New Delhi (Gurpreet Singh/Balwinder Singh): The National Testing Agency (NTA) has released the results of NEET (UG) 2026, with candidates from Punjab and Haryana claiming the highest scores in one of India’s largest entrance examinations for medical education. The examination witnessed nearly 20 lakh aspirants, of whom over 11.2 lakh have qualified for undergraduate medical and allied courses.
Sharing the top position nationwide are Aryan Gupta from Punjab and Panshul Bansal from Haryana, both securing 715 marks out of 720. Their performance placed the two northern states at the forefront of this year’s merit list.
The NTA said the country’s 138 highest-ranking candidates belong to 66 different cities, indicating a wide geographical representation among the best performers. Students who crossed the 705-mark threshold came from eight states, including Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Telangana.
This year’s results also highlighted the strong performance of female candidates. Women accounted for more than 58 per cent of all qualified aspirants, with their overall success rate exceeding that of male candidates.
Officials noted that first-time candidates dominated the top ranks. More than 93 per cent of those scoring above 690 marks appeared for NEET for the first time, while the majority of top performers belonged to the 17–19 years age group.
The examination was conducted at 5,440 centres across 551 Indian cities and 14 international locations, with candidates writing the test in 13 languages, including English, Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and Marathi.
The NTA stated that the result declaration followed a redesigned evaluation process that enabled faster completion of answer key verification, OMR sheet display and final score compilation. The provisional answer key was released in June, followed by candidate challenges, display of recorded responses and publication of the final answer key before the announcement of results.
Among the qualified candidates, 19 students scored above 700 marks, while 1,492 candidates crossed the 650-mark level. More than 10,000 aspirants secured 600 or above, and around 90,780 candidates obtained 500-plus marks, reflecting the highly competitive nature of this year’s examination.
With the results now available, successful candidates will move to the counselling phase for admissions to MBBS, BDS, AYUSH and other undergraduate healthcare programmes under the All India Quota and respective state admission processes.
