Minimum Marks Required in NEET for MBBS in Government Colleges

Qualifying Marks vs. Admission Cutoff: The Difference That Actually Matters

NTA sets a "qualifying cutoff" every year: the bare minimum needed to pass NEET and become eligible for counselling. This is officially called the NEET passing marks for MBBS and BDS.

For NEET 2025, the passing marks in NEET out of 720 looked like this for each category:

(Source: NTA's official NEET 2025 cutoff notification, released alongside results on June 14, 2025.)

Search "minimum marks in NEET for MBBS", and you'll find a dozen different numbers floating around, because the question itself is ambiguous until you specify which cutoff you actually mean.

Clearing this cutoff only means you're allowed to register for counselling. It does not mean a government college will admit you, that's the explanation most quick explainers skip.

How This Number Has Moved Over the Last Three Cycles

The qualifying cutoff isn't fixed; it resets every year based on how that year's candidates performed, hence, it is not a pre-decided target. Category-wise, here's how it's actually moved:

2024 produced the highest qualifying floor of the three; more candidates cleared higher marks than in that cycle. 2025 dropped back down, largely because that year's paper was tougher overall; even the topper scored 686, not a perfect 720.

The takeaway: the cutoff is a reflection of the crowd's performance that year, not a number you can predict in advance from older results alone.

How Many Marks Actually Get You a Government MBBS Seat

The number that actually matters is the admission cutoff — the real rank at which seats stopped being allotted in the final round of counselling. This is the genuine answer to the question "what NEET score is required for MBBS" — not the qualifying cutoff above.

For NEET 2025, after the Medical Counselling Committee (MCC) closed all three All India Quota (AIQ) rounds for government MBBS seats, the closing positions were:

(2025 General/OBC/SC/ST figures from MCC's final Round 3 results; 2024 figures and the EWS range are compiled from MCC's published round-wise college data, so treat them as closely-tracked estimates rather than a single official digit.)

A General candidate needed to land inside the top 26,000 out of roughly 22 lakh test-takers. EWS runs its own separate 10% reserved merit list, which is why its closing rank sits a notch above General's, even though both share the same 50th-percentile qualifying threshold. An SC candidate had room up to rank 1,36,445, not because those seats were "easier," but because SC seats are filled from a separate, smaller competing pool and not from the full applicant list.

Notice that the rank threshold barely moved between 2024 and 2025 for most categories, even though the marks needed for that same rank dropped sharply, a direct echo of the tougher 2025 paper we saw in the qualifying-cutoff trend above. Rank is the more stable benchmark year to year; marks move with the paper's difficulty.

This table covers only the 15% All India Quota. The other 85% of government MBBS seats go through state quota counselling, and the cutoff for the same category can look completely different from state to state. In Uttar Pradesh, for example, the 2025 general category state quota cutoff sat closer to 600–620 marks, noticeably higher than the AIQ figure above, simply because UP runs its own, more competitive merit list.

So if someone asks "what's the NEET score for MBBS," the honest reply depends on which quota and which state they mean.

Where the Bar Climbs Even Higher

If AIIMS or one of the handful of most sought-after state colleges is the goal, even 600+ marks can fall short.

AIIMS Delhi's General category closing rank in 2025 sat somewhere between AIR 48 and 103, depending on the counselling round, which is the top 0.01% of every test-taker in the country. Even AIIMS Madurai, the most accessible AIIMS campus that year, still closed at AIR 3,590 for General.

So "minimum marks required in NEET for MBBS in a government college" really has three different answers, depending on what's being asked: enough to pass NEET, enough for some government seat anywhere in India, or enough for one specific named college.

A Quick Note If You're Reading This Before the NEET 2026 Result

NEET UG 2026 didn't go entirely to plan. The exam originally held on May 3, 2026, was cancelled by NTA, and a re-exam was scheduled for June 21, 2026, with results expected sometime in July 2026.

I've pulled NTA's official cutoff notification every June for the last several cycles, and if you're trying to work out how many marks in NEET for MBBS you'll personally need this year, the honest answer is: nobody knows yet, not NTA, not us, and not any site already publishing a confident 2026 number. The percentile rule itself (50th for General, 40th for OBC/SC/ST) is structural and unlikely to change, but the exact marks tied to each percentile depend entirely on how this year's paper and turnout compare to past years.

Once your 2026 scorecard is out, the quickest way to know your raw score before checking it against these cutoffs is to run your correct and incorrect counts through our NEET Marks Calculator it gives you the subject-wise and total score in seconds, calculated the same way NTA does it.

Figures in this article are drawn from NTA's official NEET UG cutoff notifications (2023–2025) and MCC's published All India Quota counselling results. Numbers will be updated once NEET UG 2026 results and cutoffs are officially released.