IIM Ahmedabad PGPX RTI Data: The Real Acceptance Rate for 2026-27 (Plus EPGP, PGPBL)
- Career Simplified
- Aug 12
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 24
Almost every conversation about one-year MBA admissions in India runs on anecdote. Someone knows someone who got in with a 690. Someone else insists the cutoff is really 720. None of it is checkable, and applicants make expensive decisions on the back of it.
So we filed Right to Information applications with three IIMs and asked the same five questions of each: how many people applied, what the lowest and highest GRE scores were among admitted candidates, how many were called to interview, and how many were finally offered admission. All three replied.
The numbers below are not estimates, not forum chatter, and not a consultant's guess. They are what the institutes themselves put in writing. And read together, they overturn the single most common assumption applicants hold about how these programmes select people.
The data, side by side
Three RTI replies, all for the 2026-27 admission cycle. IIM Ahmedabad reference IIMAD/R/E/26/00051, IIM Bangalore reference IIMBL/R/E/25/00178, IIM Kozhikode reference IIMKK/R/E/26/00077.
Metric | IIM Ahmedabad PGPX | IIM Bangalore EPGP | IIM Kozhikode PGPBL |
|---|---|---|---|
Applications received | 879 | 608 | 421 |
Called to interview | 707 | 413 | 420 |
Interview call rate | 80.4% | 67.9% | 99.8% |
Offers made | 160 | 105 | 143 (see note below) |
Interview to offer conversion | 22.6% | 25.4% | 34.0% |
Overall admit rate | 18.2% | 17.3% | 34.0% |
Lowest GRE among admits | 314 | 320 | 281 |
Highest GRE among admits | 336 | 336 | 324.5 |
Batch that actually joined * | 160 | 75 | about 60 to 64 |
Implied yield on offers | about 100% | about 71% |
* Batch size figures are from publicly reported institute announcements and class profiles, not from the RTI replies. Every other number in this table is RTI-sourced.
Finding 1: The shortlist is not the filter. The interview is.
This is the number that should change how you plan.
IIM Ahmedabad interviewed 707 of 879 applicants. IIM Bangalore interviewed 413 of 608. IIM Kozhikode interviewed 420 of 421. Four out of five, two out of three, and effectively everybody.
Most Indian applicants arrive at these programmes with a mental model built from CAT-based flagship admissions, where the shortlist is the brutal stage. You clear a percentile cutoff that eliminates 98 percent of the field, and if you make the call list your odds of converting are respectable.
One-year MBA admissions invert that completely. The profile screen barely screens. Then roughly three out of four interviewed candidates are rejected: 77.4 percent at IIM Ahmedabad, 74.6 percent at IIM Bangalore.
Two practical consequences follow. First, an interview call is not a signal that your application impressed anyone. At IIM Ahmedabad it is closer to a default. Candidates routinely read the call as validation and relax; the data says the hard filter has not happened yet. Second, if you are budgeting preparation time across the cycle, the interview deserves far more of it than most applicants give it. The stage that eliminates the most people is the stage most people prepare for last.
Finding 2: The GRE is a threshold, not a ranking device
IIM Ahmedabad admitted at least one candidate with a GRE of 314. IIM Bangalore admitted at least one at 320. Both admitted candidates at 336.
Using ETS concordance as a rough guide, 314 sits somewhere around a 640 to 660 GMAT and 320 around a 680 to 700. These are respectable scores. They are not the 730-plus that applicant forums treat as the entry ticket to a top IIM one-year programme.
A 22-point admitted spread at IIM Ahmedabad and a 16-point spread at IIM Bangalore tells you the committee is not ranking on score. If it were, the admitted range would be tight and clustered at the top. It is not. The score gets you over a bar, and above that bar it stops doing much work.
The honest caveat: the person admitted at 314 almost certainly brought something else that was unambiguous, and you do not know what it was. A single low data point is a permission slip to stop obsessing over five more points, not a licence to apply with a weak score and hope.
The decision this should drive is a resource-allocation one. If you are sitting at 320 and considering six more weeks of prep to reach 327, the data suggests those six weeks are worth more spent on your SOP, your recommenders, and interview practice.
Finding 3: Offers versus seats tells you whether the waitlist moves
This one is not in any brochure, and it matters if you are sitting on a waitlist in March wondering whether to sign a lease.
IIM Ahmedabad reported 160 offers. The PGPX 2026-27 batch that began in April 2026 has 160 students. Offers and seats match exactly, which means the programme is managing to a fixed number and backfilling declines quietly rather than over-offering upfront.
IIM Bangalore reported 105 offers against a batch of 75 that actually joined. That is roughly a 71 percent yield, meaning about 30 admitted candidates said no.
The read-across: EPGP competes for candidates who are also holding ISB, INSEAD and overseas offers, and it prices that into how many offers it releases. A waitlist position at IIM Bangalore is a live position. The equivalent at IIM Ahmedabad is tighter, because there is no visible over-offering buffer.
Finding 4: Two thirds of applicants wait until the last phase
IIM Kozhikode was the only one of the three to break its application count down by phase, and the split is stark.
Phase | Applications | Share of total |
|---|---|---|
Phase 1 | 70 | 16.6% |
Phase 2 | 74 | 17.6% |
Phase 3 | 277 | 65.8% |
Nearly two thirds of the entire applicant pool arrived in the final phase. These programmes admit on a rolling basis, so Phase 3 applicants are competing for whatever seats remain, against the largest and most crowded pool of the cycle. Phase 1 applicants faced 70 competitors for a full complement of seats.
Applying early is the cheapest advantage available in this process, and most people decline it.
A note on two figures in the IIM Kozhikode reply
Two numbers in the PGPBL reply do not sit comfortably with what is publicly known, and we would rather flag that than present them as clean.
The offer count of 143. Publicly reported PGPBL batch strength runs at roughly 60 to 64 students. If 143 offers were genuinely made and the batch is around 62, the programme would be over-offering by more than 2x and losing well over half its admits. That is possible for a blended programme where candidates hold multiple options, but it is a long way outside the pattern at IIM Ahmedabad and IIM Bangalore. Treat 143 as an offer or provisional-offer count across all three phases at best. Do not treat it as a seat count.
The highest GRE of 324.5. A GRE total score cannot end in a half point. Verbal and Quantitative are each reported in whole one-point increments, so every total out of 340 is an integer. A 324.5 is therefore either an average of two figures, a transcription slip, or a blend of GRE and some other scale. The 281 floor is unusual too, and low enough that it is worth reading as an outlier admitted on the strength of everything else in the file.
The application and interview counts in that same reply, 421 and 420, are internally consistent and match the phase breakdown, so we have used them as given.
How the other top one-year programmes compare *
We do not hold RTI replies for the programmes below. Everything in this table is drawn from public sources: institute announcements, published class profiles and admissions pages. It is directionally useful and should not be quoted with the same confidence as the RTI figures above.
Programme | Applications * | Recent batch size * | Test accepted * |
|---|---|---|---|
ISB PGP | Roughly 3,000 to 5,000 | About 826 to 900 | GMAT or GRE |
IIM Calcutta MBAEx | Not disclosed | About 90 | GMAT only, test centre |
IIM Lucknow IPMX | Not disclosed | About 110 | GMAT or GRE, test centre |
IIM Indore EPGP | Not disclosed | 58 in the 2026 batch | GMAT or GRE |
* All figures in this table are from public sources rather than RTI replies, and batch sizes fluctuate year to year. The one hard inference worth drawing: ISB aside, these are small programmes. A cohort of 58 to 110 means every marginal decision is made by a small committee reading your file closely, which is exactly why the interview carries the weight it does.
What this means for your application
1. Assume you will get an interview, and plan backwards from it. At an 80 percent call rate, treating the shortlist as a milestone worth celebrating is a planning error. Build your interview narrative while you are writing the application, not after the call lands.
2. Stop optimising a score that is already over the bar. Admits at 314 and 320 mean the marginal value of points above roughly 320 GRE or 700 GMAT is small. If your score clears that, the retake is usually the wrong investment.
3. Apply in the first phase. Two thirds of the IIM Kozhikode pool waited for the last window and competed for a depleted seat count. Early application is free optionality and almost nobody uses it.
4. Expect to be rejected after a good interview, and apply to more than one programme. Three in four interviewed candidates are turned down. That is not a verdict on you; it is arithmetic. Applicants who apply to a single programme are taking a roughly one-in-five shot and calling it a plan.
5. A waitlist at IIM Bangalore is worth more than a waitlist at IIM Ahmedabad. EPGP loses about 29 percent of its admits to other offers. PGPX shows no equivalent gap. Plan your timelines accordingly.
Method and caveats
All three RTI applications were filed for the 2026-27 admission cycle and answered by the respective institutes: IIM Ahmedabad on 10 April 2026, IIM Kozhikode on 30 April 2026, and IIM Bangalore on 29 May 2026.
Three limitations are worth stating plainly. The GRE figures cover only candidates who submitted GRE scores, so they say nothing about the GMAT distribution, which is the larger pool at all three programmes. The lowest and highest scores are extremes rather than a median, and an extreme tells you where the boundary sat once, not where the centre of the class sits. And a single cycle is a single cycle; the 2027-28 numbers may look different, particularly at IIM Kozhikode, where the programme is still young.
Where a number came from a public source rather than an RTI reply, it carries an asterisk. Everything unmarked came from the institutes in writing.
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