XAT 2026 Cutoff: Category-Wise Marks & Percentile

XLRI's XAT 2025 BM cutoff was 96 percentile for male candidates. XAT 2027 is still months away. XLRI has scheduled it for 3 January 2027. XLRI hasn't put out an official XAT 2026 cutoff yet either. XLRI simply hasn't reported results for that cycle.

We know how the cutoff moved across the two confirmed cycles, 2024 and 2025. This trend gives a fair idea of where your own score might land once the real number comes out.

For XAT, cutoff is never a rank or a raw mark. It's a percentile, your position compared to every other candidate who took the exam. The tables below show roughly which percentile bands clear which shortlist, by category and by institute. Every 2027 figure below is a trend-based expectation, not a confirmed XLRI number, and each one is labelled that way wherever it matters.

XLRI Jamshedpur conducts XAT on behalf of XAMI, the Xavier Association of Management Institutes. Over 250 B-schools across India accept the score. Here's where the numbers stand right now.

In the XAT network, only XLRI publishes an exact percentile cutoff every year, for its BM and HRM programmes. Most other XAMI members and associate institutes shortlist using a mix of percentile and profile. None of them names a fixed number on its own site.

Two institutes say this directly. IMI Delhi's official admission page states there is "no fixed cut-off." XIM University's MBA-HRM page also lists no XAT percentile threshold. It names only the base eligibility mark: 55% aggregate in your bachelor's degree.

Is XAT used for IIM admission?

No. XAT doesn't feed into IIM admissions at all. The IIMs run their own entrance exam, CAT, with a completely separate applicant pool.

XAT's own network runs through XAMI, XLRI, and a wider set of associate B-schools. IMT Ghaziabad, MICA, TAPMI and FORE are on that list. None of these are IIMs. If you're searching for an IIM-wise cutoff, you're looking at the wrong exam. Check CAT's own cutoff pages for that instead.

XLRI is the one name every XAT candidate needs to track. It's the only institute that shortlists on a published percentile every year.

Here's a fair expectation for XAT 2027, based only on XLRI's own confirmed numbers. Across XAT 2024 and 2025, the BM cutoff held at 95 to 96 percentile for male candidates. The female band held at 90 to 91 across the same two cycles. HRM ran two to five points lower on both, across those same two years.

XLRI hasn't confirmed a XAT 2026 figure on its own channels. It can't say whether that band held steady, rose, or eased in the most recent cycle. It isn't going to guess just to fill that gap. Treat 95-96 (male) and 90-91 (female) as a working planning band for BM. That holds until XLRI's own XAT 2027 cutoff is out. It's not a guarantee.

Once the actual cutoff is out, check the XAT result 2027 page for your exact percentile. Then return here for the confirmed figure.

Video: What It Takes to Clear XLRI's Bar

This walks through the strategy behind hitting a 95-plus percentile, the band XLRI's BM cutoff has held at across the last two confirmed cycles.

Does XAT have a category-wise cutoff for SC, ST, OBC or EWS?

No, not at the exam level. XAT's official website says it plainly: "XAT itself does not follow any reservation rules. The exam treats every applicant on equal terms." There's no government reservation category built into the test, or into XLRI's published cutoff. When people say "category-wise cutoff" for XAT, they usually mean something else. They mean a split by academic stream, engineer or non-engineer, and by gender. That's the real split XLRI publishes every year.

Individual institutes can still run their own reservation policy at the seat-allocation stage. That decision sits with each college, not with XAT.

Here's how XLRI's category split has moved, cycle to cycle.

*XLRI has not published its XAT 2026 category-wise cutoff on its own official page. This is current as of our verification on 12 September 2026. This page does not use a third-party or aggregator-reported number to fill that gap. The XAT 2024 and 2025 figures above come straight from XLRI's own cutoff press releases.

Why is the XAT cutoff lower for female candidates at XLRI?

XLRI says this openly in its own cutoff releases. It sets a deliberately lower percentile bar for female applicants, in both BM and HRM. This gap isn't a quirk in the data. It's a named institutional choice. XLRI states it the same way in the 2024 and 2025 releases. XLRI calls it a deliberate step toward gender diversity in the batch.

XLRI doesn't stop at one overall number. Every year, its BM and HRM cutoffs also carry a sectional floor. That floor covers three sections: Quantitative Ability (QA), Verbal Ability and Logical Reasoning (VALR), and Decision Making (DM). A strong overall percentile doesn't automatically clear this floor. If you miss one section badly enough, it won't matter how high your overall score is.

The figures above are official, from XLRI's XAT 2025 cutoff press release. XLRI has not published a sectional cutoff for XAT 2026 on its own official channels. This is current as of our 12 September 2026 verification. That's why no XAT 2026 sectional figures appear here. This section will update once XLRI issues one.

Does the General Knowledge section count toward the XAT cutoff?

Not toward the main cutoff. GK sits in its own timed part of the exam and carries no negative marking. XLRI scores and reports it separately. It's not part of your Verbal Ability, Decision Making and Quantitative Aptitude composite. XLRI uses your GK score only at its own later selection stage, after shortlisting. It doesn't decide who XLRI shortlists in the first place. Most other institutes don't factor GK into their cutoff at all. This fits how XAT's process works overall: each accepting institution sets its own weightage for the different test components, based on its own admission requirements.

Your raw score and your percentile are two different numbers. The raw score comes straight from XAT's marking scheme. You get one mark for every correct answer, and lose 0.25 for every wrong one outside GK. If you skip more than eight questions, each extra skip costs 0.1 mark too. Percentile is a different count. It's what that raw score becomes once XAT measures it against every other candidate that year.

A 96 percentile doesn't mean you scored 96% of the marks. It means 96 out of every 100 candidates finished behind you, and only 4 scored higher. That's why the exact same raw score can give two different percentiles in two different years. Say the XAT 2027 paper turns out tougher than 2026's. A lower raw score could still land a higher percentile, simply because everyone else's score drops too.

XLRI has never published an official score-to-percentile table, for XAT 2027 or any earlier cycle. It's unlikely to release one before results are out either. Treat any "expected score vs percentile" chart online as a rough guess, not a guarantee. Your real percentile depends on the entire XAT 2027 applicant pool. No fixed formula can lock that in before the exam.

What percentile do I need in XAT 2027 to get a call from XLRI?

Aim for 95-plus if you're male and applying to BM. Aim for roughly 90-plus if you're female. HRM runs a few points lower on both counts. This is a planning target based on XLRI's own confirmed XAT 2024 and 2025 numbers, not a promise. XLRI hasn't confirmed a XAT 2026 figure either. You'll know your exact standing only once the XAT 2027 result is out and XLRI announces its actual cutoff.

Which MBA colleges accept XAT other than XLRI?

Over 250 B-schools accept an XAT score. This includes the 12 XAMI member institutes, plus a long list of associate colleges. XIM University Bhubaneswar, LIBA Chennai, XISS Ranchi and XIME Bangalore sit inside XAMI alongside XLRI. IMT Ghaziabad, MICA Ahmedabad, TAPMI Manipal, GIM Goa, FORE School of Management and BIMTECH Noida are the associate institutes on the list. XAT's own official blog names all of them as regular acceptors.

That same blog groups these institutes into rough percentile bands, not exact cutoffs. XLRI and the top XAMI names typically want "95-plus overall, strong sectionals." A mid tier works with "good XAT scores," in the 85 to 95 range. GIM Goa, TAPMI and FORE fall in that band. A further tier of emerging and regional institutes takes "decent" scores, in the 70 to 85 range. These are XAT's own descriptive tiers. They give a rough band, not a promised cutoff. Every institute still weighs your profile, work experience and interview on top of the number.

If your XAT 2027 percentile lands below 90, you're not out of the running. A large share of the 250+ accepting institutes work in that 70 to 90 band. Many of them run genuinely good programmes too. The XAT 2027 colleges page has the fuller list. It shows what each institute has historically asked for, and what it actually offers once you're in.

Video: Which Percentile Gets You Where

A percentile only means something once you map it against real colleges. This breakdown from the most recent completed XAT cycle shows roughly where different percentile bands landed.

Here's the actual pattern from the last few cycles. It uses only XLRI's own confirmed numbers, and says clearly wherever a cycle's figure isn't out yet.

BM's engineer-versus-non-engineer gap is worth a closer look. It was a full point in 2024. By 2025, that gap had closed, and both streams landed on the same 96/91 split. XLRI hasn't confirmed whether this held for XAT 2026 on its own channels. So this page doesn't stretch the pattern into a claim about 2026 or 2027. It's a real two-cycle data point, not a rule XLRI has committed to in writing.

The category split, by stream and gender, is identical across the two officially confirmed cycles, 2024 and 2025. That part of the comparison holds well. XAT 2026 has no official figure yet, either on the category table or the sectional cutoff. So this page doesn't stretch the comparison further than the confirmed data allows.

Why does the XAT cutoff change every year?

A handful of real variables move the cutoff. None of them are fixed in advance.

• Number of test-takers, and their overall strength. Percentile is relative. A stronger applicant pool pushes the same raw score down the ladder. A weaker one does the opposite.
• Difficulty of that year's paper. A tougher Quantitative Ability or Decision Making section changes what raw score you need for a given percentile. Everyone's score moves together, so the bar moves with it.
• Seats available at XLRI and other institutes. XLRI and other institutes don't set a cutoff in isolation. It reflects how many candidates a college needs to shortlist for the seats it has that year.
• XLRI's own stated diversity policy. The gap between the male and female cutoff isn't accidental. XLRI names it directly, as a deliberate step toward a more gender-balanced batch.
• Sectional performance patterns. XLRI enforces a sectional floor alongside the overall percentile. If candidates broadly struggle in one section, say Decision Making, that section's cutoff can drop for that year. The overall number can still hold steady.

Nobody can predict these variables precisely, months before the exam. That's why this page treats every XAT 2027 figure as an expectation. It builds this from real trend data, and never presents it as a number anyone can promise you today.