CSAB 2026 NEUT SR1 — Eligibility, Dates & How It Works

NEUT seats are created as supernumerary — meaning they sit outside and in addition to an institute's regularly sanctioned intake for a branch. This is a fundamentally different mechanism from reservation categories like OBC-NCL or SC/ST, which carve out a percentage of the existing seat pool. A NEUT candidate is not competing with the General, EWS, or other category pools for the same fixed number of seats; instead, institutes add extra seats specifically to accommodate eligible NEUT candidates, which is why this channel doesn't reduce the seat count available to other CSAB applicants.

A common misconception is that NEUT is a separate round with its own distinct dates. In practice, NEUT SR1 is folded into the same registration, choice-locking, and reporting timeline as the regular CSAB SR1 — registration closed on csab.nic.in on August 3, and the system automatically considered NEUT eligibility (verified via domicile certificate) when running the SR1 allotment, declared on August 6, 2026. There is no separate NEUT login or portal. The SR2 result was declared on August 12, 2026, completing the CSAB 2026 counselling cycle.

For candidates who qualify, one underappreciated detail is that NEUT eligibility can be combined with category reservation. A NEUT-eligible SC or ST candidate, for instance, can potentially be considered under both the NEUT supernumerary pool and the SC/ST reservation pool depending on how their choice list is structured, effectively broadening their odds relative to a General-category candidate with a similar rank who isn't NEUT-eligible.

Institute-tier availability for NEUT seats tends to concentrate more heavily at NITs and a subset of IIITs than at GFTIs, though this varies by year and by how many supernumerary seats each institute has been sanctioned for 2026. Because CSAB expanded to roughly 114 institutes and ~48,000 total seats this cycle (up sharply from ~14,000 in 2025), NEUT candidates should check the seat matrix carefully rather than assuming last year's institute list applies unchanged — see the CSAB seat matrix for the final SR2 numbers.

Finally, since CSAB has not published a NEUT-specific sub-schedule distinct from the main SR1 timeline, treat this page's dates as the best available estimate and verify directly on csab.nic.in. Registration closed August 3; the SR1 result was declared Aug 6 and the SR2 result was declared Aug 12, 2026, marking the end of CSAB 2026 counselling. If NEUT ever runs on a shifted timeline in a future cycle, the difference is likely to be measured in days, not weeks, given how tightly the whole CSAB calendar is compressed after JoSAA.