IIM Placements 2026: What Is the Average, Median and Highest Salary at the IIMs? Compare CTC, Recruiters and Trends, Based on Official Reports

Across the IIM system, twenty institutes have reported IIM placements data in the current collection. IIM Guwahati, has no graduating batch as it opened in February 2026 and its first MBA cohort finishes in 2028.

The reported IIM placements range is wide. IIM Calcutta’s 61st batch averaged ₹36.00 lakh; IIM Sirmaur’s 2024-25 cohort averaged ₹13.30 lakh. That is a spread of nearly three times between two institutes.

Three structural points shape how IIM placements data in this report should be read, and they shape everything that follows.

• Reporting batches differ. IIM Ranchi has published audited 2025-26 figures. IIM Kashipur’s most recent report covers 2023-25. Comparing them directly compares two different hiring markets.
• Reporting standards differ. For IIM placements, IIM Ahmedabad and IIM Udaipur publish audited reports under the Indian Placement Reporting Standards, which use Maximum Earning Potential — a broader measure than the CTC most institutes quote. IIM Bodh Gaya and IIM Ranchi also publish audited numbers. Most others publish an unaudited summary.
• Disclosure differs. IIM Bangalore publishes median and average but no highest package, as a matter of policy. IIM Amritsar publishes figures for its top 50 students and top 50% of the batch, but no whole-batch average. These are choices, not omissions, and they tell you something in themselves.

The IIM average salary table below carries every reported IIM placements figure in the collection, sorted by average. The placements are for different years, so check batch column before drawing final comparison. IIM highest packages are offered by IIM Calcutta, IIM Ahmedabad and IIM Lucknow. IIM placements highest package 2026 was ₹1.45 crore offered at IIM Calcutta. IIM placements average salary varies from ₹15 lakhs to ₹35 lakhs – details in table below. IIM Ahmedabad highest package and IIM Ahmedabad placements 2026 details are given in table below. 

IIM Calcutta leads the reported table for 2024-26. Its 61st batch of 458 students received 542 offers from 202 firms, with 100% placement, an average of ₹36.00 lakh and a median of ₹35.00 lakh. The batch carried a 64:36 gender ratio, 32.8% from IITs, NITs and BITS, more than 80 CA, CFA or FRM holders, and average work experience of 22.6 months including 20 entrepreneurs.

Notably, the institute’s own Chairperson of the Career Development and Placement Committee described the year as “particularly challenging due to turbulence in the market and global shrinking of managerial jobs” — a candour worth noting alongside the numbers.

IIM Bangalore reported an average of ₹35.35 lakh and a median of ₹34.75 lakh across 605 students in the PGP and PGPBA 2024-26 batch, with 665 offers from 177 companies, 283 pre-placement offers of which 219 were accepted, and 7 overseas offers.

IIM Lucknow secured more than 580 offers for 559 students, averaging ₹33.20 lakh with a median of ₹32.90 lakh. Its top 5 percentile averaged ₹59.70 lakh and its top 50 percentile ₹42.20 lakh — a useful disclosure most IIMs do not make.

The headline package is the most quoted and least useful number in IIM placements reporting, and it deserves a paragraph of scepticism before it deserves a table.

A highest package goes to one student. It tells you the ceiling of the distribution, not its shape, and it is often the figure most vulnerable to definitional choice. IIM Sambalpur is unusually transparent about this: it reports a highest offered CTC of ₹48,60,000 alongside a highest secured CTC of ₹32,95,207 — a gap of nearly ₹16 lakh between the largest offer made and the largest offer actually taken up. Most institutes report only one of those two numbers without saying which.

IIM Tiruchirappalli makes a similar distinction, reporting a maximum of ₹44,98,040 including ESOPs against ₹33,12,000 excluding them, and noting that only 23 of 357 offers carried ESOPs at all.

IIM Bangalore does not disclose a highest package in either its 2025 or 2026 report. That is a deliberate institutional position, and arguably a defensible one given how the number is typically used.

Where an institute publishes both, the gap between them is the single most informative thing in its IIM placements report.

A tight gap means outcomes are evenly distributed. A wide gap means a small number of very large offers are pulling the average upward, and the typical student’s experience sits closer to the median.

IIM Indore’s ₹2.57 lakh gap is the widest in the set, indicating a longer tail of high offers. IIM Lucknow’s ₹0.30 lakh gap is the tightest, indicating unusually even outcomes across a 559-student batch — a genuinely strong signal that gets lost when only averages are compared.

Where percentile bands are published, they are better still. IIM Lucknow reports its top 5 percentile at ₹59.70 lakh, top 10 at ₹52.60 lakh, top 20 at ₹48.70 lakh and top 50 at ₹42.20 lakh. IIM Kozhikode reports top 5 at ₹49.00 lakh, top 10 at ₹46.71 lakh and top 20 at ₹42.53 lakh. IIM Shillong reports top 10 at ₹43.26 lakh, top 20 at ₹38.62 lakh and top 50 at ₹30.51 lakh.

Recruiter participation is a more stable indicator of IIM placements strength than salary, because it reflects sustained demand rather than a single hiring season.

Consulting firms dominate the top of the IIM placements system. At IIM Ahmedabad’s Class of 2026, Boston Consulting Group was the largest recruiter with 33 offers, followed by McKinsey & Company with 21 and Bain & Company with 20. At IIM Bangalore, Accenture Strategy made 94 final-placement offers, ahead of BCG at 27 and Bain at 23.

IIM Calcutta’s cluster structure shows the same concentration: Cluster 1, covering consulting and finance, drew 62 firms making 299 offers — more than half the batch’s total from under a third of the participating firms.

Beyond consulting, the names recurring across institutes include Accenture, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC, Amazon, Aditya Birla Group, Tata Administrative Services, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, Microsoft, Hindustan Unilever and ITC.

Consulting is the largest single destination in IIM placements at every institute that publishes a sector split, and at the older IIMs it is dominant.

Two institutes break the pattern in ways that reflect their positioning. IIM Mumbai sends 29% into Operations and 38% into IT and Analytics, consistent with its Operations and Supply Chain Management heritage as the former NITIE. IIM Ranchi sends 32.07% into BFSI and Fintech against under 5% into consulting.

IIM Nagpur’s function split is unusually granular: General Management 20.21%, Strategy and Consulting 18.10%, Sales and Marketing 14.58%, IT and Analytics 13.17%, Finance 12.44%, Product Management 12.05%, Operations 9.04% and HR 0.41%.

Summer placements are the leading indicator for the following year’s final IIM placements, and they are reported far less consistently.

IIM Bangalore placed 605 students in its 2025-27 summer cycle with 601 offers from 137 companies and 4 opting out. Accenture Strategy alone made 132 summer offers.

IIM Indore hosted 215+ recruiters for its 2024-26 summer cycle including 25 first-time recruiters, with an average stipend of ₹2.53 lakh for the two-month internship and a highest stipend of ₹5 lakh.

Pre-placement offers, which convert from summer internships into final IIM placements, are a useful signal. IIM Bangalore’s 2024-26 batch generated 283 PPOs with 219 accepted. IIM Mumbai reported 179 PPOs. IIM Rohtak reported 40+. IIM Ranchi’s audited report puts its PPO percentage at 21.74%.

In IIM placements, the direction of travel matters more than any single year’s figure, and here the MBAUniverse.com Rankings 2026 analysis provides the clearest series available.

The pattern is stagnation rather than growth at the top. IIM Bangalore’s average fell from ₹35.92 lakh in 2024 to ₹34.88 lakh in 2025. IIM Calcutta’s fell from ₹35.07 lakh to ₹34.23 lakh. IIM Kozhikode has not recovered its 2023 level.

Set against the fee trajectory over the same period — IIM Ahmedabad from ₹25.00 lakh to ₹27.50 lakh, IIM Calcutta to ₹33.50 lakh — this is the central return-on-investment question for the 2027 cycle, and it deserves stating plainly rather than talking around.

Individual institutes report their own movements. IIM Nagpur recorded year-on-year growth of 10.93% in average and 6.48% in median for 2023-25. IIM Rohtak reported a 6.9% average increase for 2024-26. IIM Kozhikode reported average CTC growth of 7.01% in consulting and 11.45% in operations. IIM Ranchi’s audited 2025-26 report shows the highest CTC up 4.19% and the PPO percentage up 2.56%.

This distinction affects how far you can trust an IIM placements number, and almost nobody explains it to aspirants.

Audited reports follow the Indian Placement Reporting Standards, currently Revision 2.2, and are verified by an external auditor. IIM Ahmedabad and IIM Bodh Gaya use B2K Analytics; IIM Udaipur uses Sorab S. Engineer & Co. These reports separate salary into components: Fixed Yearly Cash Component, One-Time Cash Payment, Total Guaranteed Cash Component and Maximum Earning Potential.

MEP is the broadest measure — it includes the guaranteed cash plus maximum variable pay and, where disclosed, the first-year vesting portion of stock options. An MEP figure is therefore not comparable to a CTC figure from a summary report. IIM Ahmedabad’s audited Class of 2025 shows the difference clearly: Total Guaranteed Cash mean ₹29,83,955 against MEP mean ₹35,22,591 — a gap of over ₹5 lakh on the same cohort.

Audited reports also disclose their own limitations. IIM Bodh Gaya’s auditor noted that one-time cash verification for 20 students relied on unsigned computer-generated offer letters, that four students’ offer letters were unsigned, that the salary breakup for six students could not be verified, and that one offer letter was unavailable entirely. That transparency is the point of an audit.

Summary reports carry no external verification and no standard definition of CTC. Most IIM placements reporting across the system falls into this category.

Interim reports are a third category. IIM Tiruchirappalli’s 2024-26 report is explicitly unaudited, dated 20 April 2026, with 57 students still in the process, and it warns that where joining letters were unavailable, CTC figures for certain companies were taken from previous years’ data.

In IIM placements reporting, reading what is absent is as useful as reading what is present.

• Highest package: IIM Bangalore does not disclose it in either the 2025 or 2026 report. IIM Jammu and IIM Sirmaur do not state one.

• Whole-batch average: IIM Amritsar publishes only the average for its top 50 students, ₹18.60 lakh, and for its top 50% of the batch, ₹16.30 lakh. No figure covers the whole cohort.
• Batch size: six institutes report CTC and recruiter counts without stating how many students were in the batch, so percentages have no denominator.
• Absolute figures: IIM Ranchi’s reports express MBA-BA and MBA-HRM outcomes almost entirely as year-on-year percentage movements rather than rupee levels.
• Lowest package: almost no institute publishes it, though audited reports disclose the minimum by construction — IIM Ahmedabad’s audited 2025 minimum was ₹16,99,996 MEP, and IIM Udaipur’s ₹7,50,000 MEP.

IIM placements outcomes and institutional ranking correlate loosely at best, and the two ranking frameworks disagree in instructive ways.

Each institute publishes considerably more IIM placements detail than fits a cross-institute comparison. Read institute IIM Placement articles below:

• IIM Calcutta Placements
• IIM Bangalore Placements
• IIM Ahmedabad Placements
• IIM Lucknow Placements
• IIM Mumbai Placements
• IIM Indore Placements
• IIM Kozhikode Placements
• IIM Shillong Placements
• IIM Rohtak Placements
• IIM Ranchi Placements
• IIM Raipur Placements
• IIM Nagpur Placements
• IIM Tiruchirappalli Placements
• IIM Udaipur Placements
• IIM Jammu Placements
• IIM Visakhapatnam Placements
• IIM Sambalpur Placements
• IIM Kashipur Placements
• IIM Bodh Gaya Placements
• IIM Sirmaur Placements
• IIM Amritsar Placements

Indeed IIMs offer very good career opportunities. So, IIM admission is naturally a dream of almost every CAT exam aspirant. To get into an IIM, you have to clear four steps: complete your CAT 2026 registration, prepare for and take the CAT exam, meet each IIM’s shortlisting criteria, and finally appear for the WAT and personal interview round. Read complete guide to IIM Admissions 2027. Also read about IIM admission criteria; for the interview call read IIM shortlisting; for what happens after it see the IIM selection process.

CAT exam is the only MBA entrance exam accepted for IIM Admissions. CAT 2026 exam date is November 29, 2026. CAT 2026 Registration last date is September 15, 2026. The CAT 2026 exam pattern is expected to retain 68 questions with 120-minutes duration across three sections: Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension, Data Interpretation & Logical Reasoning, and Quantitative Ability. For admission into IIMs in India, read MBAUniverse.com CAT 2026 preparation guide.

The 22 IIMs in India are regarded as top MBA colleges in India. IIM placements tell you what your MBA is really worth. We update this IIM placements 2027 guide as new 2027-cycle placement reports are released. Also read: IIMs in India and IIM Admission 2027.