CAT 2026 on 29 November: Sessions, 40-Minute Sections, Timeline

The Common Admission Test 2026 is on Sunday 29 November 2026, in three sessions, conducted by IIM Indore on behalf of the 22 IIMs. Registration is over: it was extended once and closed on 22 September 2026 at 5 PM. From here the calendar is short: the admit-card, mock-test and test-day dates are announced, while the answer-key, objection and result dates are not yet — and most pages still carry the dates from the first press release. This guide puts every official date in one place, sets the bulletin’s promises against what actually happened in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and explains the parts of the paper that are official and the parts that are only coaching estimates.

CAT 2026 Information Bulletin (26.07.2026), Press Release (26.07.2026) and FAQ.

The most useful thing you can know about the CAT calendar is how the last three cycles behaved against their own bulletins. The pattern is consistent: the result came out in the third or fourth week of December, every time, even when the bulletin said early January. The CAT 2025 bulletin also said “first week of January, 2026”; the result was declared on 24 December 2025. And the CAT 2025 admit card, promised “from November 05”, actually opened on 12 November.

What this tells you, and what it does not. It tells you to have your application documents ready in December, not January: IIM shortlists follow the result, and IIM Ahmedabad already says its shortlist is tentatively due in the second week of January 2027. It does not give you a date for 2026. The bulletin’s wording is the only official statement, and we do not replace it with a guess.

Two consequences follow. A wrong MCQ costs one mark on top of the three you did not earn, so a blind guess is not free; a non-MCQ has no penalty, so a typed answer is always worth entering if you have one. And the fixed order means that, for standard-time candidates, QA starts 80 minutes into the test (106 minutes 40 seconds in for PwBD candidates with compensatory time) — practise all three sections back to back, not QA fresh.

The bio-break rule is the one to plan around: a break inside a 40-minute section comes straight out of that section’s clock. The scribble pad rule matters for DILR — most candidates get one pad for all three sections (only PwBD candidates with blindness or low vision can ask for a second), so keep your set-up tables compact.

Very little, and only for two days. The media release of 29 September 2026 opens a limited edit window from 10:00 AM on 5 October to 5:00 PM on 6 October 2026, for candidates who registered and paid the fee. Only three things can be changed: the photograph, the signature and the test state/city preferences. The release says no further extension will be granted, so if your photo or city choice needs fixing, do it in that window. The bulletin adds that no change of category is entertained after registration, and that the Central Government list on the last date of registration is binding for reservation. If your NC-OBC or EWS certificate was still pending, the bulletin’s undertaking route (the undertaking form, the older certificate and proof of application in one PDF) is the only one; failure to upload the full set “may result in disqualification from the entire admission process”.

For the next eight weeks the useful work is the paper itself. If you want the Quant formulas, DILR methods and VARC rules on a few pages, ProSyllabus has a CAT 2026 revision kit built from the same bulletin and FAQ; page 1 is free to read on that page.