MHT CET 2026 Percentile vs 2025: Use Your State Merit Number Instead

If you compare a 2026 MHT CET cut-off percentile with a 2025 one, you are comparing two different scales. In 2026 every candidate who sat both attempts kept the better of two total percentiles, so the whole distribution of reported percentiles moved up. The number that did not move is the one CAP actually ranks on: the Maharashtra State General Merit Number, which the CET Cell prints beside every percentile in its cut-off lists. This guide shows the shift from those lists, with a converter.

CAP Round I cut-off lists 2025–2026; 2026 final merit list (our counts).

The gap is small at the very top — a tenth of a percentile around merit number 1,000 — and grows fast down the list: 3 points at 50,000, 7.4 at 1,00,000, 30.8 at 2,00,000. That is exactly what best-of-two should do: a candidate near the top scores near the top in both attempts, while a candidate in the middle can gain a lot by keeping the better sitting. Anyone reading a 2025 cut-off of, say, 85 percentile (about merit number 50,000) and aiming for 85 in 2026 would have aimed at roughly merit number 62,500 — about 12,500 places lower than they meant to (straight-line interpolation between the 50,000 and 75,000 rows; our arithmetic).

Say a senior closed 2025 at 85.06 percentile and a college course of interest closed near there. Step one: the 2025 table puts 85.06 at about merit number 50,000. Step two: in 2026 the same merit position was worth about 88.11 percentile. So to hold the same place in the queue in 2026, a candidate needed roughly three percentile points more than the 2025 figure suggested. Lower down the gap is larger: a 2025 percentile of 67.82 (about merit number 1,00,000) corresponded to about 75.24 in 2026. Near the top it almost vanishes: merit number 1,000 was about 99.65 in 2025 and 99.77 in 2026 in our nearest pairs.

The same logic runs the other way for anyone reading their own 2026 result. A 2026 percentile of 88 is not the same achievement as a 2025 percentile of 88: in the table, 88.11 in 2026 sat at about merit number 50,000, while 88.17 in 2025 sat at about 40,000 — roughly 10,000 places apart. That does not make it worse for admission, because everyone in 2026 was measured on the same inflated scale; it only matters when you compare across years.

The Maharashtra State General Merit Number is your position in the CAP merit list of Maharashtra-State candidates, ordered by MHT CET total percentile, with ties broken by higher marks or score in MHT CET Mathematics, then Physics, then Chemistry, then HSC marks (CAP Information Brochure 2026-27, printed pp. 60–61). It appears on the final merit list the CET Cell publishes before Round I (27 July in 2026, per Admission Notice No. 5). Every cut-off list quotes the closing merit number first and the percentile in brackets — which is a hint about which of the two the CET Cell treats as the real measure.

Work in merit numbers. Take the college and branch you want, read its closing merit number in the latest cut-off list (the cut-off guide in this series has the top 120 courses), and compare that with where your mock scores place you. If you only have a percentile — from a mock test or from 2025 — convert it with the tool above to a merit number first, and then to 2026’s percentile scale. And treat any single number as a range: closing merit numbers moved by hundreds between rounds and between years for the same course.