JEE Main 2026: More Students Appear, Cutoffs Might Change
The JEE Main 2026 exam for the first session is happening now. This year, more students than ever before are taking the exam. The National Testing Agency (NTA) reported that 8,01,326 students were expected to take the exam, and 7,70,441 students have already appeared. Because so many students are taking the exam, the scores needed to pass (cutoffs) and where students rank might be affected. This means the competition is getting tougher.
A record over 14.5 lakh students registered for JEE Main 2026, which is the highest number in the exam's history. This is more than last year and shows that many students want to become engineers. However, how these numbers affect the final scores and cutoffs will depend on how many students actually show up and how well they perform in each exam session.
What is a Percentile Score?
JEE Main uses a system called percentile to make scores fair for everyone, no matter which day or time they took the exam. Your percentile score shows how you did compared to other students in your exam group, not your total marks. If more students take the exam, the difference between scores can become smaller. This means you might need to get a higher score to achieve the same percentile as last year. The marks needed for a top percentile can also change depending on how hard the exam was for that specific group of students.
Will Cutoffs Go Up for JEE Main 2026?
Early signs suggest that the minimum scores needed to qualify for JEE Main might be a little higher this year. Based on registration numbers, past trends, and expert opinions, the general category cutoff could be around 93.5 to 94 percentile . This is slightly higher than last year.
| Categories | Expected Cutoff |
| Unreserved (UR) | 93.3045326 |
| Gen-EWS | 81.4387917 |
| OBC-NCL | 80.7456432 |
| SC | 61.3526948 |
| ST | 48.2456783 |
| UR-PwD | 0.0082349 |
However, the cutoffs could also go down if many exam sessions are much harder than usual. The difficulty of the exam paper directly affects how raw scores are turned into percentile scores by the NTA.
Exam Difficulty and Student Reactions
Students and experts have noted that some exam papers, especially in Mathematics and Physics, have been difficult in certain sessions. When an exam is harder overall, fewer students might get very high raw scores. This can sometimes lower the pressure on cutoffs because percentiles rise relative to the scores of others in that session. On the other hand, easier exams usually require higher marks to reach the same percentile.
