CSAB 2026 started with 14,934 empty seats, 6,791 of them at GFTIs

Before the CSAB Special Rounds 2026 began, 14,934 seats at NITs, IIITs and GFTIs were listed as vacant. That is 1,698 more than the 13,236 listed in 2025, and 1,969 more than the 12,965 in 2024. Close to half of the 2026 empty seats, 6,791, were at Government Funded Technical Institutes (GFTIs).

These numbers come from CSAB's tentative seat vacancy list, published before Special Round I. We matched the list to the JoSAA seat pools in our data: the same institute, program, quota, category and gender pool.

Empty seats by institute type

Institute type	Institutes	Empty seats before CSAB 2026	JoSAA 2026 seats	Empty as share of JoSAA seats
GFTIs	56	6,791	11,504	59%
NITs (incl. IIEST Shibpur)	32	4,558	24,800	18%
IIITs	26	3,585	11,461	31%
Total	114	14,934	47,765	31%

Every one of the 114 institutes had at least one empty seat. The share column compares the vacancy count with the JoSAA 2026 seat matrix. It shows how much of each group was still open, but the vacancy list is CSAB's own count and is not a strict subset of the JoSAA seats.

The year-on-year rise came from all three types. GFTI vacancies grew from 5,901 in 2025 to 6,791, IIIT vacancies from 3,051 to 3,585, and NIT vacancies from 4,284 to 4,558.

Which branches had the most empty seats

Branch group	Empty seats	At NITs	At IIITs	At GFTIs
Computer Science and IT	5,167	812	2,389	1,966
Electronics and Communication	2,944	788	964	1,192
Mechanical and Production	1,843	740	199	904
Civil	1,096	583	0	513

Computer Science had more empty seats than any other branch group, and 2,389 of them were at IIITs. At NITs, 812 of 5,863 Computer Science seats (14%) were listed as empty. At IIITs it was 2,389 of 8,117 (29%), and at GFTIs 1,966 of 3,637 (54%).

The institutes with the most empty seats were all GFTIs: BIT Mesra's main campus (662), Gurukula Kangri Vishwavidyalaya (481), Guru Ghasidas Vishwavidyalaya Bilaspur (478) and SLIET Longowal (436). Among NITs, NIT Calicut (280), NIT Agartala (276) and SVNIT Surat (274) had the most.

Quotas, categories and female-only seats

• Quota: 9,674 empty seats were All India quota seats. Another 2,642 were Other State quota seats (2,446 of them at NITs) and 2,490 Home State quota seats (1,984 at NITs).
• Category: 7,297 were OPEN seats, 3,033 OBC-NCL, 1,723 SC, 1,209 EWS and 1,036 ST. Another 636 were PwD seats.
• Gender pool: 1,850 were female-only seats, 1,111 of them at NITs.
• By state: Jharkhand (1,242) and Madhya Pradesh (1,226) had the most, followed by Gujarat (991) and Chhattisgarh (830).

What happened to them

Of the 5,052 seat pools that had at least one empty seat, 4,409 got a CSAB closing rank in 2026. That means at least one seat in each of those pools was allotted in the Special Rounds. Our data does not show how many of the individual seats were filled.

All CSAB closing ranks are JEE Main All-India Common Rank List (CRL) ranks, also on category seats. Don't compare them directly with JoSAA category ranks. A later closing rank means the seat was easier to get. Our CSAB vs JoSAA analysis shows that NIT seats closed a median 24% later in CSAB 2026 than in JoSAA.

To see where each empty seat closed, open the CSAB cutoff explorer, or compare both counsellings side by side in the JoSAA and CSAB view.