How many seats, how many students?

Every family planning Class 11 and 12 carries a mental map of the destinations — IIT here, NIT there, the state colleges somewhere behind them. Most of that map is inherited from conversations, not numbers. So we sat down with the public numbers.

One idea holds the whole picture together, and it is worth saying before any table: the same Class 11 and 12 Physics, Chemistry and Maths sits under every one of these doors. JEE Main tests it. Your state CET tests it. CUET tests it as three separate papers. The NDA tests the Maths and Physics of it. A student who builds a strong PCM is not preparing for one exam — they are standing in a corridor where every door opens onto the same foundation.

The second idea matters just as much: these ratios describe the doors, not you. A ratio of 85 applicants per seat says something about how many seats exist. It says nothing about any particular student's chances, because applicants are not a lottery — preparation moves people through the pool. No number below is a prediction about anyone.

The twelve routes, side by side

All figures are from the 2024–2026 admission cycles, drawn from NTA, JoSAA and UPSC releases and from education portals. "Applicants per seat" is simple division: the public applicant pool over the public seat count.

Route	Roughly how many applicants per seat	The arithmetic behind it
BSc at a college in your state	about 1 — open admission	Admission on Class 12 board marks; seats are generally available
State engineering (MHT-CET, KCET and others)	about 2 to 4	MHT-CET 2025: 4.64 lakh PCM candidates for 1.84 lakh seats — and seats stay vacant after counselling
Architecture (NATA / JEE Main Paper 2A)	about 3 to 6	~63,000 Paper 2A candidates; ~22,000 sanctioned B.Arch seats, many unfilled
250+ universities through CUET	about 5	15.7 lakh registered; roughly 3 lakh seats (portal estimate)
Merchant navy (IMU-CET)	varies by institute	Published counts conflict; medical standards, including eyesight, apply
NITs and IIITs	about 33	16.05 lakh JEE Main candidates; 48,372 JoSAA seats outside the IITs
IISERs and NISER	about 42	IAT: 1 lakh+ registered for 2,363 seats; NEST runs near 175 per seat for 257 seats
BITS	roughly 70 to 100 (estimate)	BITS does not publish applicant counts; media estimates against ~3,000 seats
IITs	about 85	16.05 lakh JEE Main candidates; 18,951 seats. Within JEE Advanced itself, about 10 per seat
ISI and CMI	about 200 seats nationally	Neither institute publishes applicant counts, so no ratio can be given
IISc and IIST	about 400	~450 combined seats against the 1.8 lakh who sit JEE Advanced
NDA and Naval Academy	about 1,300 per place (estimate)	406 vacancies per exam; applications estimated at 5–6 lakh

Two things in this table surprise almost everyone.

The scarcest door in the country is not IIT. It is the NDA — 406 places per exam, against lakhs of applications. And IISc, IIST, ISI and CMI, which many families have never discussed, have fewer seats than the IITs by a wide margin. Scarce does not mean better, and open does not mean lesser. A BSc seat taken with strong marks, in a subject a student cares about, is a door walked through — the only kind that counts.

Read down the near end of the table again. State engineering seats go vacant. Architecture seats go unfilled. CUET spreads 15 lakh students across more than 240 universities. For a student with a solid PCM, the corridor is wider than the dinner-table conversation suggests.

Where these numbers are firm, and where they are soft

We would rather show the seams than paint over them.

• Firm: JEE Main registrations, JoSAA seat counts, JEE Advanced statistics, NDA vacancies, MHT-CET registrations. These come from official releases.
• Estimates: NDA application counts (UPSC does not publish them), CUET seat totals (a portal estimate), architecture's sanctioned intake (derived from admission and fill data), and the BITS ratio (BITS publishes nothing; the range is built from media estimates).
• Not published at all: applicant counts for ISI and CMI. We list their seats and stop there.
• Conflicting: merchant navy registration figures vary several-fold between sources, so we give no ratio.

Numbers like these move every cycle. The ordering of the doors rarely does.

Published 14 August 2026 · a basic scan of public numbers, subject to correction — write to us.

EduPeak is not affiliated with NTA, the IITs, the NITs, UPSC, CBSE or any state CET cell. Exam names describe the pattern a paper follows, nothing more.

---

The full working, with every door and every source, is on our doors research page.

And if you want to know where your own PCM stands today, PCM Basecamp is where everyone starts — 100 minutes, one clear starting picture. It is free to start, and there will always be free material.