UGC NET December 2026 Exam Date and Notification; UGC NET June 2026 Result, Answer Key, Cut-off, Exam Pattern, Syllabus, Eligibility and Free UGC NET Mock Tests

The three qualifications, in descending order of cutoff

• Junior Research Fellowship and Assistant Professor — the highest threshold, carrying a research fellowship along with teaching eligibility.
• Assistant Professor only — eligibility to be appointed as an Assistant Professor, without the fellowship.
• Admission to a PhD programme only — the lowest of the three thresholds, qualifying the candidate for doctoral admission.

Other rules worth knowing

• Subject — appear in the subject of your post-graduation; if it is not on the list, in a related subject. Four-year-degree candidates choose freely.
• SET holders — candidates who cleared a State Eligibility Test before 1 June 2002 are exempt from NET for Assistant Professor anywhere in India; later SETs count only in that state.
• Third gender — draws the SC/ST/PwD relaxations in fee, age and eligibility, and the lowest of the category cut-offs in the subject.
• Foreign degrees — need a UGC equivalence certificate; postgraduate diplomas need AIU equivalence.

The UGC NET process, from registration to certificate

1. Register on the NTA portal Applications are online only, on ugcnet.nta.nic.in. Registration takes the name, parents’ names and date of birth exactly as on the class-10 certificate, one mobile number and one e-mail address, and generates an application number; the form then takes the category, PwD status, qualifications, the subject and medium, and up to four city choices. Only one application per candidate is accepted — duplicates are cancelled.
2. Upload the images and pay the fee A recent passport photograph (10–200 KB JPG), a signature in running hand (10–50 KB), and the category, PwD and result-awaited attestation PDFs where they apply. The fee is ₹1,150 for General, ₹600 for General-EWS and OBC-NCL and ₹325 for SC, ST, PwD/PwBD and third gender, plus bank charges. Payment by debit or credit card, net banking or UPI; the application counts only when the fee transaction succeeds, and the confirmation page should be saved.
3. Use the correction window NTA opens a two- or three-day correction window after the closing date. Most fields can be edited once; the category, PwD status and subject changes may attract a fee difference. Nothing is changed after the window closes, and NTA does not edit forms on request.
4. City intimation and admit card An advance city-intimation slip appears about ten days before the examination and the admit card a few days after it, both on the portal; nothing is posted. Carry the admit card, the same photo-ID used in the form, a passport photograph for the attendance sheet and, for PwD candidates, the certificate.
5. The computer-based test Reporting is about two hours before the shift and the gate closes 30 minutes before the start. The paper runs on a computer with a virtual keyboard; rough sheets are issued and collected. Marked-for-review questions with an option selected are counted as answered.
6. Answer key challenge and result Provisional answer keys with the recorded responses go up for about three days; a challenge costs ₹200 per question, refundable if the experts accept it, and accepted corrections apply to every candidate. Final keys, then the result and scorecard are hosted on the portal; there is no re-evaluation. E-certificates follow on the portal and DigiLocker.
7. JRF award and Assistant Professor eligibility Candidates in Category 1 receive the JRF award letter through UGC and take up the fellowship within the notified period at a university or institution; the fellowship pays on the DST-aligned scale — ₹37,000 a month for two years, then ₹42,000 as SRF on upgradation. Categories 1 and 2 carry lifetime eligibility for Assistant Professor recruitment, which universities run separately with their own interviews and API scores. Category 3 counts as the entrance test for Ph.D. admission under the UGC Ph.D. regulations of 2022, within the validity the admitting university applies.

What separates JRF from Assistant Professor scores

• Paper I at 80-plus — reasoning and data interpretation are formula-driven and learnable; the aptitude units are recall.
• Recent question repetition — NTA’s own committee found repeated questions in the June 2026 papers; the previous three cycles are the highest-yield practice material.
• Attempting everything — there is no deduction, so a blank question is a certain loss of two marks.
• The computer interface — marked-for-review questions with an option count as answered; practise on screen so the three hours are spent on the paper, not the navigation.

Practice on this site

UGC NET syllabus UGC NET previous year papers UGC NET mock tests UGC NET study material CSIR NET for science subjects

Official documents

UGC NET — NTA portal Information bulletin, UGC NET June 2026 (PDF) Public notice: opening of applications, 29 April 2026 (PDF) Public notice: extension of the last date to 23 May 2026 (PDF) Press release: declaration of the June 2026 result, 28 August 2026 (PDF) UGC NET June 2026 subject- and category-wise cut-off marks, 84 subjects (PDF) Public notice: re-conduct of English, Commerce and Sociology, 16 August 2026 (PDF) Public notice: answer-key challenge for the re-examination, 10 September 2026 (PDF) Press release: result of English, Commerce and Sociology, 17 September 2026 (PDF) Cut-off marks for English, Commerce and Sociology, 17 September 2026 (PDF) Press release: declaration of the December 2025 result, 4 February 2026 (PDF) National Testing Agency — notices University Grants Commission