IIT Hyderabad's AI, CSE and Mathematics & Computing branches together averaged "around ₹40 lakh per annum" in Phase 1 of the 2025-26 season (to December 2025), and CSE placed 83.05% of its registered students, per institute data reported by The Hindu (5 January 2026). IITH has not published a separate CSE-only average or median. Across all programmes, the full 2025-26 season averaged ₹24.06 LPA, and the top offer was the ₹2.5 crore Optiver package.
| Quick answer: IIT Hyderabad 2025-26 | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| CSE average / median package | Not published. Phase 1: CSE placement rate 83.05%; AI + CSE + M&C combined average around ₹40 LPA | The Hindu |
| Average package, full season (all programmes) | ₹24.06 LPA | IITH placement brochure 2026-27 |
| Average / median, 2026 (as stated by the placement office) | ₹23.5 lakh / ₹20 lakh | ETHRWorld, 28 Sep 2026 |
| B.Tech average, Phase 1 only | Over ₹30 LPA | The Hindu |
| Highest package | ₹2.5 crore (Optiver, international); the brochure lists ₹2.62 crore | Telangana Today, brochure |
| B.Tech median, 2024-25 graduates | ₹19.15 lakh | NIRF 2026 data |
CSE average across IITs: for comparison, IIT Guwahati's B.Tech CSE median was ₹51 lakh in 2025-26, with an average of ₹48.49 lakh, per its CCD placement report 2025-26. IIT Madras's B.Tech CSE average was ₹53.2 lakh in 2024-25, per its CPC annual report 2024-25. Those are CSE-only, full-season figures, so they are not like for like with IITH's three-branch Phase 1 average. Every IIT's published CSE number, with season and source, is in our IIT CSE average package 2026 comparison.
IIT Hyderabad broke its 17-year-old placement ceiling in 2025-26: Edward Nathan Varghese, 21, a final-year B.Tech Computer Science student, secured a ₹2.5 crore per annum Software Engineer PPO from Optiver at its Amsterdam headquarters. That is the highest offer in the institute's history since its founding in 2008, up 278% from the 2024-25 ceiling of ₹66.13 LPA and comfortably past the prior all-time record of ₹1.1 crore set in 2017. "No student had got more than one crore package in 17 years of IITH's history so far," Telangana Today reported. The offer was also covered by CareerIndia, CampusUtra, DailyJagran, ZeeBiz, CollegeHai and Deccan Chronicle.
The ceiling number is the eye-catcher. The average is the number most students will live with. The full 2025-26 season closed at ₹24.06 LPA across all programmes, per the Office of Career Services' 2026-27 placement brochure. That is up about 19% from the official 2024-25 average of ₹20.26 lakh in the IITH Annual Report 2024-25.
2025-26 final numbers: what the full season produced
The OCS brochure, published in July 2026, carries the season's "Previous Statistics (2025-26)" page. These cover all programmes, not just B.Tech:
| Metric | 2025-26 (full season) |
|---|---|
| Students registered | 910 |
| Students placed | 639 |
| Total offers | 659 |
| Pre-placement offers | 120 |
| International offers | 46 |
| Companies registered | 315 |
| Highest annual package | ₹2.62 crore |
| Average annual package | ₹24.06 LPA |
Source: IITH Placement Brochure 2026-27, page 8. The brochure's ₹2.62 crore ceiling is higher than the ₹2.5 crore reported in January; the brochure does not say which offer it refers to or what exchange rate it used.
The placement office gave a second set of numbers in September. Mayur Vaidya, faculty-in-charge of the Office of Career Services, told the Times of India: "For 2026, we recorded an 86.9% placement rate for BTech students and 70% for MTech students, including on-campus, off-campus and higher-studies outcomes. The average package was Rs 23.5 lakh and the median package was Rs 20 lakh" (ETHRWorld, 28 September 2026). Note the 86.9% counts higher studies and off-campus jobs, so it is not comparable with the Phase 1 rate below.
The same report says 15 offers to IITH's 2026 batch were not honoured: five from Oracle and ten from Rapidue Technologies. IITH has barred both firms from campus placements for two years. "Oracle selected the students in Dec. So, they were taken out of the placement process soon afterwards. It was only in May this year that the institute learnt that the offers would not be honoured," said Mohsin Siddiqui, a placement official.
Who is Edward Nathan Varghese, and how did he land ₹2.5 crore
The specifics matter, because "IIT student gets ₹2.5 crore" hides how singular the profile actually was. Per CollegeHai's January 2026 profile:
- JEE Main 2022 AIR 1100 · JEE Advanced 2022 AIR 558: top-tier but not top-50
- CAT 2025: 99.96 percentile, AIR 120: separately qualified for the top MBA route he did not take
- Top 100 nationally in competitive programming: the actual signal that mattered for Optiver
- Overall Head, Office of Career Services at IIT Hyderabad: managing a team of 8 student managers and ~250 coordinators
- Schooling: early years in Hyderabad, Classes 7–12 in Bengaluru
The mechanics of the ₹2.5 Cr PPO, per CareerIndia: it converted from a two-month summer internship at Optiver's Netherlands office (two weeks training + six-week project). Of two IITH students selected for the internship, Varghese was the only one to convert. Optiver was the first and only company he interviewed with during placements. His project work was CI/CD and cloud infrastructure automation. He was due to start at Optiver as a Software Engineer in July 2026, per Telangana Today.
Read this correctly: the ₹2.5 Cr is not the median CSE outcome, it is the extreme-right-tail outcome. Top-100 competitive programming + Overall Head of OCS + a hedge-fund internship conversion is a very specific stack. Do not plan your career around replicating it. Do plan around what makes it possible: the campus culture that puts an IITH student on the recruiter map for Amsterdam-headquartered quant firms in the first place.
2025-26 Phase 1: the B.Tech numbers from December 2025
Phase 1 concluded in December 2025 and Phase 2 began on 5 January 2026. These are B.Tech-only figures the institute shared with The Hindu:
| Metric | 2025-26 Phase 1 (B.Tech) |
|---|---|
| B.Tech students placed | 304 of 487 registered |
| B.Tech placement rate | 62.42% |
| Average CTC (B.Tech) | Over ₹30 lakh per annum |
| CSE placement rate | 83.05% |
| AI / M&C placement rate | 83.33% / 77.78% |
| Average CTC, AI + CSE + M&C combined | Around ₹40 lakh per annum |
| Highest package | ₹2.5 Cr (international, Optiver) |
| Highest domestic offers | Two at ₹1.1 Cr each; four between ₹75 lakh and ₹1 Cr |
| International offers | 24 (Phase 1 alone; 2024-25 full season had 53) |
Per The Hindu, "Officials said, in the domestic market, its two students secured job offers of Rs 1.1 crore each, and four other students received offers in the ₹Rs 75 lakh and ₹1 crore range." The institute also said "departments witnessed a steady increase in both average and median compensation", but it did not release a median or a CSE-only average.
Branch-level Phase 1 rates were top-heavy: Artificial Intelligence 83.33%, Computer Science 83.05%, Mathematics & Computing 77.78%. Those three branches carry the B.Tech average up. For comparison, the last department-wise count IITH released was for 2023-24, when CSE placed 96 of 111 registered students, per The Indian Express.
Recruiters listed in the 2026-27 brochure for the AI department include Google, Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Apple, Jane Street, Oracle, D. E. Shaw, Tower Research and NK Securities Research. The Jane Street presence matters: a second HFT/quant firm recruiting alongside Optiver signals that IITH is now on the same recruiter shortlist as IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi for that specific segment.
The trajectory: from ₹1.1 Cr (2017) to ₹2.5 Cr (2025-26)
Zoom out on the highest-package number and the ceiling story becomes clearer:
| Year | Highest on-campus package | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | ₹1.1 Cr | DailyJagran |
| 2023-24 | ₹90 LPA | OCS placement statistics 2023-24 |
| 2024-25 | ₹66.13 LPA | IITH Annual Report 2024-25 |
| 2025-26 | ₹2.5 Cr (brochure: ₹2.62 Cr) | OCS brochure 2026-27 |
Two clean readings. First: the 2024-25 ₹66.13 LPA figure was a cyclical low that made 2025-26's rebound look larger than the underlying trend. Second: what actually shifted is which recruiters showed up. Optiver + Jane Street on the same campus in the same cycle is not the same recruiter mix as 2024-25. The ceiling changed because the recruiter base changed.
Fast-growing new-gen IIT: the ranking backdrop
IIT Hyderabad's NIRF trajectory across five years:
| Year | Overall | Engineering |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 16 | 8 |
| 2022 | 14 | 9 |
| 2023 | 14 | 8 |
| 2024 | 12 | 7 |
| 2025 | 12 | 7 |
That is a climb of four places in the overall ranking over five years.
NIRF's own placement data tells a steadier story than the headlines. An ETEducation analysis of five years of NIRF filings (15 September 2026) found IITH's B.Tech placement rate rose from 65.8% in 2019-20 to 76.7% in 2023-24, the largest gain among the ten institutes it studied, while the median salary fell 0.4% in real terms over the period.
What the community actually says
The r/IITHyderabad subreddit is essentially inactive. The community conversation happens on r/Btechtards and r/JEENEETards instead. Three voices worth reading:
Confirmation that the number is real, from an April 2026 first-year experience post: "highest package bhi 2.5 cr on campus tha ish year and next year bhi minimum 2 logo ka 1 cr+ confirm h ppo" (u/Timeless_Being, 7 upvotes). Translation: the ₹2.5 Cr happened this year, and at least two people already have ₹1 Cr+ PPO confirmations for next year's cycle. The pipeline continues.
The EE / non-CSE reality check, from a June 2026 thread: "in ee icdt 100% went for core jobs and in ee core more than half went for core jobs with the median still being 30lpa+ in this era where IT companies are doing mass lay offs". This is one student's account, not institute data, and IITH has not published an EE median.
The tier placement, from a widely-shared June 2026 CSE median tier list on r/JEENEETards (50 upvotes): IIT Hyderabad CSE is placed in the "Exceptional Tier (30+ LPA median)", alongside BITS Pilani, IIIT Hyderabad, IIIT Bangalore, IIT Guwahati, IIT BHU, and IIT Roorkee. Not in the "Elite" (top-5 legacy IITs) tier, but comfortably in the second-highest cohort. That is consistent with the official Phase 1 average of around ₹40 lakh for AI, CSE and M&C, though no official CSE median exists to check it against.
2024-25: the last completed cycle, for reference
Official figures from the IITH Annual Report 2024-25 (Placement Drive 2025, which began on 1 December 2024) and the NIRF 2026 data sheet:
| Metric | 2024-25 (full season) |
|---|---|
| Highest package (all programmes) | ₹66.13 lakh |
| Average package (all programmes) | ₹20.26 lakh |
| Median, B.Tech 4-year graduates (NIRF) | ₹19.15 lakh |
| B.Tech 4-year graduates placed (NIRF) | 364 of 447 (45 more went to higher studies) |
| Students registered for placement | 943 |
| Total offers | 700 |
| PPOs | 130 |
| International offers | 53 |
| Companies registered / hired | 358 / 210 |
IITH has not published branch-wise pay for 2024-25, so there is no official CSE average for that year either. Branch averages that circulate online for IITH come from aggregator sites, not from the institute.
What this means if you got IIT Hyderabad via JoSAA 2026
Three practical reads.
- If you got CSE, AI or M&C, the official anchor is the Phase 1 figure: those three branches averaged around ₹40 lakh, and CSE placed 83.05% of registered students by December. The ₹2.5 Cr is one student in one cycle whose profile is not replicable by design (top-100 CP + OCS Overall Head + Optiver intern conversion). Plan for the typical outcome, not the record.
- If you got a core branch, read the institute-wide numbers: ₹24.06 LPA average across all programmes, and a ₹20 lakh median per the placement office. The r/Btechtards account of a ₹30 LPA+ EE median is encouraging, but it is one student's view, not institute data.
- Watch the offer-revocation risk. IITH's one-company policy takes students out of the process once they accept an offer, which is why the Oracle and Rapidue withdrawals in May 2026 hurt. Both firms are now barred for two years.
For CSE figures across every IIT, read our IIT CSE average package 2026 hub. For a per-IIT comparison across the top-5 (Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Kanpur, Kharagpur) and the newer per-IIT deep-dives, read our IIT Placements 2026 canonical guide, the IIT BHU 2025-26 deep-dive, or the IIT Madras 2025-26 breakdown. For the JoSAA Round 5 closing ranks that decided who ended up at IITH, our JoSAA 2026 cutoffs post has the full Round 1 → Round 5 progression.
A note on sourcing: full-season 2025-26 figures come from IIT Hyderabad's own 2026-27 placement brochure and from the Office of Career Services as quoted in ETHRWorld. Phase 1 figures are the institute's data as reported by The Hindu. 2024-25 figures come from the IITH Annual Report 2024-25 and the NIRF 2026 data sheet. IITH does not publish a CSE-only average or median.
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By Arun Raghav S · Co-founder, IITian Vibes · B.Tech, IIT Jodhpur · Published 20 July 2026 · Updated 2 October 2026 with the full 2025-26 season figures from the IITH placement brochure, and 8 October 2026 with a cross-IIT CSE comparison. Corrections to hello@iitianvibes.com.