IIT placements, from the government's own data

Why “average package” is the wrong number — and where the right one lives

Almost every IIT placement figure in circulation is an average, released by the institute's placement cell to the press, and dragged upward by a small number of very large international offers. An average is trivially inflated by outliers: one ₹2 crore offer moves the average for a 700-student batch by roughly ₹28,000 per student, while telling you nothing about what the median student earns.

There is exactly one place where IITs are required to publish a median: the National Institutional Ranking Framework. Every institution submits “Median salary of placed graduates per annum” to the Ministry of Education each year, in a fixed format, and that figure carries ranking weight — 25 marks in the engineering framework. The submissions are published as public PDFs. That makes NIRF the only honest, comparable, year-on-year series available.

The gap is not subtle. For 2023-24, IIT Bombay submitted a median of ₹19.6L to the government. Widely-quoted “average package” figures for the same batch run several lakh higher.

The three-year trend across the top 7 IITs

“Avg of medians” is the unweighted average of the 7 institutes' reported medians. It is deliberately not called a median: a true pooled median cannot be reconstructed from per-institute medians. Placement rate and higher-studies share are cohort-weighted across all 7 institutes.

Placement rate, institute by institute

The decline is not one struggling outlier dragging an average down: six of the 7 fell, several of them steeply. The exception is IIT Madras, which was essentially flat across all three years (76.5% → 77.6% → 76.9%) — it started lower than the others and stayed there, rather than declining to meet them.

The convergence nobody is talking about

In 2022-23, the medians across these institutes ranged from ₹16.6L to ₹24.0L — a spread of ₹7.4L. By 2023-24 that spread had collapsed to ₹2.8L: every institute in the set landed between ₹17.0L and ₹19.8L.

In other words, in a single year most of the measurable salary premium between a higher-ranked and a lower-ranked IIT disappeared at the median. The premium may well still exist at the top of the distribution — that is exactly what the median does not tell you — but the typical graduate's outcome converged sharply.

One in five now chooses further study over a job

The higher-studies column is the number most relevant to anyone weighing an MS. Across these 7 institutes it went from 561 students in 2021-22 to 1339 in 2023-24 — from 12.6% of the graduating cohort to 20.9%. IIT Roorkee went from 87 to 333. IIT Bombay from 83 to 259.

Note also that IIT Delhi runs against the trend — its higher-studies count stayed flat (64 → 49) while its placement rate fell like everyone else's. We do not know why, and we are not going to invent a reason.

What this actually means for your decision

If you are comparing an Indian job against an MS abroad, the number you need on the India side of the equation is the median, not the headline. For a top-7 IIT B.Tech graduate that is roughly ₹18.8L — and there is roughly a 27.0% chance of not being placed through campus recruitment at all in the latest year on record.

That figure is the counterfactual your payback period is measured against. If an MS abroad costs ₹50L and lifts your starting salary from ₹18.8L to some higher number, the payback depends entirely on the size of that gap — which is precisely the calculation the payback guide walks through, and the one every Honest Scorecard runs for your specific profile.

And if you are not from an IIT: these are the best-placed engineering graduates in the country, and this is what their outcomes look like. Benchmark accordingly.

Sources, method, and what we did not do

Every figure comes from the institution's own “Data Submitted by Institution” PDF for India Rankings 2025 (10th edition, released 2025-09-04), published by the Ministry of Education. Scope is UG 4-year programmes only — the B.Tech cohort. The same PDFs contain PG and 5-year figures; we excluded them so the comparison is like-for-like.

• IIT Madras — NIRF 2025 submission (IR-E-U-0456)
• IIT Delhi — NIRF 2025 submission (IR-E-I-1074)
• IIT Bombay — NIRF 2025 submission (IR-E-U-0306)
• IIT Kanpur — NIRF 2025 submission (IR-E-I-1075)
• IIT Kharagpur — NIRF 2025 submission (IR-E-U-0573)
• IIT Roorkee — NIRF 2025 submission (IR-E-U-0560)
• IIT Guwahati — NIRF 2025 submission (IR-E-U-0053)
• NIRF India Rankings 2025 — Engineering ranking index

Caveats, stated plainly: NIRF data is self-reported by each institution and is not independently audited. Median salary covers placedgraduates only — it says nothing about the outcomes of those not placed. Institutions differ in how they count “placed” (some exclude students who opted out of campus placement), so cross-institute gaps of a few percentage points may not be real. We have not adjusted any figure for inflation; the nominal decline in median salary understates the real-terms decline. NIRF 2026 had not been released as of July 2026 — this page will be updated when it is.