UPTAC 2026 Spot Round (Special Round)

UPTAC (Uttar Pradesh Technical Admission Counselling) 2026, conducted by AKTU, ran through 4 main rounds — Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, and Round 4 (an auto-freeze round where floating candidates are automatically locked into their best-ever seat). After Round 4 concluded, AKTU conducted two Special Rounds — commonly referred to as a spot round — to fill seats still vacant across its 600+ affiliated institutes, with Special Round 2 physical reporting completed September 3–7, 2026.

Unlike some other states' counselling systems, where the equivalent stage is a purely decentralized walk-in process managed entirely by individual colleges, UPTAC's Special Round is still coordinated centrally through the SAMARTH portal (uptac.samarth.edu.in). Candidates fill fresh choices online against the published vacancy list, and AKTU runs a rank-based allotment specifically for the Special Round. This makes it more structured than a pure spot-admission process, though it can still differ in rules — such as Freeze/Float availability — from the main 4 rounds.

By the Special Round stage, government AKTU-affiliated institutes — HBTU Kanpur, MMMUT Gorakhpur, KNIT Sultanpur, IET Lucknow — have almost always filled their most competitive branches, particularly CSE and IT. Special Round vacancies concentrate heavily in private AKTU-affiliated colleges, which carry substantially larger seat capacity and tend to retain vacancies the longest, especially in core branches with historically lower demand.

If seats remain vacant even after the Special Round(s) conclude, individual colleges may then handle any remaining capacity through direct or management-quota admission, conducted outside the UPTAC portal entirely. At that stage, candidates would need to approach specific AKTU-affiliated colleges directly.