Let us be honest about what this page is. Nobody knows the SSC CGL 2026 Tier-1 cut-off, including us, and anybody telling you a precise figure before the exam has even been held is guessing and calling it a forecast. What we can do is show you the real cut-offs the Commission has published in past cycles, put this year's 12,256 vacancies and roughly 28 lakh applicants beside them, account for the new 15-minute sectional timing, and give you a band with the reasoning visible so you can judge it yourself. Treat everything below as an estimate. The only cut-off that will ever matter is the one SSC publishes with the Tier-1 result on ssc.gov.in, and it will arrive as an exact number with five decimal places, not a range.
Tier-1 is out of 200 marks: four sections of 25 questions and 50 marks each, 60 minutes in total, +2 for a correct answer and -0.50 for a wrong one, with 15-minute sectional timing introduced for the 2026 cycle. Cut-offs are published on normalised marks, not raw marks, and SSC issues separate lists for Junior Statistical Officer (List-1), Statistical Investigator Grade-II (List-2) and all other posts (List-3). The figures most candidates mean by 'the cut-off' are the List-3 ones.
After a full mock, the AI estimates your All-India rank using real 2020-24 cut-off data rather than a made-up scale. Two weeks out that is the number worth watching: not whether you scored 140, but where 140 would have landed you in the cycles where SSC actually published the figures.
The cut-off this year will be set by scores produced under 15-minute sectional locks, so a score from an untimed or old-pattern mock tells you very little about it. Our free mocks are 100 questions, four sections of 25, with the sectional locks and +2/-0.5, which is the only setting in which your score is comparable to the population that will set the cut-off.
Of about 31,000 questions in the bank, close to 29,000 are genuine previous-year SSC questions carrying the Commission's own answer keys. Cut-off reasoning is only as good as the difficulty of the paper you measured yourself on, and real SSC questions are the closest available proxy for the paper you will actually sit.
If your mock score is sitting below the band on this page, the AI analysis tells you whether the shortfall is conceptual, calculation, careless or time-pressure. In a fortnight, calculation and careless gaps are worth attacking and conceptual gaps in unfamiliar topics generally are not; knowing which one you have is what makes the remaining days count.
Our estimate, and it is only an estimate, is that the List-3 cut-off for UR will land somewhere in the region of 128 to 145 marks out of 200, with the other categories falling roughly 6 to 30 marks below that in the usual order. The reasoning is set out on this page: the 2025 UR List-3 cut-off was about 136.83, vacancies have fallen from 14,582 to 12,256 which pushes upward, and the new 15-minute sectional timing will depress raw scores across the whole cohort which pushes downward. We could be wrong. Do not plan your Tier-2 preparation around this number, and check ssc.gov.in for the actual figure when the result is declared.
For List-3, which covers all posts other than JSO and Statistical Investigator Grade-II, the published UR cut-offs were 132.37 in the 2020 cycle, 130.18 in 2021, 114.27 in 2022, 150.05 in 2023, 153.18981 in 2024 and about 136.83 in 2025. The full 2024 category set, taken from SSC's own result write-up, was UR 153.18981, OBC 146.26291, EWS 142.01963, SC 126.45554 and ST 111.88930, with 1,65,240 candidates shortlisted in that list. The spread between 114 and 153 in five years should tell you how little a predicted figure is worth.
Our view is that it probably will, though how far is genuinely unknown. Fifteen minutes per section with no carry-over removes the tactic most high scorers relied on, which was finishing General Awareness quickly and donating those minutes to Quantitative Aptitude. That should reduce total attempts across the whole candidate pool, and since the cut-off is a relative measure of that pool, lower raw scores generally mean a lower cut-off. The counter-argument is that everyone faces the same constraint, so the relative ordering may barely change.
Not automatically, and the recent record shows why. Vacancies fell from 17,727 in 2024 to 14,582 in 2025, yet the UR List-3 cut-off fell too, from about 153 to about 137, because the paper's difficulty mattered more than the vacancy count. Vacancies set how many candidates get shortlisted; paper difficulty sets what marks those candidates score. Both matter, and difficulty has been the stronger driver in the last two cycles.
No, you are shortlisted at your own category's cut-off, which has consistently been lower. There is one detail worth knowing: candidates from reserved categories who score at or above the UR cut-off, while remaining within the UR age limit, are counted separately in SSC's own result write-ups. In the 2024 Tier-1 result, for instance, 29,867 OBC, 12,548 EWS, 4,349 SC and 1,042 ST candidates qualified at the UR cut-off and were shown under their respective categories.
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