MHT CET CAP Rounds: Freeze vs Betterment, Seat Codes and Acceptance Fee

Your MHT CET percentile decides nothing on its own. The seat is decided in the Centralised Admission Process (CAP) the CET Cell runs after the result: a merit list, an option form of up to 300 choices, and four allotment rounds with rules about when a seat becomes final. In 2026-27 two things happened that every candidate for 2027 should know: the seat-acceptance fee rule changed three times in one season, and all admissions closed on a hard date set by the Supreme Court. This guide walks through CAP as it actually ran in 2026, from the official notices.

CAP Information Brochure 2026-27; Admission Notice No. 5; circular dated 07.09.2026.

The calendar was compressed by an order, not by choice. After the Supreme Court’s order of 12 August 2026 (MA No. 2380/2026) and AICTE’s revised academic calendar of 13 August, the CET Cell issued a circular on 7 September fixing 14 September 2026 as the last date for every admission. That file is titled “Cut-off circular” on the CET Cell site, which is why some pages mistake it for a list of cut-off marks — it is a date. The CET Cell’s own portal now says the admission process for 2026-27 is closed. Registration dates for earlier cycles are only partly on record: the 2024-25 CAP began on 14 July 2024, and Round I acceptance in 2025-26 was extended to 4 August 2025.

The practical consequence: what you put at the top of the form is what you get. In Round I your first preference is binding the moment it is allotted; in Round II anything in your first three is; in Round III anything in your first six. A candidate who lists a “safe” college first to be sure of a seat has locked themselves out of every better college below it. Put preferences in the order you would genuinely take them, and use the cut-off guide in this series to check each one against where your merit number is likely to land.

So the rule on paper moved from an escalating fee to a flat ₹1,000 paid once, and the final notice of the year — the one that governed Round IV — says ₹1,000 once. For 2027, read the fee clause in that year’s admission notices rather than assuming either version; the CET Cell has shown it will change the rule mid-cycle.

Two readings matter. First, at an autonomous institute every Maharashtra seat is state level, so your home district does not help you there; at a non-autonomous one, 70% of seats go to candidates of that institute’s Home University, which can make a college in your own university region much easier than its state-level cut-off suggests. Second, All-India seats exist only at private unaided institutes (15%), ICT and LIT (30%) and COEP (20%) — and they are filled on JEE (Main) in preference to MHT CET, which the CET Cell prefers over MHT CET for them.

Every row of a cut-off list and every allotment carries a code like GOPENS or LOBCH. The legend is printed on each page of the CET Cell’s lists: the first letter is the gender quota — G (general seat, open to all genders) or L (ladies-only seat); the last letter is H (Home University seat), O (Other than Home University) or S (State Level); what sits between is the category. So GOPENS is a general-quota, OPEN-category, state-level seat, and LOBCH is a ladies OBC Home-University seat. Special seats — TFWS, EWS, PWD…, DEF…, ORPHAN… — carry their own codes.

About one seat in five went unfilled in 2025-26, so a seat somewhere is not the scarce thing — a seat at a particular institute and branch is. That is why the merit number, the order of the option form and the freeze rules matter far more than whether you “qualify”.