UPSC Cut Off for the Last 10 Years: Prelims, Mains and Final

A UPSC cut-off is the marks with which the last successful candidate in a category moved to the next stage. UPSC describes it in its notices as the "minimum qualifying standards/marks secured by the last recommended candidate". There are three for every exam year: one each for prelims, mains and the final list.

Every cut-off on this page comes from UPSC's own cut-off notices, one for each year, linked under Sources at the end.

Cut-off trends from 2016 to 2025

Pick a stage and your category. Your category's line turns blue and the others stay grey for comparison. Tap or hover on the chart to see every category's mark for that year. The table below the chart lists every number, and you can sort it by any column. Up to CSE 2017, UPSC printed the disability categories as PH-1 to PH-3; they appear here under PwBD-1 to PwBD-3.

The three cut-offs, explained

Prelims cut-off

This is marked out of 200 and uses GS Paper I only. CSAT (GS Paper II) is qualifying: you need at least 33% in it. If you clear that, only your GS Paper I score is compared with the cut-off. A wrong answer in either paper costs one-third of the marks for that question.

Mains cut-off

This is the written total of the seven papers that count (Essay, GS I to IV and the two optional papers), out of 1,750. UPSC applies it only to candidates who also score at least 10% in each of those seven papers. The two language papers do not add to the total, but you need 25% in each of them, or UPSC does not count your Essay, GS and optional papers at all.

Final cut-off

This is the written total plus the personality test, which carries 275 marks, out of 2,025. The final cut-off is the total of the last candidate UPSC recommended in each category.

Would your score have cleared?

Enter a GS Paper I score and your category to see which of the last ten years it would have cleared.

Cut-off by year

Every year has its own page with the full table for that year, the change from the year before and the numbers behind the result.

Why the cut-off moves from year to year

The CSE 2026 notice says UPSC admits about 12 to 13 times the number of vacancies to the mains, and calls about twice the number of vacancies to the interview. So each cut-off is simply the score at which those places run out. Two things move it:

• How hard the paper was. When a paper is hard, everyone scores lower, and the score at which the places run out falls with them. The cut-off can drop sharply in one year and recover the next without the competition changing at all.
• How many vacancies there are. More vacancies mean more places at every stage, so the line falls further down the list.

That is why one year's number makes a poor target on its own. Aim for a score that would have cleared most of the last ten years in your category, not just the most recent one.