NEET Result: Only 1 in 8 Qualifiers Will Get Admission as Punjab’s Aryan Gupta, Haryana’s Panshul Bansal Share AIR 1
NEET Result: NTA declares NEET UG 2026 results after paper-leak forced a re-exam. 11.21 lakh qualify out of 20 lakh candidates; Ludhiana’s Aryan Gupta and Haryana’s Panshul Bansal jointly top with 715/720.
North Desk Correspondent
Chandigarh, July 17
The National Testing Agency declared NEET UG 2026 results late Thursday night, nearly a month and a half after the original exam was scrapped following a paper-leak scandal — capping the most disrupted NEET cycle in years.
NEET Result: The numbers
NEET Result: Close to 20 lakh candidates appeared for the exam this year, down from 22.09 lakh in 2025 and 24.06 lakh in 2024 — continuing a two-year decline in NEET turnout. Of those, 11.21 lakh candidates qualified, against 12.37 lakh who cleared the exam last year.
Women made up more than 58 percent of all qualifiers this year, and cleared the exam at a higher rate than men: 56.8 percent of women who appeared qualified, compared to 55.1 percent of men. Uttar Pradesh again produced the largest number of qualified candidates, at over 1.7 lakh, with candidates from all 36 states and Union Territories clearing the exam.
At the top end: 19 candidates scored above 700 marks, 138 scored 690 or above, 10,160 scored 600 or above, and 90,780 scored 500 or above. The NTA said the 138 top rankers came from 66 cities, and that the 17 candidates who scored above 705 marks were spread across eight states: Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Telangana.
The topper
NEET Result: Ludhiana’s Aryan Gupta and Haryana’s Panshul Bansal jointly topped the exam with 715 out of 720 marks — India’s highest score this year, though short of a perfect 720. Aryan, a student of Education Square in Dugri, said the rank “feels like a dream” and that he studied 16-17 hours a day through his preparation. He comes from a family of doctors and said he wants to specialise in oncology, tracing that back to losing his grandmother to cancer when he was three. His elder brother had secured AIR 54 in NEET last year.
The result also drew political attention, with Shiromani Akali Dal leader Bikram Singh Majithia posting congratulations calling it a moment of pride for Punjab and crediting Aryan’s father’s support alongside the student’s own effort.
Why the exam was delayed by six weeks
NEET Result: NEET UG 2026 was originally held on May 3 but was cancelled by the NTA on May 12 after evidence surfaced that roughly 410 questions had circulated on WhatsApp groups for up to a month before the exam — a leak a whistleblower first flagged on May 7. The Centre approved a full re-exam for all candidates who had appeared in May; the Union Education Ministry said at the time that “a wrong candidate through the education mafia cannot steal the rights of another,” while NTA Director General Abhishek Singh said the cancellation was necessary to protect public trust in the exam.
The re-exam was held June 21 under tightened security, with four question paper codes in use. The NTA then restructured its own timeline to speed up results: it published the provisional answer key on June 25, opened the answer-key challenge window till June 28, displayed scanned OMR sheets to candidates July 13-15, and released the final answer key and results on July 16 — a faster turnaround than NEET has typically managed in recent years, achieved by running administrative stages in parallel rather than one after another.
Over to admissions now
Qualifying is only the first hurdle. India has roughly 1.29 lakh MBBS seats this year across around 820-824 medical colleges — about 63,000-64,000 government seats (including AIIMS and JIPMER) and the rest in private and deemed institutions, per National Medical Commission data.
That means fewer than 1 in 8 of the 11.21 lakh qualified candidates will actually get an MBBS seat anywhere in the country this year, before state-wise and category-wise competition is even factored in. Counselling will follow in rounds through the Medical Counselling Committee (15 percent All India Quota) and state bodies (85 percent state quota), with admissions expected to stretch into the autumn.
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