CAT Percentile Predictor
Work out what your CAT raw score is likely to be worth in percentile terms, section by section. The tool below runs your score against the score-vs-percentile tables compiled from actual candidate scorecards after CAT 2023, 2024 and 2025 results were declared — not against pre-exam guesswork.
CAT Percentile Predictor
Enter your section-wise raw score to see the percentile that score has historically produced. Built on post-result score-vs-percentile data, not pre-exam guesses.
How this works, and what it can't tell you
Treat this as an estimate. Your percentile depends on how everyone else who sat the exam that year performed, so the score that buys a given percentile moves between years — by around 10 marks at the 80 percentile band, and by as much as 25 at 99.9.
Here is what each percentile band has actually required, year by year:
| Percentile | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 99.9 | 124 | 109 | 101.4 | 127 | 111.5 |
| 99 | 98 | 84 | 76.2 | 95.1 | 84.8 |
| 95 | 73 | 62 | 54.9 | 70 | 62.3 |
| 90 | 60 | 49 | 44.4 | 58 | 51.5 |
| 80 | 45 | 36 | 35.5 | 44 | 38 |
A 99 percentile needed 76 marks in 2023 and 98 marks in 2021: the same percentile, 22 marks apart. Most of that gap is how hard the paper was, though the size and strength of the candidate pool moves it too.
Raw score and scaled score are different things. What you calculate from the answer key is the raw score. What appears on the scorecard is a scaled score, and percentile is computed from that. CAT runs in multiple slots, and the IIMs normalise across them so that drawing the harder paper costs you nothing, which shifts your score up or down by a few marks. The formula is never published, so no tool can convert raw to scaled precisely.
Sectional percentiles do not add up to the overall one. Scoring 90 percentile in all three sections usually puts you above 90 overall, because performing evenly across all three is rarer than it sounds.
The IIMs have never published an official score-to-percentile table. Everything here is reconstructed from candidate scorecards by coaching institutes after results were declared — IMS India, Cracku and iQuanta. These are post-result reconstructions, which are far more reliable than the score predictions those same institutes publish before results, but they are still reconstructions, and the three do not always agree. The sectional figures follow IMS; the overall figures for 2025 follow the table IMS and iQuanta share. Where a published figure was internally inconsistent — CAT 2024 had one source showing 40 marks at 75 percentile and 25 at 70, which cannot both be true — it was dropped rather than smoothed over. Where sources differ by a few marks, as they do on DILR at the very top, the number shown is one source's view and not a consensus.
Clearing the percentile cutoff only gets you looked at. IIM shortlists run on a composite score in which Class 10 and 12 marks, graduation marks, work experience and diversity factors all carry weight alongside the CAT percentile, and each institute weights them differently. The CAT syllabus breakdown covers how the sections are structured; the individual school guides cover how each shortlist is built.
Data sources: post-result score-vs-percentile tables published by IMS India, Cracku and iQuanta for CAT 2023, 2024 and 2025. Exam pattern verified against the CAT 2024 and CAT 2025 papers. Last updated September 2026.
What score do you actually need?
The honest answer is that it moves every year. Using the most recent full year of data (CAT 2025, 2.58 lakh candidates), here is roughly where the common targets sat:
- 99 percentile — about 85 marks out of 204. In CAT 2023 the same percentile needed only 76; in CAT 2021 it needed 98.
- 95 percentile — about 62 marks.
- 90 percentile — about 51 marks. This is the band where most of the newer IIMs and a large share of good non-IIM programmes begin to open up.
- 80 percentile — about 38 marks.
Those figures are overall percentiles. Every IIM also applies a sectional minimum, so a lopsided score — a very strong QA carrying a weak VARC, for instance — can clear the overall bar and still miss a shortlist. The tool reports all three sectional percentiles for exactly this reason.
Why the same score gives a different percentile each year
A percentile is a ranking. It answers one question: what share of the people who sat the exam that year scored below you. When the paper is harder, everyone’s raw score falls, and the score needed for 99 percentile falls with it. CAT 2023 was the harder year at the top end — 76 marks were enough for 99 percentile. CAT 2024 took 95. That is a 19-mark swing between consecutive years, on the same percentile.
There is a second layer. CAT runs in three slots on the same day, and the slots are never identical in difficulty. The IIMs normalise scores across slots so that no candidate is penalised for drawing the harder paper, which is why the number printed on your scorecard — the scaled score — is not the raw score you calculated from the answer key. The exact normalisation formula has never been published, so the conversion cannot be modelled precisely by anyone, this tool included.
What a percentile does and does not get you
A CAT percentile clears the first gate. What follows is a composite score, and every institute weights it differently — Class 10 and Class 12 marks, graduation marks, work experience, academic background and gender diversity all carry points alongside the CAT score. Two candidates at the same percentile can end up with very different shortlists.
The school-by-school guides set out how each institute builds that composite and what its programme structure looks like once you are in: