NEET PG 2026 Seat Cost: Rank, Fees, Stipend and Bond Explained

A postgraduate medical seat in India has four prices the rank you earn, the fee you pay, the stipend you receive, and the bond you sign. Only the first is visible on the MCC counselling screen, and Round 1 choice filling closes at 10:00 AM on 22 October 2026, so check the other three in your state prospectus and the college's own notice before you lock.

Key dates for NEET PG 2026 counselling

Round 1 choice filling for all-India quota, deemed and central university seats closes at 10:00 AM on 22 October 2026. The allotment result is due on 24 October, and reporting runs from 26 October to 2 November. State counselling follows a separate schedule, so check your state's notice as well.

State counselling: MCC's consolidated schedule lists Round 1 as 21 October–2 November (joining by 10 November), Round 2 as 14–23 November, Round 3 as 4–12 December, and the stray round as 22–25 December. Always follow the relevant state authority's current notice.

Source: MCC PG counselling schedule, updated 15 October 2026. Where other portals show a different closing time, use MCC's own notice for MCC counselling.

The NEET PG 2026 rank you earn

In the 2025 all-India quota, MD Radiodiagnosis closed at All India Rank 6,656 in the general category. MD Anatomy closed at 1,87,915. Same exam, same year, a twenty-eight-fold gap.

That gap is not a quirk of one cycle. It is the organizing fact of Indian postgraduate medicine, and everything else in this article follows from it.

The concentration at the top is extraordinary. Of the first 100 ranks allotted in NEET PG 2025, 46 took MD General Medicine, and 40 took MD Radiodiagnosis. Three took General Surgery. Eighty-six of the country's hundred best PG candidates chose two branches. The year before, of the top 1,000 in 2024, General Medicine took 404 and Radiodiagnosis 299, against 14 for Orthopaedics. These figures are based on compiled allotment data.

Closing ranks compiled from MCC allotment data by Sartha; seat counts from the NMC seat matrix 2026-27. MCC does not publish an official cut-off table, so treat these ranks as indicative; the rounds covered by third-party compilations may differ.

The consequence shows up as empty chairs. Karnataka's 2025-26 counselling left 783 of 4,186 seats unfilled. Anatomy was 93 per cent vacant. Physiology was 83 per cent. Biochemistry was 81 per cent. Anesthesia, at the other end, was 0.7 per cent vacant three seats out of 443. RGUHS Vice-Chancellor Bhagavan BC attributed most vacancies to management-quota fees being out of reach. In Madhya Pradesh's 2025 round one, Anatomy drew three takers and Physiology three, against 116 for General Medicine.

Nationally, 1,140 PG seats were still vacant after the 2025 stray round, the Health Ministry told the Rajya Sabha on 17 March 2026. There were 2,65,960 candidates who sat NEET PG 2026 and 58,468 MD/MS seats, plus roughly 9,200 DNB seats in the MCC matrix. Seats are not scarce. The seats people want are.

The NEET PG 2026 fee you pay

At University College of Medical Sciences in Delhi, an MD costs Rs 30,000 a year in tuition. The whole three-year course, including Delhi University charges, comes to roughly Rs 1.9 lakh.

At Santosh Medical College, Ghaziabad, MD Radiodiagnosis costs Rs 76 lakh a year in 2025-26. Over three years, Rs 2.28 crore.

The clearest illustration of how Indian PG fees work sits in a single notification from Mahatma Gandhi Medical College, Jaipur, dated 12 November 2025. Same college, same year, same admission cycle:

MGUMST notification, AY 2025-26. Add caution money of Rs 3 lakh, hostel charges of Rs 2.46–3.92 lakh a year, and mess charges of Rs 69,300 a year.

Dermatology costs Rs 63 lakh a year. Anatomy is free. The college is not being generous about Anatomy; it is pricing a seat nobody wants.

Across about 720 courses at 44 private deemed-university colleges, 313 (roughly 42 per cent) cost more than Rs 1 crore for the full course, up from 37 per cent a year earlier. At least 15 programmes across eight institutes exceeded Rs 2 crore. This analysis covers the 2025 counselling cycle, so 2026 figures may differ.

Now put fee and rank side by side, because this is where the system shows its hand. In the all-India quota, MD Radiodiagnosis closed at AIR 6,656. In the deemed-university stream, the same branch closed at around AIR 1,39,966. In Rajasthan's private management quota, it closed at AIR 2,08,058 a worse rank than the previous year, meaning the seat got easier to get.

A candidate at rank 2.08 lakh cannot touch radiology through merit. They can buy it. The exchange rate is published.

There is a rule that was meant to stop this. The NMC's Guidelines for Determination of Fee, issued as an office memorandum on 3 February 2022, require fees for 50 per cent of seats in private colleges and deemed universities to be at par with government college fees in that state. The memorandum referred to fees on 50 per cent of seats in private colleges and deemed universities. Its application and enforcement remain contested; candidates should not assume it guarantees government-level fees for a PG seat.

It has not happened. The Kerala High Court read the parity rule down in 2022, holding it could not apply as written in Kerala. Karnataka and Tamil Nadu decided not to implement it. A challenge by private institutes has been pending in the Supreme Court since notice was issued in September 2022, with no ruling on the merits. We found no PG-specific enforcement action and no 2026 order reviving it. MCC's own position during this cycle is that candidates should verify fees with colleges themselves and that it is not responsible for the fee information institutions provide.

One option sits almost entirely outside this market. NBEMS caps DNB fees at Rs 75,000 a year in tuition and Rs 1.25 lakh a year in total, and makes a stipend compulsory. At the stated cap, three years of DNB training cost about Rs 3.75 lakh in total fees. Compared with an Rs. 1 crore deemed-university course, that is roughly 27 times less; compared with a Rs 2.28 crore course, about 61 times less.

The stipend you may not get

The rule is not ambiguous, and it is not new. Clause 5.4 of the Postgraduate Medical Education Regulations, 2023 requires that PG students "in all the institutions" be paid a stipend at par with PG students in government medical institutions in the same state. The identical obligation existed under the 2000 regulations. This is a twenty-six-year-old rule.

Here is what it looks like in practice. Tamil Nadu's directorate of medical education publishes stipends for every college in the state. The government rate for a first-year PG resident in 2025-26 is Rs 54,025 a month.

Of 26 private colleges on that list, two come close to parity. The worst pay 46 per cent of what the law requires, and they do it on a document the state government itself publishes.

The NMC's own compliance file is more damning. A 482-entry spreadsheet on nmc.org.in, with colleges reporting between April 2024 and February 2026, records Vivekananda Institute of Medical Sciences in Kolkata paying first-year PG residents Rs 13,915 a month. East Point College in Bangalore: Rs 20,000. Several colleges are recorded simply as "Not Providing" or "Not Given" Prasad Institute in Lucknow, Akash Institute in Devanahalli, and K.D. Medical College in Mathura. Earlier NMC data put the national range at Rs 15,000 to Rs 1,27,384 a month.

In 2023, the NMC surveyed 7,901 PG students across 213 colleges. It found 2,110 receiving no stipend at all, 4,288 paid less than government peers, and 1,228 whose stipend was taken back by the management after being paid. That last number is the one to sit with. Paying on paper and recovering in cash defeats an audit by design.

So what has the regulator done? In March 2026, it imposed penalties of Rs 1 crore each on seven colleges for failing to disclose stipend details, not for underpaying. Four of the seven were government colleges. One penalty, on PGIMS Rohtak, was revoked in July 2026 once the data arrived. In August 2026, the NMC told the Supreme Court that all 564 colleges running PG courses reported paying stipends; the affidavit did not say whether anyone had checked.

On 8 October 2026 four days before this counselling round opened the NMC refused an RTI application asking what action it had taken against private colleges over unpaid PG stipends, citing an exemption. The applicant, Dr K.V. Babu, says there has been none. We could not find a single NMC penalty for stipend non-payment, as distinct from non-disclosure, in 2025 or 2026. That absence is the finding.

DNB trainees sit under a different rule: NBEMS sets a national minimum of Rs 43,000 a month in year one for post-MBBS broad-specialty training, rising to Rs 47,000 by year three. It is a floor, not a parity test. In Gujarat, that produces an odd result a DNB trainee is owed Rs 43,000 while an MD resident in a private college in the same city is owed Rs 1,00,800, the state rate. Same city, same work, different legal entitlement.

The bond you sign

We found no mention of the word "bond" in the Post Graduate Medical Education Regulations, 2023. Bonds are governed by state policy, which is why they vary so widely. The penalties in the table range from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 2.5 crore.

Rajasthan is worth pausing on. It prices the bond by branch, and the tiers map exactly onto desire: Rs 1.5 crore for Dermatology, Radiodiagnosis, Obstetrics & Gynecology and General Medicine; Rs 1 crore for Orthopedics, Pediatrics and General Surgery; Rs 50 lakh for Anesthesia and Pathology; Rs 25 lakh for Anatomy, Physiology and Biochemistry. The state charges the most for the branches that already cost the most in fees and close at the hardest ranks. Three separate mechanisms pushing in the same direction.

For scale: when the Supreme Court upheld compulsory service bonds in 2019, it also directed states to consider a two-year service period with a Rs 20 lakh default. Uttarakhand's bond is 12.5 times that figure. Rajasthan's top tier is 7.5 times. Seven years on, there is still no uniform national policy, and the question is back before the Court in a pending matter heard in August 2026.

The law here is more favorable to doctors than most prospectuses admit. Bonds themselves are valid the Supreme Court settled that in 2019, and the Allahabad High Court reaffirmed it in September 2026, holding that an administrative delay in issuing a posting does not extinguish the obligation. But enforcement by holding degrees hostage keeps failing. The Telangana High Court held in 2026 that a college "has no lien over the original certificates" and must sue for recovery instead; twelve originals were ordered returned within a week. The Madras High Court put it plainly in 2022: an educational certificate "is not a marketable commodity."

And yet withholding is written into the prospectuses candidates are signing this month. Kerala keeps originals in the principal's safe custody and pays no stipend until the bonds are executed. Tamil Nadu's undertaking reads: "I will not claim my original certificates till I fulfill my bond conditions."

How much of this is ever enforced is another matter. Gujarat told its own legislative assembly that about 70 per cent of MBBS graduates from government colleges since 2020-21 skipped bond service 1,856 of 2,653 and that 1,310 of them had paid nothing, leaving Rs 65.4 crore outstanding. In Punjab, 31 specialists left government service owing Rs 50 lakh each; none had paid.

Two things changed recently and are worth knowing. Maharashtra scrapped its one-year MBBS bond entirely in July 2026 but kept PG and super-specialty bonds untouched. And Himachal Pradesh has no 2026 PG prospectus published at all its resident doctors' association went public on 11 October, days before counselling opened, asking for the Rs 40 lakh penalty to be cut and describing a three-year bond, while the only official document online says two years.

What to check before choice filling closes

Choice filling for Round 1 closes at 10:00 AM on 22 October 2026, with the allotment result on 24 October and reporting from 26 October to 2 November. Round 2 registration runs 6–11 November; choice filling is 7 November to 10:00 AM on 12 November; the result is on 14 November; and reporting is 16–23 November. Round 3 registration runs 26 November–1 December; choice filling is 27 November to 10:00 AM on 2 December; the result is on 4 December; and reporting is 5–12 December. The stray vacancy round runs 16–21 December for registration, with choice filling until 11:55 PM on 21 December, the result on 24 December, and reporting through 31 December. The academic session starts on 20 November.

Six things to establish for every college you are about to rank, in this order:

1.      The bond, from the state's own prospectus not from a coaching website's comparison table. We checked the widely circulated 2026 bond tables against primary documents, and most cite no source at all. If your state has not published a current PG prospectus, that is itself information worth acting on.

2.      The stipend, in writing, from the college. Ask for the figure and the payment history. Tamil Nadu and the NMC both publish college-level stipend data you can check an answer against. A private college paying 46 per cent of the state rate appears to fall below the parity required by clause 5.4; candidates should document the amount and seek clarification from the college and relevant regulator.

3.      The full fee, including year two and year three. Several private colleges require post-dated cheques for later years at admission. Ask what the annual escalation clause says.

4.      Whether the college withholds original certificates, and on what terms. The case law is on your side; the prospectus may not be.

5.      Whether a DNB seat does the same job. Fees are capped at Rs 1.25 lakh a year, and a stipend is mandatory. For many candidates, this is a better deal than a Rs 1 crore deemed-university seat in the same specialty.

6.      Whether the branch is worth the premium you are about to pay for it. This is the hardest one, and the honest answer is that nobody can tell you. We searched for published Indian data on post-PG earnings by specialty and found none no government survey, no professional body study, no peer-reviewed cohort. A Radiodiagnosis seat costing more than Rs 2 crore over three years is priced without publicly available Indian data on post-PG earnings by specialty.

One concrete example of how much the details matter. A candidate choosing MD Dermatology at MGUMST Jaipur pays Rs 78.75 lakh a year in the management quota, or about Rs 2.36 crore over three years, before additional charges. Rajasthan's reported top-tier bond is Rs 1.5 crore, and the stipend may be below the state rate. At a government college, the same branch may cost only a few lakhs for the whole course, while the stipend varies by state and institution. The branch on the certificate is identical.

And a diary note: Madhya Pradesh's round-one notification sets a window from 30 October to 10 November 2026 during which the seat-leaving bond will not apply. If you are in that state and uncertain, that window is a real, dated escape hatch.

Sources, and what we could not verify

Primary documents: MCC NEET PG 2026 counselling schedule (DGHS, 7 Oct 2026) · NMC stipend detail list, 482 entries · Post Graduate Medical Education Regulations 2023 · NBEMS fee and stipend guidelines · Kerala PG prospectus 2026-27 · Tamil Nadu PG prospectus 2026-27 · MGUMST Jaipur fee notification · UCMS Delhi fee structure.

Reporting and case law: ThePrint on the NMC's RTI refusal (13 Oct 2026) · Careers360 on deemed-university fees (11 Nov 2025) · Medical Dialogues on Karnataka's vacant seats (10 Mar 2026) · Rajasthan's tiered bond (7 Sept 2025) · Association of Medical Super Speciality Aspirants v. Union of India (2019) 8 SCC 607 · Telangana HC on withheld certificates · Supreme Court on a uniform bond policy (7 Aug 2026).

Not verified, and flagged deliberately. Branch closing ranks are compilations of MCC allotment PDFs by third parties, not an official MCC cut-off table; MCC publishes none. Rajasthan's and Uttarakhand's bond figures have never been published with a government order number, and reports of a Rs 4.5 crore Radiology seat in Rajasthan rest on tables whose own column headings are internally inconsistent we have used the per-year figures instead. Himachal Pradesh's bond duration is contested between a 2023 prospectus and its own residents. Uttar Pradesh appears to run two parallel bond regimes, one for in-service doctors and one for direct candidates, and no source states this explicitly, so we have given no single UP figure. Current official stipend orders for Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Bihar and Punjab could not be located. Vacancy counts for the 2025 cycle range from 1,140 (Parliament, after the stray round) to over 17,000 (press reporting, at an earlier stage) and are not the same measure.

Nothing here is admission advice. Bond terms, fees and stipends change between counselling rounds and sometimes within them. Before you lock a choice, read your state's own prospectus and the college's own fee notification, and if a bond or a withheld certificate is at stake, talk to a lawyer rather than a comment section.