Will CAT 2026 Have More Test Takers Than CAT 2025?

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The question surfaces every registration season, and it carries an unstated worry underneath: if more people sit the exam, does my percentile get harder to reach? That worry is reasonable in shape and mostly wrong in substance, and untangling the two is worth doing before you let a registration figure affect how you prepare.

Registration for CAT 2026 ran from 3 August to 15 September 2026, with IIM Indore conducting the exam on Sunday 29 November across roughly 170 test cities. Final registration and attendance figures are published after the fact, so at this point any claim about the size of the cohort is a forecast rather than a fact.

What a Percentile Actually Measures

The whole question turns on this, and it is worth being exact.

A percentile is your position relative to everyone who sat the exam, expressed as the share of candidates you finished above. It is a rank statement, not a score statement, which is why there is no fixed mapping from marks to percentile in CAT.

Because it is a proportion, the size of the cohort does not change what the percentile means. Being in the top one percent of two hundred thousand candidates and the top one percent of three hundred thousand are the same achievement by definition, even though the second describes more people.

So the intuition that more candidates makes a 99 percentile harder to reach is, at the level of the percentile itself, mistaken. What it changes is how many individuals occupy that band, which is a different thing entirely and matters in a different place.

Where Cohort Size Genuinely Matters

The effect is real, and it operates downstream of the percentile rather than on it.

If a percentile band contains more people, then more candidates clear any given sectional or overall cutoff. Schools have fixed intake and fixed interview capacity, so a larger pool above a threshold means competition for calls tightens even though the percentile itself has not moved.

That is why the effect shows up at shortlisting rather than at scoring. The same percentile can produce a call one year and not the next, without any change in the exam, because the number of people holding a comparable percentile changed.

Question	Affected by cohort size?	Why
Is a 99 percentile harder to get?	No	It is a proportion of whoever sat the exam
Are more people at 99 percentile?	Yes	More candidates, same proportion
Is a call harder to get at 99?	Possibly	Fixed intake, larger qualified pool
Does my preparation need to change?	No	Nothing you control has moved

Why the Forecasts Are Unreliable

Three things make cohort predictions weaker than they look, and each is worth knowing before you read one.

The Registration to Attendance Gap

This is the largest source of error in casual estimates. Registration closed on 15 September, which fixes one number, and the number that matters for percentile calculation is how many people actually sat the paper. Those are different figures and the second is not knowable until the day.

In Season Numbers Are Partial

Any figure circulating before the exam is either an official interim statement or somebody's estimate, and the two get quoted identically. Treat anything without an official source attached as a guess, including confident ones.

The Real Drivers Sit Outside the Exam

Cohort size responds to how many people graduate, what the job market looks like and how attractive a management degree seems that year. Those are macro questions, and an analysis that predicts CAT registrations without addressing them is pattern matching on past numbers.

What This Should Change About Your Preparation

Almost nothing, and that is a useful conclusion rather than a dismissal.

Your percentile depends on your position relative to the field, and the only side of that relationship you influence is your own performance. A larger field does not change which questions you should be practising, how you should be reviewing errors, or how you should be selecting questions in the hall.

What it can reasonably change is your application strategy. If you expect competition for calls to tighten, the sensible response is a wider and better researched school list, and more attention to the parts of an application that are not CAT.

That second point is where most candidates under-invest. A profile includes academic record across school and graduation, work experience, and in many schools diversity considerations, and shortlisting formulas weight these very differently. Some weight CAT at around three quarters with academics and work experience carrying the rest; others weight it at nine tenths with small allocations elsewhere.

The Normalisation Question Underneath

A related worry often travels with this one, and it deserves a direct answer.

CAT runs in three slots and those slots do not receive identical papers. Normalisation exists to make scores comparable across them, so that the slot you were allotted does not determine your outcome.

That process operates regardless of cohort size. A larger cohort means more data in each slot, which if anything makes the comparison more stable rather than less. There is no mechanism by which more candidates makes slot allocation matter more.

So the two anxieties that cluster here, that more people makes percentiles harder and that a bad slot will sink you, are both addressed by the same feature of the system. Percentile is a proportion and normalisation handles the slots.

What a Rising Cohort Means for Your Shortlist

Build the list wider than feels necessary, and research the criteria rather than assuming they are uniform. Scores are accepted by all 22 IIMs and more than a thousand other schools, and their shortlisting formulas differ enough that the same percentile produces meaningfully different outcomes across them.

The Timing of the Application Work

Several school deadlines fall before CAT results are published, which means application work cannot wait for a percentile. Our guide on building a realistic preparation plan covers how to keep that from colliding with the final weeks of study.

Why This Question Attracts So Much Attention

There is a reason cohort speculation reliably fills forums between registration and exam day, and it is not that the answer is useful.

The period has very little genuine news in it. Registration has closed, the exam has not happened, and nothing about the paper can be known, so attention flows toward the one variable that produces a number: how many people signed up. A figure feels like information even when it changes nothing you would do differently.

It also offers a way to explain a future outcome in advance. A candidate who expects a difficult result has a ready account of it, and one who expects a good one can feel they beat a bigger field. Neither framing affects the result, and both are more comfortable than the honest position, which is that the outcome depends mostly on forty minutes per section and on work already done.

The test worth applying to any piece of exam-season news is simple: does knowing this change what I do tomorrow? For paper structure, marking rules and deadlines, it does. For the size of the field, it does not.

The Answer

Will CAT 2026 have more test takers than CAT 2025? Nobody can say yet. Registration closed on 15 September 2026, final attendance figures are published after the cycle, and every number circulating now is a projection.

More usefully: it does not matter much to you. A percentile is a position in whatever field turns up, so a larger cohort does not move the bar. What it can do is put more people above any given bar, which tightens competition for interview calls rather than making the exam harder.

The response to that is an application strategy rather than a study strategy. Research shortlisting criteria properly, build a wider list, take the non-CAT parts of your profile seriously, and keep the preparation exactly as it was. None of the work that actually moves your outcome depends on how many people sit beside you.

If speculation about the field is absorbing attention that your application needs, that is worth correcting early. A CAT preparation strategy review will show where your time is actually going, and a personalised CAT preparation plan keeps the study half insulated from the noise.