CAT Cutoffs for Top IIMs: One Weak Section Filters You Out

Cutoffs Are Not One Number

CAT cutoffs for the top IIMs are set per section, not just overall - and that is exactly where a strong composite score can still get you filtered out. IIM Ahmedabad's own Shortlisting Criteria for PGP 2026-28, dated 9 January 2026, sets the qualifying bar at the 95th percentile overall and the 85th percentile in every section for General and EWS candidates on CAT 2025 - a full 15-20 points higher on the sectional side than the "70th-75th percentile" figure that a lot of cutoff round-ups online still print. Category-wise, that same document relaxes to 90th/80th for NC-OBC, 85th/75th for SC, and 75th/65th for ST. I track exactly this kind of gap on myself: five of my own VARC mock scores this quarter converted to the 12th, 92nd, 15th, 78th and 37th percentile respectively - the kind of swing an overall score hides completely, and precisely what a sectional cutoff exists to catch.

Most top IIMs apply both an overall percentile cutoff and minimum sectional percentile cutoffs. Clearing the overall bar with one weak section can still get you filtered out before the shortlisting stage even looks at your profile, academics, or work experience - and, as the rest of this piece verifies against each IIM's own published policy rather than a secondary source, the exact bar and even the exact rule differ more between institutes than most single-table summaries suggest.

Why I Take This Personally: My Own VARC Swing

I track my mocks section by section, not just overall, and five of my VARC scores this quarter read 3, 36, 5, 39 and 9 - which translated to the 12th, 92nd, 15th, 78th and 37th percentile respectively (see the full score-to-percentile data). On paper my overall score across those same five mocks looked like reasonable, if noisy, progress - 41, 91, 47, 80 and 60. If I only looked at the overall number, none of that VARC volatility would have been visible at all, and it's precisely the kind of volatility a sectional cutoff exists to filter for: an admissions committee doesn't see my QUANT strength compensating for a VARC that occasionally falls to the 15th percentile, it sees a candidate whose verbal ability is a real question mark on a bad day.

Why Sectional Cutoffs Exist

IIMs want candidates who can perform across all three cognitive domains the program requires - verbal/written communication, quantitative reasoning, and structured problem-solving. A candidate who tops Quant but is well below average in VARC is, to an admissions committee, a data point suggesting a real skill gap rather than an aberration. Sectional cutoffs filter for balance, not just aggregate score.

What Each IIM Actually Publishes, Category by Category

Coaching-site cutoff round-ups on this exact question disagree with each other by 15-20 percentile points on the same IIM, and often with the institute's own current policy (the comparison further down shows a concrete case). So every table in this section is read directly from that IIM's own admission-policy document for the CAT 2025 / batch 2026-28 cycle, dated and linked. Two things worth knowing before reading them: some IIMs (Ahmedabad, Kozhikode, Lucknow) apply one uniform percentile floor to VARC, DILR and QA alike, while others (Calcutta) publish three separate section-wise numbers. And percentile isn't always the live rule at all - IIM Bangalore's real rule for this cycle is different from the table most sites print for it, explained under its own heading below. Five IIMs are covered here in depth rather than a shallow row for all twenty, because a category-wise number that hasn't been checked against the institute's own document isn't worth printing.

IIM Ahmedabad

IIMA's own document sets a single percentile floor per category, applied identically to VARC, DILR and QA (Non-PwD, CAT 2025, PGP 2026-28):

PwD candidates get a further relaxation within each category: General/EWS PwD sits at 85/75, NC-OBC PwD at 80/70, SC PwD at 75/65, and ST PwD at 65/55. Transgender candidates in the General category are assessed against the NC-OBC row. Source: IIMA, Shortlisting Criteria for PGP 2026-28, published 9 January 2026.

IIM Bangalore

This is the one where reading the primary document changes the answer rather than just refining it. IIMB's own PGP 2026-28 Admission Procedure states plainly that the first shortlist for CAT 2025 applicants requires "a minimum raw score that is positive in all sections" - not a percentile cutoff at all. The percentile table the same document does publish is explicitly labelled "Cut-offs for the batch of 2025-27, based on CAT 2024," included for reference rather than as this cycle's rule:

Most cutoff round-ups present a table exactly like this one as "IIM Bangalore's CAT cutoff" without the year attached. IIMB's own document does not claim it applies to the current cycle. Source: IIMB, PGP 2026-28 Admission Procedure, Annexure I.

IIM Calcutta

IIM Calcutta's Admission Policy for the MBA Programme, Batch 2026-28 is the one institute here that genuinely publishes three different section-wise floors rather than one uniform number, for CAT 2025:

IIM Calcutta's own document adds a caveat worth taking seriously: "the actual section-wise and overall percentile cut-offs may be much higher than the above-mentioned minimum percentiles as it will depend upon the number of candidates to be called for personal interview (PI) in each category." These are floors for Stage I eligibility, not the real bar for a WAT-PI call. Source: IIM Calcutta, Admission Policy for the MBA Programme, Batch 2026-28.

IIM Lucknow

IIM Lucknow's Admission Policy for the MBA, MBA-ABM and MBA-SM, Academic Year 2026-28 (CAT-2025) is the most demanding of the five in absolute terms for its flagship MBA, and it runs three programmes at three different cutoff levels rather than one:

The MBA-ABM and MBA-SM programmes run 5 points lower across the board (General 80/80/80/85) - a distinction most round-ups collapse into a single "IIM Lucknow cutoff" line that doesn't say which of the three programmes it means. Source: IIM Lucknow, Admission Policy Batch 2026-2028, Table 1.

IIM Kozhikode

IIM Kozhikode's PGP Admissions Policy and Procedure for 2026-2028 Batch again applies one uniform percentile across all three sections, and is the only one of the five that groups ST with PwD rather than giving PwD its own row:

Source: IIM Kozhikode, PGP Admissions Policy and Procedure for 2026-2028 Batch, Table 1.

Two IIMs worth naming honestly here: I could not find a current admission-policy PDF for IIM Indore that I could open and read directly (its published link for this cycle returned a 404 during this check), and Indore's numbers are therefore left out of this section entirely rather than sourced to a coaching aggregator and presented as equivalent to the five above. The same rule - skip rather than guess - applies to every non-IIM B-school and every one of the newer IIMs; they're not covered here at all, not because their cutoffs don't matter, but because this piece isn't printing a number for an institute whose own document wasn't checked.

Where the Coaching-Site Round-Ups Disagree With the Official Number

Two live cutoff round-ups checked against IIM Ahmedabad's own January 2026 policy show exactly how wide that disagreement gets, on the same institute, the same category, the same season:

Careers360 matches the official document almost exactly. Toprankers is 15 points low on both numbers and, on the same page, applies that single 70th-percentile sectional figure across every category rather than relaxing it for OBC/SC/ST/EWS, which the institute's own document does not do. Neither page is disreputable or obviously wrong to a reader with no way to check; both read as confident, specific, and current. The only way to tell them apart was opening IIMA's own PDF. That's the whole reason this piece names its sources per row rather than printing one number: a table with no citation looks exactly as trustworthy whether it's right or 15 points off.

IIM Bangalore is the sharper version of the same problem: several round-ups print last cycle's percentile table (the one reproduced above) as though it were this year's rule, when IIMB's own document says the current first-shortlist criterion is a positive raw score in every section, full stop. Getting that distinction backwards would mean a candidate stressing over an 80th-percentile VARC target that the current cycle's own eligibility rule doesn't actually apply.

This isn't hypothetical - it happened while writing this piece. Searching Google for IIM Bangalore's sectional cutoff on 20 September 2026 returned an AI Overview stating flatly that "the rumor about dropping sectional cutoffs is false," citing the same 85/80/75/75 figures reproduced above from lptedtech.com (last updated 4 August 2026) and WePegasus. Both are reading IIMB's own Annexure I - the table the institute itself labels a prior-cycle reference - and reporting it as this cycle's active rule. An AI Overview synthesising from those two pages inherits the same mistake with the same confidence. The primary document doesn't change depending on who's asking; only checking it does.

The Practical Implication for Your Prep

If your target is a top-3 IIM, "get a good overall score" is the wrong framing. The right framing is: no section can be a liability. This changes how you allocate study time - a candidate naturally strong in Quant but weak in VARC should not spend more hours on Quant just because it's comfortable. In my own case, the section that actually needed the extra attention wasn't the one I felt weakest in day-to-day (DILR, which improved by only two marks over three months of practice per my mock log) - it was VARC, because an 85th-percentile sectional cutoff (IIM Ahmedabad's actual General/EWS figure, not the 70th-75th most round-ups print) means an occasional 15th-percentile day is a real risk, not just an off day I can average away. My RC question-types guide is where I started fixing that.

Where My Own Numbers Sit Against These Official Bands

Comparing my first five logged mocks against my last five, against IIM Ahmedabad's actual verified General/EWS floor rather than an aggregator's estimate, makes the cutoff math concrete rather than abstract:

Raw score isn't percentile, so this table can't tell me directly whether I'd clear each cutoff on a given day - the same score maps to wildly different percentiles depending on the paper, and the CAT percentile predictor is where I check a specific sectional score against a band rather than guessing. What the table above does tell me is which section has the least room for a bad day. DILR's average barely moved in three months, which means unlike VARC or QUANT, I can't currently point to a trend line that suggests the section is getting safer against an 85th-percentile bar - it's the one I'd bet against myself on if the exam were tomorrow.

Beyond CAT: The Rest of the Shortlist Criteria

Even after clearing sectional and overall cutoffs, most IIMs weigh academic performance (Class 10, 12, and undergraduate percentage), work experience, gender diversity, and academic diversity in the final composite score used for interview shortlisting. CAT percentile gets you past the first filter - it is necessary but not sufficient at the most selective institutes. This is worth knowing early so you don't treat a 99.5 percentile as a guaranteed call. See my breakdown of the WAT-GD-PI stage for what happens after the cutoff is cleared.

Why Section-Wise Tracking Matters More Than Overall Score

Given that sectional cutoffs can make or break a shortlist independent of your overall percentile, tracking your accuracy and percentile trend per section - not just your composite mock score - is the single highest-leverage habit for anyone targeting a top program. Karma Yogi's Insights dashboard breaks down your mock history by section automatically, so a lagging section shows up as a trend line, not a vague feeling you can talk yourself out of. Track your section-wise progress free.