MHT CET Eligibility: Domicile Types A–E, the 45% Rule and PCB Branches

Two different questions get mixed up under “MHT CET eligibility”. The first — can I sit the exam? — has an almost-yes answer: any Indian national who has passed or is appearing for Class 12 may register, and there is no age limit. The second — can I get a Maharashtra-State engineering seat with it? — depends on three things the exam never asks: where you passed Class 10 and 12, where you or your parents are domiciled, and your Class 12 marks in a specific set of subjects. This guide takes each in turn from the official brochures.

MHT-CET 2026 Information Brochure; CAP Information Brochure 2026-27.

The 2026 brochure is short on this: all candidates who have passed or are appearing at the qualifying examination (HSC / Class 12 or equivalent) and hold Indian nationality are eligible, and “there is no age limit”. There is no marks threshold to sit MHT CET — the 45% rule below applies only when you seek admission. You may take PCM, PCB or both, but “marks obtained in a particular group will not be transferred to another group”.

Who does not need MHT CET: NRI, OCI, PIO, foreign-national and CIWGC (children of Indian workers in Gulf countries) candidates are exempt and are admitted against their own quotas. All-India candidates “may or may not appear”, because for B.E./B.Tech JEE (Main) is preferred over MHT CET for All-India seats (and NEET for B.Pharm/Pharm.D). For Maharashtra State and Minority candidates, MHT CET is mandatory.

The order matters: you are Type B only if you are not Type A, Type C only if neither A nor B, and so on. A student who has lived in Pune since childhood but did Class 10 in another state is not Type A — but is Type B if a parent holds a Maharashtra domicile certificate. A student whose father is a central-government employee transferred to Nagpur can be Type C even with no Maharashtra schooling at all. Anyone who fits none of the types can still compete for All-India seats in Maharashtra colleges on JEE (Main), or for the special quotas.

OCI holders have one extra condition. They count as Maharashtra or All-India candidates only if they obtained OCI status before 4 March 2021 and meet the residence conditions, following the Supreme Court’s ruling in W.P.(C) 891/2021.

Home University matters only at non-autonomous institutes, where 70% of Maharashtra seats (45.5% of all seats at a non-autonomous private college) are kept for candidates of that university’s districts. At autonomous institutes — the 2026 CAP cut-off lists mark VJTI, COEP, SPIT, PICT and Walchand Sangli as “Autonomous Institute” — every Maharashtra seat is state level and the district does not help. The CAP rounds guide in this series has the full seat-share table.

Note the last condition: a PCM candidate must have appeared in all subjects with a non-zero score. The eligibility clause asks for no minimum MHT CET percentile — only that you appeared in every subject with a non-zero score, so a zero in any subject disqualifies.

A worked example (our arithmetic): Physics 58, Chemistry 62, Mathematics 58 out of 100 each makes 178 / 300 = 59.33% — comfortably eligible. Physics 40, Chemistry 48, Mathematics 45 makes 133 / 300 = 44.33%, which rounds to 44% and fails the open-category rule even though each subject is a pass. The calculation uses the three subjects only, not your aggregate.

Some of these are competitive in their own right. In the 2026 Round I cut-off lists, LIT University Nagpur’s Food Technology closed at state merit number 2,585 for general open seats, and its Pharmaceutical Engineering at 10,608 — the cut-off guide in this series has both. A student who took PCB and is weighing engineering should check which list they would be ranked on for these courses before deciding whether to also sit PCM.

All-India candidates using JEE (Main) had to fetch their JEE scorecard into DigiLocker and then into the CAP portal before registering in 2026. Backward-class candidates other than SC and ST also need a non-creamy-layer certificate valid to 31 March 2027 — without it, the CAP brochure treats them as General candidates.