IIT Kharagpur: Complete Guide & JoSAA 2026 Cutoff, Round Wise
IIT Kharagpur was the very first IIT ever established, and remains the largest by campus area and by alumni network. Its breadth of programmes – well beyond core engineering – sets it apart from most other IITs. Here's what to know, plus its 2026 JoSAA cutoff movement.
About IIT Kharagpur
Founded in 1951, IIT Kharagpur was the first of the IITs and is located in West Bengal on the largest campus of any IIT. That scale is reflected in its academic breadth: alongside core engineering, IIT Kharagpur offers agricultural engineering, architecture, and even a dedicated law school – the Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law – a range of disciplines wider than almost any other IIT.
Academic Strengths
- Computer Science & Engineering: Firmly among the top five most competitive CSE programmes across all IITs.
- Breadth of disciplines: One of the few IITs offering law, architecture, and agricultural engineering alongside core branches.
- Alumni network: Being the oldest IIT, it holds the largest and longest-running alumni base of any institute in the system.
- Mining and metallurgical engineering: A traditional area of depth, reflecting its historical roots.
JoSAA 2026 Cutoff, Round Wise
Over JoSAA 2026's five rounds – concluding 16 July 2026 – IIT Kharagpur's CSE closing rank has typically opened in the 230s–380 range and closed between roughly 450 and 510, placing it alongside Roorkee and Guwahati as part of the "old IIT" cluster that closes CSE admissions within the top 500–1,000 of the General category – noticeably behind Bombay, Delhi, Madras, and Kanpur, but well ahead of the newer IITs.
JoSAA 2026 Cutoff, Round Wise
JoSAA 2026 ran five rounds, with the final round declared on 16 July 2026. The table below is IIT Kharagpur's complete final-round (Round 5) result, pulled directly from JoSAA's own OR-CR portal – OPEN category, gender-neutral seats, across every programme on offer. With 23 distinct programmes, this is one of the widest spreads of any IIT – from CSE closing under rank 510 to Architecture closing beyond 24,500.
| Branch (Gender-Neutral, OPEN) | Round 5 (Final) Closing Rank |
|---|---|
| Computer Science & Engineering | 509 |
| Artificial Intelligence | 1,043 |
| Mathematics & Computing | 1,428 |
| Electronics & Electrical Communication Engineering | 1,660 |
| Electrical Engineering | 2,190 |
| Instrumentation Engineering | 2,600 |
| Mechanical Engineering | 4,588 |
| Industrial & Systems Engineering | 4,699 |
| Aerospace Engineering | 5,297 |
| Chemical Engineering | 5,803 |
| Economics | 6,450 |
| Manufacturing Science & Engineering | 6,984 |
| Metallurgical & Materials Engineering | 8,502 |
| Civil Engineering | 8,816 |
| Physics | 9,572 |
| Biomedical Engineering | 10,089 |
| Biotechnology & Biochemical Engineering | 10,683 |
| Ocean Engineering & Naval Architecture | 11,219 |
| Mining Engineering | 11,962 |
| Agricultural & Food Engineering | 12,603 |
| Chemistry | 14,760 |
| Exploration Geophysics | 14,923 |
| Applied Geology | 15,872 |
| Architecture | 24,582 |
This is JoSAA 2026's final, closed result. Confirm the current year's actual figures on JoSAA's own OR-CR portal (josaa.nic.in) once that year's rounds are under way, rather than assuming this table still applies.
How Reserved Categories Compare
JoSAA keeps a separate closing rank for every category – General, EWS, OBC-NCL, SC, ST, and PwD – and each one is a position within that category's own applicant pool, not the overall merit list. As a rule, EWS tracks closest to the General figure, OBC-NCL relaxes further, and SC/ST relax the most of all, since fewer candidates compete within each of those pools. With IIT Kharagpur's unusually wide spread of branches, this gap tends to be even more pronounced outside CSE than at more CSE-concentrated IITs.
We're not publishing specific OBC-NCL, SC, or ST numbers for IIT Kharagpur here – the third-party sources available for category-specific figures disagree with each other widely enough, even for well-documented institutes, that citing one as fact would be misleading. For the precise, current closing rank in your own category and branch, use JoSAA's OR-CR tool directly on josaa.nic.in.
Placements
IIT Kharagpur's scale works in its favour at placement time – a very large and diverse recruiter base visits campus each season, spanning technology, core engineering, consulting, and law, reflecting the institute's unusually broad academic offering.