JoSAA 2026 Total Vacant Seats After Round 5

It might seem surprising that any seats remain unfilled after a five-round process specifically designed to exhaust candidate demand, but vacancies are a structural, expected feature of every JoSAA cycle — not a sign of a broken system. The largest single contributor is non-payment: candidates allotted a seat in any round who fail to pay the ₹35,000 (Gen/OBC/EWS) or ₹15,000 (SC/ST/PwD) seat acceptance fee within the round's deadline are automatically dropped, and if that seat isn't picked up again by a Float candidate in a later round, it stays vacant.

A second major source is category-specific demand shortfall. Certain reserved-category seats — especially PwD (Persons with Disabilities) seats, and in some years specific ST or female-supernumerary combinations at less-preferred institutes — simply do not have enough rank-eligible, interested candidates in the applicant pool to fill every earmarked seat, regardless of how many rounds run. This is common at GFTIs and some newer IIITs where overall applicant interest is thinner across every category.

A third factor is genuine candidate preference. Some seats at less-known GFTIs or specific unpopular branch-institute combinations are simply not on enough candidates' locked choice lists at all — a seat cannot be allotted to someone who never chose it, no matter how low their rank threshold would technically qualify them. This is different from a "high cutoff" — it's a pure demand/awareness gap. Compare this with our analysis of how seats moved across all 5 rounds for the demand-side patterns.

Withdrawal after acceptance is a smaller but real contributor: candidates who Froze a seat and paid the fee, but later withdrew (for example, to join a different counselling process or private college), free up that seat too late in the cycle for it to be reprocessed within JoSAA's own rounds.