For the first time in six years, the number of women candidates qualifying for JEE Advanced crossed 10,000, as per the Joint Implementation Committee report released by IIT Roorkee.
According to the report, 43,112 female candidates registered for the entrance examination for admission to undergraduate programmes at the Indian Institutes of Technology and some other institutes in 2026.
Of these, 40,562 appeared for both papers and 10,107 qualified. The qualification rate among registered women candidates rose from 21.7 per cent in 2025 to 23.4 per cent this year.
The top women candidate scored 280 marks (mathematics: 101, physics: 86, chemistry: 93), securing All India Rank 77. Among the 3,814 admitted women candidates, 37 secured seats through the gender-neutral pool, the report said.
“In 2026, 3,814 female-only seats (including female supernumerary seats) were allotted, and 37 female candidates secured seats through the gender-neutral pool,” the report said.
The JEE (Advanced) 2026 was held on May 17 in two sessions. As many as 1,87,389 candidates registered for the exam, 1,79,694 of them appeared for both papers, and 56,880 qualified.
The report shows a decline in the number of general category candidates qualifying the exam. Last year, 16,154 students from the category qualified. The figure has dropped to 15,883, with the qualification rate declining from 43 per cent to 39.8 per cent.
The qualification rates for Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) candidates have also seen sharp jumps from 9.8 per cent and 8.1 per cent, respectively.
In 2026, 15,856 SC candidates and 6,379 ST candidates qualified in the JEE Advanced entrance exam, whereas last year the figures were 12,499 and 5,008, respectively.
The number of Economically Weaker Section (EWS) candidates clearing the entrance exam rose from 6,291 to 6,377.
For Other Backward Classes (non-creamy layer) candidates, the qualification rate declined from 18.2 per cent to 17.5 per cent, while the number of qualified candidates fell from 12,606 to 12,385.
Qualifying criteria were relaxed
“It was decided that category-wise, the top 2,50,000 candidates would be shortlisted from JEE (Main) 2026 to be eligible to appear in JEE (Advanced) 2026. Due to the bunching of percentiles, a total of 2,50,174 candidates (excluding 394 foreign and 2058 OCI/PIO candidates) from JEE (Main) 2026 were declared eligible for JEE (Advanced) 2026,” the report said.
“The qualifying criteria were relaxed to ensure at least twice the number of candidates qualify as compared to available seats in each category,” the report said.
urther, the highest number of seats have been allotted in IIT Kharagpur (1,952), followed by IIT BHU (1,590), IIT Bombay (1,366), IIT Roorkee (1,357), IIT Delhi (1,251), IIT Kanpur (1,241), IIT Dhanbad (1,215) and IIT Madras (1,122).
