CAT 2026 Correction Window and Exam City Allotment

Exam Updates

You submitted the form on 12 September, got the acknowledgement email, and moved on. Since then the application has felt finished. It is not, quite. There is a short window in early October when three fields open up again, and one of them decides which city you travel to on 29 November.

Almost nobody plans for it, because it is not part of the CAT registration 2026 story anyone tells. The window is short, it is easy to miss while you are deep in mocks, and once it closes the choices behind it are permanent. This piece covers what you can change, what you cannot, and how city allotment actually works.

The Week Most Aspirants Ignore

Between the registration deadline on 15 September and the admit card on 4 November sits seven weeks that feel like pure preparation time. They mostly are. But two administrative moments fall inside them, and both are the kind that cannot be recovered afterwards.

The first is the correction window. The second is the quiet realisation, usually in late October, that your test city preferences were chosen in a hurry during registration and no longer match where you will actually be in November. Aspirants who are relocating for work, or going home for the exam, discover this at exactly the wrong time.

• You picked cities based on where you lived in August, not where you will be in November.
• Your uploaded photograph was a phone snap that met the size limit but not the clarity expectation.
• Your signature upload was a scan of a signature you no longer produce consistently.
• You listed a preference order without knowing that order actually matters.

Each of those is fixable in early October and permanent afterwards. That asymmetry is the whole reason the window deserves a diary entry rather than a passing thought.

What Happens After You Submit the CAT 2026 Form

The post submission sequence is short and the dates are worth holding together in one place. Two of them are confirmed and two are expected, and the table below marks which is which.

Stage	When	Status
Registration closes	15 September 2026	Confirmed in the official notification
Correction window opens	Expected early October 2026, around three days	Widely reported, not officially fixed
Admit card with city, centre and slot	4 November 2026	Published in the official schedule
Exam day	29 November 2026	Confirmed in the official notification

What You Should Do in Each Stage

• Before the window opens: review your uploads and re-think your city list against your November location.
• On the day it opens: make every edit in one thirty minute session and download a fresh acknowledgement.
• After it closes: stop checking the portal. Nothing changes again until 4 November.
• On 4 November: read the admit card carefully and build the travel plan the same day.

Note what is missing from that list. There is no separate exam city intimation slip, which several other national exams do issue. For CAT, the first confirmation of your city arrives with the admit card, which is why the preference you set in October is the last input you get.

The Correction Triage: 3 Editable Fields and 5 Locked

Treat the window as a triage rather than a general edit. Three fields open, five stay shut, and knowing which is which before the window opens saves the whole session.

Why the Locked Fields Matter More Than They Look

• Your name must match the photo identity document you carry, and it is the admit card that has to change, not the document.
• Your email is the only channel for official communication, so losing access to it is a genuine problem.
• Your mobile number receives the one time passwords for the portal.
• Your date of birth is checked at the centre against the same document as your name.

If any of those is wrong, the route is the official CAT helpdesk rather than the correction window, and the earlier you raise it the better. A locked field with an error is not hopeless, it just takes longer than three days to resolve.

Test City Preferences: The One Edit That Changes Your Exam Day

Preference order is not decoration. The allotment process reads your list in order, so a city you listed third is a city you might actually get. Aspirants who fill the list with aspirational choices and put their realistic city last discover this on 4 November.

The practical rule is to rank by travel feasibility rather than by preference. Ask yourself, for each city on the list, whether you could reach a centre there by the reporting time on a Sunday morning without an overnight stay. If the answer is no, that city does not belong on the list at all.

How to Rank Your Cities

• First choice: the city where you will actually be living in late November.
• Second choice: the nearest alternative you could reach by road or rail before the reporting time.
• Third choice: a city where you have somewhere to stay the night before without arranging it from scratch.
• Never list: a city that would need a flight, an unfamiliar route, or an early morning arrival on exam day.

How Exam City Allotment Actually Works

Allotment balances your stated preferences against centre capacity in each city and slot. Where demand exceeds capacity, candidates are placed in a later preference. This is why a preference is a request rather than a booking, and why nobody can promise you a first choice.

Capacity is also why the window matters more for candidates in smaller cities. Where a state has few centres, a popular slot fills quickly and later preferences do more work than they would in a metro. Ranking carefully is therefore worth most to exactly the aspirants who tend to think it matters least.

Two consequences follow. First, you should be willing to sit in any city on your list, because you may well be sent to your second or third. Second, you cannot appeal an allotment. The helpdesk corrects data errors, and an allotment outcome is not a data error however inconvenient it is.

Planning for a City You Did Not Expect

• Build the travel plan on 4 November, the day the card arrives, not in the final week.
• If the centre is more than ninety minutes away, book accommodation for the night before immediately.
• Do the journey once on a Sunday if the city is reachable, so exam morning holds no navigation surprises.
• Check the reporting time rather than the start time when you plan the morning, since the gap is significant.

Photo and Signature: The Rejections That Surface Late

Image problems are the least dramatic item on this list and the one that causes the most avoidable trouble, because a poor upload passes the size check at registration and only becomes visible when the admit card prints.

Look at your own uploads on screen at full size before the window opens. A photograph should be recent, front facing, evenly lit and unobstructed. A signature should be in dark ink on white paper and should look like the signature you will produce at the centre, since verification compares the two.

What to Do If You Miss the Correction Window

Missing it is not fatal, but the remedies are narrower and slower. Work through them in order rather than waiting for the admit card to tell you something is wrong.

1. Write to the official helpdesk immediately, with your registration number and a clear statement of the discrepancy.
2. Keep the thread, including dates and reference numbers, rather than starting a fresh email each week.
3. Prepare for the city you were given, since an allotment cannot be appealed and planning early costs nothing.
4. Carry supporting documents on exam day if a name or date discrepancy remains unresolved.

One thing not to do is assume silence means refusal. Helpdesk queues are long in October and a reply can take a fortnight, so a single follow up after ten days is reasonable and a daily one is not. Keep preparing while it sits open, because in almost every case the discrepancy is either resolved before the admit card or handled at the centre with supporting documents.

Then put it down and go back to preparation. Administrative anxiety in October is expensive, and the marks are still in the mocks. The wider sequence is laid out in the CAT 2026 timeline, and the CAT 2026 registration FAQs answer most of the questions that surface at this stage.

A Checklist for the Correction Window Days

Block thirty minutes on the day the window opens rather than the day it closes. Portals slow under load at the end, and a failed upload on the last evening has no remedy.

• Log in and confirm the portal recognises your credentials before you attempt any edit.
• Open your existing photograph and signature at full size and judge them honestly.
• Re-rank test cities by travel feasibility, not by preference, and remove any you could not reach.
• Save each change and reopen the application to confirm it persisted.
• Download a fresh acknowledgement and store it with your registration record.

Then return to the work that actually moves the score. October is when mock analysis compounds, so use the block and get out. Short sessions of chapter practice for CAT preparation and topic-wise CAT exam previous year questions are worth more than another hour spent rereading the notification, and the free CAT formula and cheatsheet library covers the revision half.