CAT 2026 Test Cities: How to Rank Your 5 Preferences

Exam Updates

The city preference field sits about two thirds of the way down the CAT registration 2026 form, between the academic details and the payment page. Most aspirants fill it in under a minute, pick the metro nearest their college, add four more that sound convenient, and never think about it again until 4 November.

Then the admit card arrives with the third choice on it, the centre is ninety minutes outside the city, and the exam morning acquires a train, a hotel and a set of decisions nobody wanted to make in November. The field takes five seconds and it shapes the hardest morning of the year.

The Field You Fill in Five Seconds

Every other field on the CAT form records something about you that is already true. Your name, your degree, your category. The city field is different, because it is the only place where you make a decision that changes what happens on exam day.

It is also the only field with a genuine trade-off in it. Everything else has a correct answer that you look up. This one asks you to weigh convenience against capacity against a journey you will make in three months, with incomplete information, in a form you are filling in a hurry.

• You will be somewhere in late November that may not be where you are in August.
• You may get your third choice, so every slot needs to be a city you can actually sit in.
• Centres are allotted within the city, so the city choice does not fix the travel time.
• The decision is reversible only during the correction window, which is short and easy to miss.

None of that is knowable with certainty in August, which is the honest difficulty. What you can do is stop treating the field as a preference and start treating it as a risk ranking, and that reframe alone changes most people's list.

How Many Cities, and Where the Real List Lives

CAT 2026 is reported to be held in around 170 cities, with candidates entering five preferences during registration rather than the four of previous cycles. That is a genuinely useful change, because a fifth realistic option is a fifth chance of a manageable journey.

Now the important part, and the reason this piece does not print a list. The only authoritative city list is the dropdown inside the official application form, and it changes between cycles as centres are added and withdrawn. A list copied from a secondary page is out of date the moment a centre changes, and an out of date list is worse than no list because it feels reliable.

1. Open the official CAT application form and read the city dropdown directly.
2. Filter it to your state and the two adjoining ones, which is where your realistic options live.
3. Write down every option you could reach by the reporting time, before you rank anything.
4. Rank that shortlist using the four tests below, then enter the top five.

Zone by Zone: What the Coverage Looks Like

The table below is orientation, not a list. It shows how coverage is distributed and names some long-standing high-capacity centres in each zone so you know roughly where to look on the dropdown.

Zone	Coverage pattern	Representative centres
North	Dense around the capital region, thinner in hill states	Delhi NCR, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Lucknow
West	Very dense, several cities within reach of each other	Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Indore, Nagpur
South	Dense, with strong coverage in tier two cities	Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi, Coimbatore
East	Concentrated around the larger cities	Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, Patna
Central and North East	Fewer options, so preference order matters most here	Bhopal, Guwahati

How to Use a Zone Table Rather Than a List

• Find your zone and note the density. Dense zones mean more realistic options within two hours.
• Look at the adjoining zone too, since state borders often put a good centre closer than your own capital.
• Treat the named centres as anchors for searching the dropdown, not as the options themselves.
• In a thin zone, expect to use all five slots properly rather than filling two and padding three.

The pattern worth reading off that table is the last row. In zones with fewer options, capacity fills faster and later preferences do more work, so careful ranking is worth most to exactly the candidates who tend to assume it matters least.

The City Filter: 4 Tests for Each Slot

Run every shortlisted city through these four before it earns a slot. A city that fails test one does not belong on the list at all, however much you would prefer it.

How to Use the Filter on Five Slots

• Slots one and two: cities that pass all four tests. These are your real answers.
• Slot three: a city that passes reach and cost but not familiarity. Acceptable with a dry run.
• Slots four and five: the next best cities that still pass test one, in descending order.
• Never fill a slot with a city that fails test one just to use all five.

Test 1: Can You Reach the Reporting Time

Reporting time is earlier than the exam start time, and it is the time that actually binds you. Plan against it, and add an hour, because a centre can be anywhere within the city and you will not know where until 4 November.

The honest version of this test is not whether you could theoretically get there. It is whether you could get there having slept, without a 4 am alarm, and with enough margin that a delayed train does not end your season. If any of those three is doubtful, the city is a fail.

The Three Questions That Settle Test One

• Would I have to leave before 6 am to be there in time, allowing for an unknown centre location?
• Is there a second route if the first one fails, or does the whole plan rest on one train?
• Would I sleep normally the night before, in my own bed or a booked room, rather than in transit?
• If the answer to any of these is no, the city fails and does not belong in a slot.

Test 2: What the Journey Costs You on the Morning

Two cities can both be reachable and cost you very differently. Ninety minutes on a familiar metro line is not the same as ninety minutes of driving through traffic you cannot predict, even though the clock says the same thing.

The section that suffers is VARC, because it comes first and it needs a settled attention span from minute one. An aspirant who arrives having spent two hours managing a journey reads the first passage in the state everyone else reaches at minute thirty.

• Predictable transport beats fast transport. A slower train you trust is better than a faster road you do not.
• Count the changes, not the distance. Every interchange is a decision on a morning you want decision-free.
• Consider the weather. Late November varies enormously across the country and it affects travel.
• Ask what happens if the first option fails. A city with one route in is riskier than its travel time suggests.

Tests 3 and 4: Capacity and Familiarity

Capacity is the test you cannot measure directly and can reason about. Larger cities host more centres, so a first preference for a major city is more likely to be honoured than a first preference for a small one, though it also means a centre further from where you are staying.

Reading Capacity Without Data

You cannot see centre capacity, and you can infer it. A city with several universities and a large IT presence hosts more test centres than a city of the same population without them, because centres are usually institutional computer labs. That is a rough signal and it is better than none.

Familiarity is the cheapest advantage in the whole list. A city you have visited removes navigation, and a centre you have walked past removes the last of it. If your allotted city is reachable on a Sunday before the exam, that trip is worth more than the study hours it costs.

What Happens After You Submit

Your preferences are locked at submission and reopen only during the correction window, which is expected in early October and runs for about three days. Test city preference is one of the few fields that window actually allows you to change.

After that, allotment runs your list against capacity and the result appears on the admit card on 4 November. There is no separate city intimation slip for CAT, and an allotment cannot be appealed, so 4 November is when travel planning starts rather than when it can still be influenced.

1. August. Enter five preferences, ranked by the filter rather than by preference.
2. Early October. Revisit the list in the correction window, especially if your location for November has changed.
3. 4 November. Read the allotted city and centre address, and build the travel plan the same day.
4. Before 29 November. Do the journey once if the city is reachable, and book accommodation if your rule says so.

The CAT 2026 timeline sets those dates in the wider sequence, and the CAT 2026 registration FAQs cover the rest of the form. Then go back to the work: chapter practice for CAT preparation and topic-wise CAT exam previous year questions are what the percentile is actually made of, and the free CAT cheatsheets and notes cover the revision half.