CLAT 2026 Result and Cutoff: What the Past Cycle Showed

This page covers a completed cycle

CLAT 2026 is done. The examination was held on 7 December 2025 and the result was declared on 16 December 2025, with first-round counselling cutoffs published on 7 January 2026.

The naming convention causes real confusion, so it is worth stating plainly: "CLAT 2026" means admission to the 2026-27 academic year, and the examination for it took place in December 2025. There is no CLAT 2026 examination still to come.

If you are preparing to sit CLAT, the examination you want is CLAT 2027, held on 6 December 2026, with registration open since 3 August 2026. That page covers the pattern, syllabus, eligibility and application process for the live cycle.

This page exists for two other purposes. If you are in the 2026-27 admission cycle, it records what happened. And if you are preparing for CLAT 2027, the 2026 numbers are the most recent data point you have for judging what a competitive score looks like, which makes them worth understanding properly rather than as trivia.

What happened in CLAT 2026

Two figures in that table deserve attention.

The gap between roughly 92,000 registrations and roughly 72,631 candidates actually appearing is about 19,000 people, which is a fifth of those who registered. That attrition is normal across Indian entrance examinations and it matters when you are estimating competition: the field you compete against is the one that turns up, not the one that registers.

And 72,631 candidates against about 3,700 seats is roughly 20 candidates per seat across all NLUs and all categories. That is the honest headline ratio, though it understates competition at the top, since seats at the most sought-after universities are a small fraction of that 3,700.

The withdrawn question, and why the paper was out of 119

This is the detail most worth knowing from CLAT 2026, because it illustrates a process that recurs every cycle.

The paper carried 120 questions as usual. After the result process began, the Consortium of NLUs withdrew one question, a Logical Reasoning item concerning family relations, following the objection window. The examination was therefore evaluated out of 119 marks rather than 120.

The mechanism behind that is worth understanding if you are sitting CLAT 2027. After the provisional answer key is published, the Consortium opens a window in which candidates may object to specific questions or answers, generally on payment of a fee per objection. Objections are reviewed by subject experts, and the Consortium may uphold a changed answer or withdraw a question entirely where it is found to be defective or ambiguous.

Two practical implications follow.

The objection window is real rather than ceremonial. A candidate who spots a genuinely defective question and objects can change the outcome for everyone, and occasionally for themselves decisively.

And the total mark can move. A candidate calculating their expected score from a provisional answer key should hold that estimate loosely until the final key and the evaluation basis are confirmed, because both the answers and the denominator can change.

What the numbers say about a competitive score

Here the honest caveats matter more than the figures, so they come first.

Cutoffs at individual National Law Universities are published by the Consortium during counselling as closing ranks, and secondary sources convert those into approximate mark equivalents. Those mark conversions are estimates rather than official figures, and they vary between sources. Treat them as indicative of a band rather than as thresholds.

With that said, the shape of the data is informative. Reported closing positions place the most sought-after universities in a narrow band at the top: NLSIU Bengaluru closed around rank 112 in the 2025 cycle, NALSAR Hyderabad around rank 159, and NUJS Kolkata around rank 327. For the 2026 cycle, reported mark-level estimates for that top group sit in the region of the low-to-mid 90s and above out of 119, with the highest score reported at 112.75.

Read that carefully and the practical picture emerges. The top three or four NLUs close within roughly the first three hundred ranks nationally, out of a field of over seventy thousand. Below that, the range of NLUs available widens considerably, and a rank in the low thousands still opens a National Law University seat.

That is the useful takeaway for a 2027 aspirant: the difference between a good score and a top-five NLU is small in marks and large in consequence, which is precisely why accuracy matters more than volume on a 120-question paper with negative marking.

What determines where cutoffs land

Cutoffs are not fixed properties of a university; they move each cycle on a few identifiable factors.

Paper difficulty. A moderate paper produces higher cutoffs because more candidates score well; a difficult paper compresses scores downward. This is why comparing raw marks across years without accounting for difficulty is misleading, and why closing ranks are the more stable comparison.

Field size. More candidates appearing raises competition at every rank, and CLAT registrations have trended upward over recent cycles.

Seat availability. Around 3,700 seats across the NLUs, and any change in intake at a university shifts its own cutoff directly.

Category and domicile reservation. Each NLU applies its own reservation policy, including state domicile quotas at several of them, which means the effective cutoff for a home-state candidate at a given university can be markedly lower than for an out-of-state candidate. This is the factor most often overlooked, and it can change your realistic target list substantially in either direction.

If you are still in the 2026-27 admission cycle

For candidates who sat CLAT 2026 and are somewhere in the admission process, the position is that counselling proceeds in rounds and residual movement continues after the early rounds.

Seats open up as allotted candidates decline, fail to report, or upgrade elsewhere, so later rounds can produce allotments at ranks that did not clear in the first. Candidates who assume the first-round cutoff is final sometimes withdraw from the process prematurely.

The rules on accepting, freezing and floating an allotment carry consequences for security deposits and further participation, and they differ by round. Those are set out in the Consortium's counselling documents for the cycle, and reading them before acting is what separates a candidate who upgrades successfully from one who forfeits a seat through a procedural error.

What a 2027 aspirant should take from this

Five things, concretely.

Closing ranks are the stable metric. Use the 2026 and 2025 closing ranks for your target universities rather than mark thresholds, since marks move with paper difficulty and ranks do not in the same way.

The top NLUs close inside the first few hundred ranks. If NLSIU, NALSAR or NUJS is the goal, that is the target, and it implies a level of accuracy rather than merely completing the paper.

Below the top group, the field widens fast. A rank in the low thousands opens a National Law University, which is worth knowing because candidates sometimes treat anything outside the top five as failure when it is not.

Domicile matters. Check the reservation and state quota position at your target universities before setting preferences, because it can move your realistic prospects considerably.

The objection window is worth using. If you sit CLAT 2027 and encounter a question you believe is defective, the process exists and it has changed outcomes, including in this cycle.

How the objection window works, step by step

Since this cycle turned on a withdrawn question, the process deserves a proper explanation. It recurs every year and most candidates never use it.

After the examination, the Consortium publishes a provisional answer key alongside the candidate's own response sheet, so you can see what you answered and what the Consortium considers correct.

A window then opens, usually short, in which a candidate may formally object to a specific question or to the answer marked correct. Objections are submitted through the portal and generally require a fee per question objected to, which is refunded where the objection is upheld and forfeited where it is not.

Subject experts appointed by the Consortium review the objections. Three outcomes are possible: the original answer stands, the answer is changed to a different option, or the question is withdrawn entirely because it is found defective, ambiguous or unanswerable as framed.

Where an answer changes, every candidate's score is recomputed on the corrected key. Where a question is withdrawn, it is removed from the evaluation for everyone, which is what reduced CLAT 2026 to 119 marks.

Two things follow for a candidate. The fee structure means frivolous objections cost money, which is deliberate, so object only where you have a genuine argument you could defend. And because an upheld objection changes scores for the whole cohort, the process is worth engaging with rather than assuming someone else will catch a bad question.

Keep your response sheet. It is the document you need to construct an objection, and it is also how you verify that the final result matches what the corrected key implies.

Why raw marks are a poor way to compare years

This point is worth expanding, because candidates routinely make the mistake and it distorts their targets.

Suppose a candidate scores 85 in a cycle where the paper was difficult, and another scores 92 in a cycle where it was moderate. On raw marks the second looks stronger. But if the difficult paper produced a general-category closing mark of 80 at a given university and the moderate paper produced 95 at the same university, the first candidate got in and the second did not.

That is the whole argument for using ranks. A rank expresses your position relative to the field that sat the same paper, which is the only comparison that means anything across cycles.

The practical method is straightforward. Pull the published closing ranks for your target universities over the last two or three cycles. Note the range rather than a single number, since they move. Then judge your mock performance in percentile or rank terms rather than in marks, which is what a good mock series will report.

Where you only have marks, convert them to an approximate rank using the marks-versus-rank data published after each cycle, treating it as a band rather than a point. That is how to use the 2026 numbers on this page productively rather than as a target mark to hit.

How CLAT 2026 fits the wider law entrance picture

For completeness, the December 2025 law entrance season ran alongside the other examinations in the same field, and the structure repeats each year.

The Consortium of NLUs conducts CLAT for admission to the National Law Universities. National Law University Delhi conducts its own examination, AILET, rather than participating in CLAT, and it falls roughly a week later. Several state and private universities conduct their own law entrance tests or accept CLAT scores.

And for law graduates rather than aspirants, the All India Bar Examination is the licence examination taken after the LLB, which is a different thing entirely from an admission test despite often being searched alongside them.

A candidate planning the December 2026 season should be looking at CLAT 2027 on 6 December and AILET 2027 on 13 December, which are a week apart and therefore both sittable.

What the 2026 numbers imply for a 2027 study plan

Translating the data into practice is the point of reading it, so here is what it actually implies.

The attrition figure suggests something about the field. Roughly a fifth of registered candidates did not appear, and a further large share of those who did appear will have prepared casually. The genuinely competitive field is therefore much smaller than seventy thousand, which is encouraging for a serious candidate and a reason not to be intimidated by the headline number.

The top score of 112.75 out of 119 tells you the paper is not fully solvable in the time. Nobody clears everything. That should settle the question of whether to attempt all 120 questions: the answer is that the strongest candidates in the country do not, and building a strategy around completing the paper is building it around something that does not happen.

The concentration of top NLUs inside the first few hundred ranks tells you where accuracy sits relative to volume. At that level, the difference between candidates is a handful of marks, and on a paper with negative marking those marks are lost to wrong answers as readily as to unattempted ones. A candidate attempting 100 questions at high accuracy will generally beat one attempting 118 at moderate accuracy.

The seat spread below the top group tells you to build a realistic preference list rather than a hopeful one. With around 3,700 seats and a wide range of universities, the useful question is not whether you will reach NLSIU but which band of universities your realistic rank opens, and what you would actually accept.

And the domicile factor tells you to do university-specific research early. Two candidates with identical ranks can have very different options depending on which state they are domiciled in, and that is knowable in advance rather than a surprise at counselling.

Frequently asked questions

When was the CLAT 2026 exam held? On 7 December 2025, with the result declared on 16 December 2025 and first-round counselling cutoffs published on 7 January 2026. The naming is confusing but consistent: "CLAT 2026" refers to admission for the 2026-27 academic year, with the examination held in December of the preceding year. There is no CLAT 2026 examination still to come.

Which CLAT should I prepare for now? CLAT 2027, held on 6 December 2026, with registration open since 3 August 2026. That is the live cycle for anyone currently preparing. CLAT 2026 is a completed cycle and this page is a record of it rather than a guide to sitting it.

Why was CLAT 2026 evaluated out of 119 marks? Because the Consortium of NLUs withdrew one question, a Logical Reasoning item on family relations, following the objection window. The paper carried 120 questions as usual, but with one withdrawn the evaluation was out of 119. This is a normal part of the process rather than an irregularity: candidates may object to specific questions after the provisional key is published, and the Consortium may change an answer or withdraw a defective question.

How many candidates appeared in CLAT 2026? About 72,631 candidates appeared for the undergraduate examination, out of roughly 92,000 registrations. The gap of around 19,000 is normal attrition and matters when estimating competition, since your real field is the one that turns up rather than the one that registers.

What was the highest score in CLAT 2026? The highest score reported was 112.75 out of 119. That gives a useful sense of the ceiling: even the top candidate did not approach a perfect score, which is characteristic of CLAT and is why cutoffs sit well below the maximum.

What was the CLAT 2026 cutoff for top NLUs? Cutoffs are published as closing ranks, with mark equivalents circulating as estimates rather than official figures. Reported closing positions place NLSIU Bengaluru around rank 112 in the 2025 cycle, NALSAR Hyderabad around rank 159 and NUJS Kolkata around rank 327, with 2026 mark-level estimates for that top group in the region of the low-to-mid 90s and above out of 119. Treat mark figures as indicative of a band rather than as thresholds.

How many seats are there across the NLUs? Around 3,700 across all the National Law Universities. Against roughly 72,631 candidates appearing, that is about 20 candidates per seat overall, though the ratio at the most sought-after universities is far steeper since their seats are a small fraction of the total.

Why do CLAT cutoffs change every year? Four main factors. Paper difficulty, since a moderate paper produces higher cutoffs and a hard one compresses scores. Field size, which has trended upward. Seat availability, where any change in a university's intake shifts its own cutoff directly. And category and domicile reservation, since each NLU applies its own policy including state quotas, which can make the effective cutoff markedly lower for a home-state candidate than an out-of-state one.

Should I use marks or ranks to judge my chances? Ranks. Marks move with paper difficulty between cycles, so a mark that secured a university in one year may not in another, whereas closing ranks are a more stable comparison. Use published closing ranks for your target universities across the last two or three cycles.

Is a rank outside the top few hundred still worth having? Yes. The top three or four NLUs close inside roughly the first three hundred ranks, but below that group the range of available National Law Universities widens quickly, and a rank in the low thousands still opens an NLU seat. Candidates sometimes treat anything outside the top five as failure, which the data does not support.

Can I still get a seat in later counselling rounds? Counselling proceeds in rounds and seats open up as allotted candidates decline, fail to report or upgrade elsewhere, so later rounds can produce allotments at ranks that did not clear in the first. The rules on accepting, freezing and floating differ by round and carry consequences for security deposits and further participation, so read the Consortium's counselling documents before acting rather than after.

What is the difference between CLAT and AILET? CLAT is conducted by the Consortium of NLUs for admission to the National Law Universities generally. AILET is conducted by National Law University Delhi for its own programmes, since that university does not participate in CLAT. For the December 2026 season, CLAT 2027 falls on 6 December and AILET 2027 on 13 December, a week apart and therefore both sittable, though their papers differ substantially in structure.