UPSC Prelims Cut Off: Year-wise and Category-wise

The UPSC prelims cut-off is the GS Paper I score, out of 200, of the last candidate in each category who qualified for the mains. For CSE 2025 it was 92.66 for General, 89.34 for EWS, 92.00 for OBC, 84.00 for SC and 82.66 for ST.

Every figure here comes from UPSC's cut-off notices, one for each exam year. This page is about the prelims only. The mains and final cut-offs have their own page, and the main cut-off guide puts all three stages side by side.

Prelims cut-off by year and category

The chart opens on the prelims. Pick your category to bring its line forward; the other categories stay grey for comparison. The table under the chart lists every year and can be sorted by any column, and the PwBD categories have their own buttons.

How UPSC draws the prelims list

The prelims has two objective papers of 200 marks each, but they do different jobs.

1. CSAT (GS Paper II) is a filter. The notice fixes its qualifying mark at 33%. Below that, your GS Paper I score is not considered at all, however high it is.
2. GS Paper I decides the merit. Among candidates who clear CSAT, UPSC goes down the GS Paper I scores in each category. Every cut-off notice from CSE 2015 to 2025 carries the same footnote: the cut-off is on the basis of GS Paper I only.
3. Wrong answers cost marks in both papers. One-third of the marks for a question is deducted for each wrong answer, and marking two answers counts as wrong. A blank costs nothing. The negative marking guide works through examples.

How many candidates qualify is not fixed in advance. The notice says UPSC admits about twelve to thirteen times the number of vacancies to the mains, so in each category the cut-off falls where those places run out. For CSE 2025, 14,161 candidates qualified for the mains. For CSE 2026, UPSC's result note says 13,343 were shortlisted.

Your prelims marks never count again. The notice describes the prelims as a screening test: once you are in the mains, your rank depends only on the mains written papers and the interview.

Would your score have cleared?

Enter a GS Paper I score and your category to compare it with each year's official cut-off. If you have just written the paper, work out your score first with the prelims score calculator, which applies the negative marking for you.

When UPSC publishes the prelims cut-off

Not with the prelims result. That result is only a list of the roll numbers that qualified. UPSC's press note on the CSE 2026 prelims result, dated 15 June 2026, says the marks, cut-off marks and answer keys of the prelims will be uploaded only after the entire process of the Civil Services and Indian Forest Service examinations is over, that is, after the final result. The CSE 2025 note said the same.

So the CSE 2026 prelims cut-off comes only after the CSE 2026 final result; until then, any 2026 figure you see is not UPSC's. For every exam from CSE 2015 to 2025, UPSC printed the prelims cut-off in one notice together with the mains and final cut-offs. How each result is announced is explained in UPSC result: prelims, mains and final, and the answer key in UPSC prelims answer key.

Reading the numbers

• Two decimals. UPSC prints prelims cut-offs to two decimals, such as 92.66. Work out your own score to two decimals before you compare.
• One line per category. General, EWS, OBC, SC and ST each have their own cut-off. EWS appears from the CSE 2019 notice onwards.
• Disability categories. The notices print separate cut-offs for PwBD-1 (locomotor disability), PwBD-2 (blindness and low vision), PwBD-3 (deaf and hard of hearing) and PwBD-5 (multiple disabilities). Up to CSE 2017 they were printed as PH-1 to PH-3.
• A past cut-off is not a target. It shows where the line fell in a year that has gone. A safer aim is a score that would have cleared most of the years in your category, with a margin.

Prelims cut-off for each year

Each exam year has its own page with the prelims, mains and final cut-offs for every category, and the change from the year before.