 2027-29 weighs the CAT score at 56 points, class 10 marks at 10, class 12 marks at 15 and a gender diversity factor at 4, out of 85 (per its 2027-29 admission procedure). A candidate with 99.2 and 72 per cent in class 12 can sit below a candidate with 98.6 and 85 per cent. Other IIMs use different components and different weights, including work experience and graduation marks in some policies. If your academics are average, it does not mean no calls; it means the calls you get will come from the IIMs whose composite leans more on CAT, and you should know which those are before January. Our weightage page has the IIM Calcutta tables and a worked example.
The weeks between the result and the first call
If the result lands in the first week of January and the first interviews start in February, you have four to eight weeks, and some of those weeks will be spent travelling between campuses. That is why the preparation has to start before the result, in December, when you know your approximate percentile from the answer key and the response sheet. Here is the order we recommend; the full week-by-week version is the CAT result to PI day roadmap.
| When | What to do | Why now |
|---|---|---|
| 30 November to the result | Write your profile summary: degree, marks, work (months after graduation, not internships), hometown, two real interests. Draft the "why MBA" answer and say it aloud daily. | These answers do not depend on which IIM calls you, and they are the ones every panel opens with. |
| Result week | Read your four percentiles against the sectional floors you can find in each IIM's published policy. Shortlist the institutes where a call is realistic. Check your registered email and phone work. | Specific preparation beats general preparation, and the call letters arrive at the registered addresses. |
| Shortlist week | For each call: interview city, date, documents (originals, mark sheets, work certificates, category certificate). Book travel as soon as the dates are out, especially if two calls fall in the same week in different cities. | Logistics eat preparation time if left late. |
| Three weeks before the first PI | Daily: one timed WAT essay (20 minutes), one academics topic revised and explained aloud, one mock interview. Our WAT topics and format page has the topics and the timing. | WAT and PI together outweigh CAT at IIM Calcutta (56 of 100 against 30). Rehearsal moves those points; rereading notes does not. |
| Week of the interview | Two full mock PIs with a stranger, a current-affairs read of that week only, documents arranged in the order the call letter lists them. | Composure is a practised state, not a decision made on the morning. |
Most of our readers speak Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati or Bengali at home and will sit every interview in English. The panel does not grade accent; it grades whether an answer has a point, a reason and a stop. That is a four-week fix if you rehearse aloud, and it is what the TalkDrill mock interview is built to drill: a panel-style question, your answer timed, and feedback on structure, fillers and pace. Use it from December, when nobody else is interviewing yet.
What we check weekly, and what changed
This page is part of our weekly exam-calendar check. Every week we re-read the CAT website and the IIM admissions pages we cite, update the dates block above (it is rendered from one shared file, so this page and the all exam dates page cannot disagree) and record the change here. Where a source blocks us, we say so and mark the link unverified on the official resources page.
| Checked | What we found |
|---|---|
| 21 October 2026 | IIM Calcutta's 2027-29 admission procedure re-read three times; every figure quoted on this page matched, and the procedure's Stage II CAT formula and work experience exclusions were added to our selection criteria page. The CAT 2026 advertisement PDF (an image with no text layer) was rendered again in the evening and read line by line: every date, time, fee, city count and quotation on this page matched. IIM Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Kozhikode policy pages still did not answer; IIM Lucknow's admissions page loaded but carried no 2027-29 document; IIM Indore's admissions page still linked only its 2026-28 PDFs. No change to any CAT date. |
| 20 October 2026 | CAT 2026 advertisement (PDF on iimcal.ac.in) rendered and read: registration 3 August to 15 September 2026, admit card 4 to 29 November, test 29 November in three sessions, result first week of January 2027 (tentative), fees Rs 2,700 and Rs 1,350, around 170 cities, 22 IIMs. iimcat.ac.in returned only a script shell to our fetcher, so session timings are not yet on this page. IIM Calcutta's 2027-29 admission procedure page read in full. IIM Ahmedabad and IIM Bangalore admissions pages did not answer (404 and 403). |
- The three session timings and reporting times (expected with the admit card, from 4 November).
- The result day within the first week of January 2027.
- Each IIM's shortlist date and WAT-PI schedule for the 2027-29 batch.
- Which newer IIMs share a common admission process this year, and who convenes it.
If you want the one thing to do this week: download nothing, book nothing, but open your registered email on your current phone and make sure it works. Then open the mock PI and answer "tell me about yourself" out loud, timed, once. The gap between the answer you have and the answer you need is the size of the work between now and February.