Here is the thing almost every "IIT highest package 2026" page will not tell you: as of August 2026, barely any IIT has published a median package for the 2025-26 season. The season ran from December 2025 to roughly July 2026 and is over. The offer counts came out. The crore-rupee headlines came out. The number that actually describes a normal graduate — the median — mostly did not. So when you see a confident "IIT Madras 2026 median: ₹19.13 lakh," you are almost certainly looking at the 2024-25 figure with a new year stamped on it.
This page separates the two. First, what is genuinely verified for 2025-26. Then the 2024-25 baseline, which is the last fully reported season and the honest benchmark for a 2026 aspirant. Then the thing that matters more than any of it: your branch.
What is actually verified for 2025-26
Only two IITs have published a full-cycle 2025-26 median, and neither is in the top six. Everything else is a phase-wise offer count or a single headline package.
| IIT | What was released | Cycle stage | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Patna | 687+ offers · UG median ₹18 L (up ~38% from ₹13 L) · average ₹23.17 L | Full cycle | HRKatha, 6 Aug 2026 |
| Bhubaneswar | 500+ placed · UG median ₹15.3 L · PG median ₹11.2 L · 85%+ UG placed, 71% PG | Full cycle | IBG News, 1 Aug 2026 |
| Hyderabad | ₹2.5 Cr top offer (Optiver) · average ₹36.21 LPA · 62.4% of registered B.Tech placed | Phase 1 | Our deep-dive |
| BHU Varanasi | ₹1.67 Cr top offer (NK Securities) · 1,005 offers in the opening week · average ₹29.33 LPA | Opening week | Our deep-dive |
| Kharagpur | 1,501 offers · ₹2.44 Cr top offer · 15 international | Phase 1 | Our deep-dive |
| Delhi | 1,275 offers · 300+ PPOs · 1,140+ placed. No highest package — institute policy | Phase 1 | Our deep-dive |
| Kanpur | 1,202 offers · 1,079 accepted · 253 PPOs · 672 Day 1 (record) | Phase 1 | Our deep-dive |
| Roorkee | 436 Day 1 offers (8 international) · 550+ more on Day 2 | Day 1–2 | CollegeDekho, 2 Dec 2025 |
| Madras | 300+ companies and 100+ startups on Day 1. No offer count, no median released | Day 1 | CollegeDekho, 2 Dec 2025 |
| Bombay | Season opened 1 December 2025. Nothing official released | — | Why Bombay publishes nothing |
| Guwahati | Nothing dated and official found for 2025-26 | — | — |
Why this matters. Notice the pattern: the institutes that published a full, honest median — Patna and Bhubaneswar — are second-generation IITs outside the top six. The older, more famous institutes released offer counts and a headline crore figure, and stopped there. Offer counts are the easiest number to make look good, because one student can hold several offers. A median cannot be gamed the same way. Read the disclosure as a signal in itself.
The 2024-25 baseline — the last fully reported season
Until the 2025-26 reports land, this is the honest benchmark. Packages in ₹ LPA unless marked crore (Cr). The median column is the typical outcome; the highest column is one outlier offer.
| IIT | Highest | Median (B.Tech) | % Placed | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bombay | ₹2.2 Cr (intl) | ₹17.9 L | ~75% | CollegeDekho |
| Delhi | ₹51.3 L | ₹20.0 L | ~96% | CollegeDunia |
| Madras | ₹4.3 Cr | ₹19.1 L | 80%+ | Careers360 |
| Kanpur | ₹1.9 Cr | ₹21.7 L | ~85% | CollegeDekho |
| Kharagpur | ₹2.14 Cr | ₹19.8 L | 90%+ | Careers360 |
| Roorkee | ₹2.05 Cr (intl) | ₹19.1 L | 61% | CollegeDunia |
| Guwahati | ₹1.25 Cr | ₹20.4 L | 62% | CollegeDunia |
| Hyderabad | ₹90 L | ₹21.0 L | 71% (UG) | CollegeDunia |
| (BHU) Varanasi | ₹2.2 Cr | ₹20.0 L | ~60% | Careers360 (RTI) |
| Gandhinagar | — | ₹19.3 L (avg) | ~60% | Careers360 (RTI) |
Ten IITs — Indore, Jodhpur, Mandi, Dhanbad (ISM), Tirupati, Palakkad, Jammu, Bhilai, Dharwad and Goa — have no figure we could trace to a dated, reachable primary source for either season. Numbers do circulate for all of them, but every one we followed led back to an undated aggregator page, and in one case to a source whose own publication date read 2020. We have left them out rather than repeat something we cannot stand behind. If you are choosing between these institutes on placement data, understand that you are choosing without data.
Branch beats brand: what CSE actually earns versus core
This is the single most useful thing on this page, and the thing rank-predictor tools ignore. Within one IIT, the gap between CSE and a core branch is larger than the gap between the best and worst IIT.
IIT Delhi published branch-wise ranges for the 2025-26 season — one of the few institutes that does:
| Branch (IIT Delhi) | Average package, 2025-26 |
|---|---|
| Computer Science & Engineering | ₹30–35 LPA |
| Mathematics & Computing | ₹25–30 LPA |
| Electrical Engineering | ₹22–25 LPA |
| Engineering Physics | ₹18–22 LPA |
| Mechanical Engineering | ₹15–18 LPA |
| Chemical Engineering | ₹14–17 LPA |
| Civil Engineering | ₹12–15 LPA |
Source: CollegeDekho branch-wise breakdown, 30 January 2026.
CSE to Civil at the same institute is roughly 2.3×. And the gap is not only in money — the same report puts CSE's placement rate above 98% while Mechanical sits at around 67%. A civil engineer at IIT Delhi and a CSE student at IIT Delhi are, in labour-market terms, in different schools.
At IIT Madras the same shape holds. For 2024-25, CSE's median was ₹37.5 LPA and its average ₹52.32 LPA, against a Civil Engineering average of ₹14.82 LPA (CollegeSearch, 28 March 2025).
A correction worth making. An earlier version of this page cited an IIT Madras CSE median of "around ₹46 LPA." We went looking for the primary source and could not find one — the figure appears only in undated summaries. The dated figure is ₹37.5 LPA for 2024-25, and that is what we now publish. If you have seen ₹46 LPA elsewhere, treat it the same way we did.
Why this matters. If you are choosing between CSE at a newer IIT and a core branch at a top-five IIT, the pay data points at CSE, and it is not close. That is a genuine trade-off against everything else a campus gives you — research, faculty, alumni, the four years themselves — but you should make it knowing the number.
Is the "90% placed" claim a myth?
In a soft market, largely yes. RTI replies obtained by Careers360 showed about 40% of students unplaced at IIT (BHU) and IIT Gandhinagar in 2024-25, and 46% unplaced at IIT Tirupati mid-cycle (Careers360 RTI). Roorkee (61%), Guwahati (62%) and Hyderabad (71% UG) all sat well below the near-total placement image the IITs project. Only IIT Delhi, at roughly 96% for B.Tech, clearly held up.
The tell is how those numbers surfaced. The institutes with the lowest rates are the ones whose figures came out through RTI, not through a press release. For 2025-26 we found no new RTI reporting at all — which means the current cycle's unplaced rate is, at the time of writing, simply unknown.
Quick answers, per IIT
What is the highest package at IIT Bombay in 2026?
IIT Bombay has released nothing official for 2025-26. The most recent confirmed figure is ₹2.2 crore from 2024-25. Any "2026" Bombay number you see circulating is either unattributed or the 2024-25 figure re-dated — we walk through why Bombay publishes so little separately.
What is the highest package at IIT Madras in 2026?
Also unreleased for 2025-26. The famous ₹4.3 crore is a 2024-25 figure — a single Jane Street offer to one computer-science student. It is repeated constantly as current. It is not.
What is the highest package at IIT Delhi in 2026?
IIT Delhi deliberately does not publish a highest package. It is institute policy, and honestly a defensible one. What it did release for 2025-26 Phase 1: 1,275 offers, 300+ PPOs, 1,140+ students placed.
What is the highest package at IIT Kanpur in 2026?
No salary figure released for 2025-26 — no highest, no median, no average. Only offer counts: 1,202 offers, 253 PPOs. The 2024-25 highest was ₹1.9 crore.
What is the highest package at IIT Kharagpur in 2026?
₹2.44 crore in Phase 1 of 2025-26, alongside 1,501 offers and 15 international offers — one of the few top-six IITs to put a current-cycle figure on record. Full breakdown in our Kharagpur deep-dive.
What is the highest package at IIT Hyderabad in 2026?
₹2.5 crore from Optiver — the highest verified 2025-26 offer at any IIT so far. IIT Hyderabad also reported a Phase 1 average of ₹36.21 LPA, though only 62.4% of registered B.Tech students were placed in that phase.
Which IIT actually reported the best 2025-26 numbers?
On disclosure quality, IIT Patna — a full-cycle median of ₹18 lakh, up 38%, published with the average alongside it. On headline package, IIT Hyderabad's ₹2.5 crore Optiver offer is the highest verified figure of the season so far.
What a ₹20 LPA package actually pays you each month
Almost every number on this page is a CTC — cost to company. It is not salary. It is the total the employer books against you for the year, and a meaningful slice of it never reaches your bank account as monthly pay.
A typical ₹20 LPA offer to an IIT graduate breaks into something like:
- Fixed base — the part that becomes monthly salary. Often ₹12–15 lakh of a ₹20 lakh CTC.
- Joining bonus — one-time, frequently clawed back if you leave inside a year or two.
- Performance bonus — quoted at target, paid at whatever the company decides.
- Stock or RSUs — quoted at grant-day valuation, vesting over three to four years. For an unlisted startup this is the least certain component in the whole package.
- Employer PF, gratuity and insurance — real money, but not spendable now.
Which is why a ₹20 lakh CTC commonly lands somewhere near ₹1.1–1.3 lakh a month in hand after the fixed portion is taxed — not the ₹1.67 lakh that dividing by twelve suggests. The gap widens as packages get bigger, because the exotic components grow fastest.
Why this matters. When you compare a ₹32 LPA quant offer against a ₹18 LPA core offer, you are often comparing a package that is 80% fixed against one that is 55% fixed with a large paper-stock component. The headline ratio and the in-hand ratio are different numbers. Ask any recruiter for the fixed-versus-variable split before you sign — good ones answer immediately, and the answer is more informative than the CTC.
How to spot a recycled placement number
We had to build this filter to write this page, so you may as well have it. A placement figure is probably stale if:
- It matches a known previous-season number exactly. If a "2026" page says IIT Madras ₹4.3 Cr or Guwahati ₹1.25 Cr, those are 2024-25 figures. We found several pages presenting the entire Guwahati 2024-25 cluster — 919 offers, 193 PPOs, ₹1.25 Cr, 62% placed — as current.
- The page has no publication date, or the date is obviously templated. One source we checked reported its own publication date as 2014 while discussing the 2026 season.
- It gives a highest package but no median. Institutes release medians in formal reports, months later. A page with a crore figure and no median is quoting a press release or a rumour.
- It says "2025" without saying which season. The 2024-25 season ends in 2025 and the 2025-26 season starts in 2025. "2025 placements" is ambiguous by construction, and aggregators exploit that.
- The percentage placed uses a hidden denominator. Some institutes report the share of students who registered for placements, which quietly excludes everyone who gave up.
What changed between 2024-25 and 2025-26
Three shifts show up consistently in the data that did get published.
1. The quant premium widened again. Every top offer this season came from a quantitative-trading firm, not a tech company — Optiver at Hyderabad (₹2.5 Cr), NK Securities at BHU (₹1.67 Cr), Da Vinci at Kharagpur. Firms like Jane Street, Optiver, Da Vinci, Graviton and Tower Research account for a tiny share of total offers and a large share of the crore-plus headlines. If you are not in that funnel, those numbers describe someone else's outcome entirely.
2. Mid-tier IITs posted the sharpest gains. IIT Patna's UG median rose 38% and IIT BHU's average rose 28.6%. The top six mostly reported flat-to-modest offer growth. Small bases exaggerate percentages, but the direction is consistent, and it matches something we have tracked all year: recruiters are widening the campus list rather than deepening at the same five institutes.
3. Disclosure got worse, not better. More institutes released offer counts this season and fewer released medians. That is the opposite of the direction the RTI-driven scrutiny of 2024-25 was pushing them in. We covered the mid-season state of this in the report card, and it has not improved since.
What IITians actually say about placements
The gap between marketed averages and reality is a constant topic on r/Btechtards and r/Indian_Academia, where students post offer counts, ghosted PPOs and core-branch struggles that no brochure records. Threads like "IIT KGP Placement Stats 2025-26" and a branch-by-branch breakdown show students reconstructing phase-wise numbers themselves — because the institutes have not published them. Their accounts line up with the RTI data: the median is real, the crore narrative is not.
How to read these numbers
- "Highest package" is one person. Usually international, usually CS or quant, often including relocation and stock. Marketing, not a statistic.
- Median beats average. A handful of crore offers drags the mean up several lakh. The median is the typical graduate.
- Cycles get conflated constantly. Always ask which season a number describes. Most pages will not tell you, which is the point of the section above.
- Official beats aggregator. NIRF submissions and institute reports over summary boxes, every time.
- Absence is information. An institute that publishes offer counts but never a median is telling you something.
If this page saved you from quoting a fake number in a counselling argument, the merch store is what pays for the research behind it.
Last updated 9 August 2026. Verified 2025-26 figures where they exist; 2024-25 used as the benchmark elsewhere and labelled as such throughout. We refresh this page as institutes release their 2025-26 reports.