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01 — Engineering

NIRF 2025 ranking. NIRF data only — no external benchmark appears in this note.

Level Academic year Institutes Graduated Placed Higher study Placed % Higher study % Institute median salary (p25 / p50 / p75)
UG 2023-24 97 107,526 76,102 15,138 70.78% 14.08% ₹700,000 / ₹1,005,000 / ₹1,435,000
PG 2023-24 100 24,797 17,501 4,271 70.58% 17.22% ₹660,000 / ₹870,000 / ₹1,121,000

The largest ranked sector by an order of magnitude — 107,526 UG graduates against Agriculture’s 15,751, the next biggest, and 222,407 across every college NIRF has ever ranked in the discipline. It places 70.78% of them, the highest UG placement rate on the board, and reports the highest UG institute-median salary. It is also the most terminal of the large UG degrees: only 14.08% go on to higher study, against 38.85% in Pharmacy and 51.49% in Agriculture. It is the one discipline where the PG track does not out-place the UG track — 70.58% against 70.78%, effectively identical.

Showing the UG track.

Each row is a different NIRF ranking edition, read at that edition’s best-covered outcome year — the academic year most of its institutes reported. Anchoring on the latest year instead compares a thin slice against a full one: ranking 2019 had 192 engineering institutes reporting 2015-16 and 25 reporting 2017-18.

The rows are not a time series. Successive editions re-report overlapping academic years, and the ranked set itself changes size — watch the institute count.

Ranking Outcome year Institutes Graduated Placed % Institute median
2019 2015-16 192 129,249 70.13% ₹350,000
2020 2016-17 192 126,106 67.61% ₹355,000
2021 2017-18 192 135,837 65.56% ₹396,000
2022 2018-19 196 145,661 67.48% ₹440,000
2023 2019-20 96 83,172 64.91% ₹700,000
2024 2022-23 97 104,499 78.87% ₹1,000,000
2025 2023-24 97 107,526 70.78% ₹1,005,000

The board gives this discipline one placement rate. Across 263 colleges — each read at its last report, banded by the rank it held that year — it looks like this. Only the bands NIRF’s ranking reached are shown.

Rank band Colleges Graduates Placed Placed % p25 p50 p75 Median salary Female enrolled
1–10 10 8,921 6,782 76.0% 74.2 76.4 76.9 ₹19.5L 20.3%
11–25 15 25,282 20,420 80.8% 73.6 81.2 90.1 ₹13.8L 21.3%
26–50 25 31,811 21,341 67.1% 63.2 71.5 82.0 ₹9.0L 23.5%
51–100 68 53,415 37,462 70.1% 57.7 75.1 83.6 ₹8.1L 23.2%
101–150 51 39,289 28,738 73.1% 58.7 70.5 81.6 ₹4.5L 29.0%
151–200 94 63,689 43,053 67.6% 59.0 69.3 78.4 ₹4.0L 30.7%
All 263 222,407 157,796 70.9%

What the bands show.

  • Salary falls 4.9× from the top band to the bottom — ₹19.5L at ranks 1–10 against ₹4.0L at 151–200.
  • Placement rate does not fall cleanly with rank. It runs 76.0% at the top and 67.6% at the bottom — a 8.4-point drop — but the highest rate is in the 11–25 band at 80.8%. The ranking separates colleges on pay far more sharply than on whether graduates are hired.
  • The 1–10 band is the most consistent, p25 to p75 spanning 2.7 points, against 26.0 in the widest. A band tells you more about a college where the spread is narrow.
  • Women are better represented further down the ranking — 20.3% of enrolment in the top band against 30.7% in the bottom. This is enrolment: NIRF publishes no placement or salary by sex, so nothing here says whether women were placed or paid equally, and the counts are taken at ranking time rather than for the graduating cohort.

Placement is the institute’s own unaudited submission and NIRF publishes no definition of “placed”, so a flat rate across bands is also what generous reporting further down would look like.

The table above is the currently ranked set. NIRF has ranked more colleges in this discipline than it ranks today, and each of them last reported something. Counting every one at its own last report:

Colleges Graduates Placed % Higher study %
Currently ranked 97 105,542 70.62% 14.14%
Ever ranked 263 222,407 70.95% 12.30%

The wider set places 0.33 points higher. The colleges that left place at essentially the same rate as those that remain, so they did not leave because their outcomes deteriorated.

Mixed vintage: each college is read at its own last report, so this blends years. It is also biased low, because a college’s final report is often the year before it fell out. See COVERAGE.md.

  • Nothing about unranked institutions. NIRF ranks the institutes that apply to it; this is the ranked sector describing itself.
  • Placement is the institute’s own submission, unaudited, and its definition of “placed” is not published.
  • The salary figure is a median of institute medians, so it weights a small college the same as a large one. It is not the median salary of a graduate in this discipline and must not be quoted as one.
  • Intake and outcomes are on different academic years, so no cohort funnel is computed here. See METHOD.md.