Eligibility Criteria 2026

Eligibility for India's premier engineering entrance system operates as two separate, sequential gates rather than a single set of rules. The first gate is JEE Main eligibility, which is deliberately broad: it covers nearly every Class 12 pass-out or appearing candidate who has studied Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics, with no upper age limit and up to three consecutive years of attempts from a candidate's first appearance. This breadth exists because JEE Main is the gateway not just to IITs but to a much wider network of NITs, IIITs, and GFTIs, and the exam is designed to be broadly accessible to the entire eligible student population across the country.

The second gate, JEE Advanced eligibility, is considerably stricter and only becomes relevant once a candidate has already cleared the first gate by ranking within the top 2,50,000 (category-wise) in JEE Main. On top of that rank requirement, JEE Advanced layers on additional, independent conditions — a specific age-of-birth window, a hard limit of two consecutive attempts, a requirement that the candidate's first Class 12 appearance falls within the current or immediately preceding year, and an absolute rule that the candidate must never have previously been admitted to any IIT, even for a single day. All of these conditions must be satisfied simultaneously; qualifying on JEE Main rank alone does not automatically make a candidate eligible for JEE Advanced if any other condition is unmet.

One of the most misunderstood eligibility rules concerns Class 12 marks. There is no minimum percentage required simply to sit for JEE Main — any candidate who has passed or is appearing in Class 12 with the required subjects can take the exam regardless of their board percentage. The 75% requirement (65% for SC/ST/PwD candidates) only becomes relevant at the admission stage for NITs, IITs, and other centrally funded technical institutes through JoSAA, not at the exam registration stage. A candidate can score extremely well in JEE Main and JEE Advanced, yet still be denied admission to an NIT or IIT if they fail to meet this Class 12 percentage requirement, unless they qualify through the alternative route of finishing in the top 20 percentile of their respective board that year.

This top-20-percentile alternative exists because board difficulty and grading standards vary considerably across India's many state and central boards, and a flat 75% threshold could unfairly disadvantage students from boards with historically stricter grading. Candidates should check both routes — their raw percentage and their board's percentile cutoff for that year (usually published by the respective board or referenced in JoSAA's official eligibility documentation) — since qualifying via either route is generally treated as sufficient for admission purposes.