A total of 56,880 candidates have qualified in the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Advanced-2026, a 4.6% jump from last year, with Shubham Kumar from Bihar topping the exam that is required to enter the premier Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).
The qualified candidates will now compete for 18,951 undergraduate engineering (BTech) seats across 23 IITs. This means only about one in three qualified candidates will secure an IIT seat through the Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JoSAA) counselling.
According to the results declared by IIT Roorkee, which conducted the test this year, 46,773 of the qualified candidates are men and 10,107 women — the highest number of women to have qualified for the examination.
Shubham Kumar, a resident of Gaya who wrote the exam in the IIT Delhi zone, ranked first, scoring 330 out of a maximum of 360. Arohi Deshpande, who hails from Pune and also wrote the test in the IIT Delhi zone, topped among female candidates with a score of 280, ranking 16th on the Common Rank List (CRL).
The CRL is the overall merit list prepared on the basis of candidates’ total marks, irrespective of their category.
Of the 187,389 candidates registered for the entrance test, 179,694 appeared in the JEE Advanced held on May 17 across about 221 cities in India.
