SSC CGL 2026 Notification: Dates, 12,256 Vacancies, Eligibility and the New Sectional Timing
SSC CGL 2026 Notification: Dates, 12,256 Vacancies, Eligibility and the New Sectional Timing
As on 13 September 2026, the SSC CGL 2026 application window is shut. It closed on 25 June 2026 after SSC reopened it for three days, fee payment ended on 26 June 2026, and Tier 1 now runs as a Computer Based Examination from 30 September to 30 October 2026. Admit cards are still awaited.
The Notification came on 21 May 2026, and the PDF is the only version that counts
The Staff Selection Commission released the Combined Graduate Level Examination 2026 Notice of Examination on 21 May 2026 and opened online registration the same day. The official host is ssc.gov.in. Nothing else is official, not a WhatsApp forward, not a screenshot, not a coaching handout.
To pull the file yourself, open ssc.gov.in, go to the Notice Board or Candidate's Corner area of the homepage, and look for the CGL Examination 2026 entry dated 21 May 2026. Download the complete Notice of Examination, not the one-page summary that gets circulated.
The summary is where aspirants get burnt. Almost everything you actually need sits in the annexures: the Scheme of Examination, the post-wise educational qualification list, the post-wise age band, the physical standards for the uniformed posts, and the list of participating ministries and departments. If you skipped those in June, read them now, because Document Verification is checked against that PDF and nothing else.
SSC also posts follow-up notices on the same page. The reopening notice of June and the Tier 1 schedule notice of 12 September 2026 both live there, and both changed something real about this cycle.
Every SSC CGL 2026 date in one table
This is the spine of the whole cycle. Two of these dates were revised mid-cycle, so an old bookmark or an old blog will mislead you.
The correction window carried a charge: Rs 200 for the first correction and Rs 500 for the second. That window is long over, so whatever sits in your form today is what SSC will verify later. Pull up your final submitted form now and check your category, your date of birth and your post preferences against your certificates.
The reopened window changed who was eligible, not just the deadline
Here is the part most pages get wrong or skip. The original last date to apply was 22 June 2026. SSC then reopened the link from 23 June 2026 to 25 June 2026, so the final closing date became 25 June.
A reopened window usually means only one thing to an aspirant: a few more days to register. This one meant more. SSC stated in the reopening notice that "the relevant part in the Notice of Examination where the closing date was treated as a crucial date for ascertaining eligibility will now be as per the new closing date i.e. June 25, 2026."
Read that again slowly. The closing date is not just a deadline in SSC's rulebook, it is the crucial date on which your age and your qualification are frozen and measured. By shifting it from 22 June to 25 June, SSC quietly moved the eligibility reference point by three days.
The practical effect is small in size and large in consequence. If your degree result was declared on 23, 24 or 25 June 2026, you now count as qualified on the crucial date. If your birthday put you inside the upper age limit only on 24 June, you now fall inside the band. Three days decided whole candidatures.
The same rule governs final-year students. You could apply provisionally, but your qualification had to be complete as on 25 June 2026, and you must be able to prove it on paper at Document Verification. A provisional certificate dated July does not save you. If you are unsure where you stand, our detailed SSC CGL eligibility breakdown walks through the crucial-date logic case by case.
12,256 vacancies and roughly 40 posts
SSC advertised 12,256 vacancies, described in the Notification as tentative. Tentative is SSC's standard wording and the number does move, usually upward, as departments report final requirements before the result stage. No corrigendum has revised it so far.
Those 40-odd posts sit across central ministries, departments and offices. The ones aspirants chase hardest include Assistant Section Officer in CSS, Assistant Accounts Officer, Junior Statistical Officer, Statistical Investigator Grade-II, Inspector in the Income Tax Department, and investigative posts in organisations such as CBI, NIA and the Narcotics wing. The full post list with department-wise vacancy and reservation split is in the Notification annexure.
On pay, get the two headline posts right, because a lot of pages do not. ASO (CSS) is Pay Level-7 with grade pay 4600. AAO is Pay Level-8 with grade pay 4800. If a page tells you ASO is Level-8, it has copied a mistake. The full in-hand structure, HRA slabs and allowances are laid out in our SSC CGL salary guide.
Fee was Rs 100, and a large share of candidates paid nothing
Fee was payable online till 26 June 2026, one day after the form itself closed. That one-day gap exists every cycle and every cycle a few thousand candidates miss it, submit the form and never complete payment. An unpaid form is not a valid form.
Eligibility in summary, and the three posts with extra conditions
The base requirement is a Bachelor's degree in any discipline from a recognised university, measured as on 25 June 2026. Age is broadly 18 to 32 years, but SSC does not apply one band to every post. Each post carries its own age range, and the post-wise band is printed in the Notification annexure. Do not trust a blog that prints a single age table for all 40 posts, including this one.
Age relaxation follows standard central government rules: 5 years for SC and ST, 3 years for OBC, 10 years for PwD, and separate provisions for Ex-Servicemen and other notified categories.
Three posts ask for more than a plain degree.
Note the difference between the first two, because it decides a lot of applications. JSO accepts a 12th-standard Maths route. Statistical Investigator Grade-II does not, and it wants Statistics in every single year or semester, not just one paper somewhere in the degree. A candidate with Statistics only in the final year does not qualify for List-2.
Physical standards apply to the uniformed and investigative posts such as CBI, NIA and Narcotics. The exact height, chest and vision requirements are post-specific and printed in the official PDF. SSC has not put them in any summary document, so take them from the annexure.
How SSC will actually pick 12,256 people
Selection runs in two computer-based stages, followed by document verification and medical checks where a post demands them.
Tier 1 is a screening test. It is qualifying only, and this is the single most misunderstood line in the whole Notification. Your Tier 1 marks decide whether you reach Tier 2 and nothing more. They do not travel into the final merit.
Tier 2 decides everything. Paper 1 is written by every shortlisted candidate and runs in Session I and Session II, covering Mathematical Abilities, Reasoning and General Intelligence, English Language and Comprehension, General Awareness, Computer Knowledge and a Data Entry Speed Test. Paper 2 is only for JSO candidates and covers Statistics. Paper 3 is only for AAO candidates and covers Finance and Economics. Negative marking in Tier 2 is 1 mark in Paper 1 Section I and Section II, and 0.50 in the Computer Knowledge module. The stage-wise detail is in our SSC CGL Tier 2 guide.
Qualifying marks are not the cut off
SSC prescribes minimum qualifying marks of 30% for UR, 25% for OBC and EWS, and 20% for all other categories. That is the floor below which a paper is not evaluated for selection.
A cut off is a different animal. It is the score of the last candidate who made the list, and it is always far above the qualifying floor. For reference, the revised 2025 Tier 1 List-3 UR cut off was 136.40215 with 1,31,027 candidates qualified. Year-wise and list-wise numbers sit in our verified SSC CGL Tier 1 cut off tool. Any page showing you 54 or 63 marks as a "cut off" is showing you qualifying marks with the wrong label.
Tier 1 pattern for SSC CGL 2026
Negative marking in Tier 1 is 0.50 for every wrong answer. Topic-level weightage for each of those four sections is mapped in our SSC CGL syllabus breakdown.
Sectional timing is the real change in this cycle
Look at that table again. The time column no longer says 60 minutes for the whole paper, it says 15 minutes four times over. That is the headline change of SSC CGL 2026.
Each of the four sections now carries its own 15-minute timer. When a section's timer runs out, that section closes. You cannot return to it, and you cannot push unused minutes forward into the next section. Finish Reasoning in 11 minutes and those 4 spare minutes die with the section.
This rewrites how the paper is played. The old approach was to sprint through Reasoning and General Awareness in about 20 minutes combined and bank the surplus for Quantitative Aptitude, where the marks are hardest and slowest. That option is gone. Quant now gets exactly 15 minutes, no more, whatever you did earlier in the paper.
Three things follow from that, and they are worth acting on before 30 September. First, your accuracy in General Awareness matters more than ever, because it is the one section where 25 questions can genuinely be closed in 7 or 8 minutes and there is now no reward for doing so. Second, Quant question selection becomes a skill in itself: in 15 minutes you are not solving 25 questions, so learn to spot and skip the two or three long ones inside the first few seconds. Third, practise with a sectionally timed mock, not an open 60-minute one, because a 60-minute mock is now training you for a paper that no longer exists.
SSC has extended sectional timing to Tier 2 as well. The exact per-section minutes for Tier 2 are not confirmed by any source we would stand behind, so check the official notice rather than a number copied from a coaching page. Candidates using a scribe get compensatory time as per SSC rules.
One honest caveat on sourcing. The 15-minute Tier 1 figure is widely reported by prep portals and is consistent across them, and we are comfortable stating it. Even so, open the Scheme of Examination annexure on ssc.gov.in and confirm it against the Notification before you rebuild your strategy around it. If SSC revises it, the Notification annexure will say so first.
Tier 1 is confirmed for 30 September to 30 October 2026
SSC released the Tier 1 schedule notice on 12 September 2026. Tier 1 will be held as a Computer Based Examination from 30 September 2026 to 30 October 2026, spread across multiple days.
Anything you read that places Tier 1 in "August to September 2026" is quoting the old tentative window from before the schedule notice, and it is wrong. So is anything saying the date has not been announced.
What SSC has not yet released is the date-wise, shift-wise and candidate-wise schedule. You do not yet know your own exam date. Aggregator sites report four shifts at 09:00 to 10:00, 11:45 to 12:45, 14:30 to 15:30 and 17:15 to 18:15, drawn from previous years. Treat that as expected, not official, until the admit card says otherwise.
Two documents come before the exam. The city intimation slip is expected around 22 September 2026 and tells you only your city and date, which is what you need to book travel. The admit card is expected around 27 September 2026, or roughly 2 to 4 days before your own exam date, and it is released region-wise by the regional SSC websites. Both those dates are our expectation from past cycles; SSC has not committed to either. Release-day steps are covered on our SSC CGL admit card page.
Because the exam runs across many days and shifts, SSC will normalise scores before publishing results. That is why published cut offs carry five decimal places instead of whole numbers, and it is why a "tough shift" is not the disaster the Telegram groups claim it is.
What to do in the 17 days before 30 September
Stop revising new material. At this distance the returns come from sectional speed and from General Awareness revision, not from starting a fresh chapter of Advanced Maths.
Rebuild your mock routine around the 15-minute clock. Take a sectionally timed SSC CGL Tier 1 mock test every second day, then spend longer on the analysis than you spent on the paper. Keep your photo ID and your final submitted form handy so that when the admit card drops you are not hunting for documents at 11 in the night.
And keep one tab on ssc.gov.in. The date-wise schedule is the next thing SSC owes you, and when it comes, your entire October plan gets rewritten around a single date. More cycle-wide detail sits on our SSC CGL hub.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the SSC CGL 2026 application still open?
No. Applications closed on 25 June 2026 at 23:00 hrs after the reopened window, and the last date for fee payment was 26 June 2026. The correction window ran from 1 to 3 July 2026 and is also closed. There is no further chance to apply in this cycle.
Why did SSC reopen the application window, and what did it change?
SSC reopened the link from 23 June to 25 June 2026 after the original 22 June deadline. The important consequence was not the extra days. SSC stated that the closing date treated as the crucial date for ascertaining eligibility would now be the new closing date, 25 June 2026, which moved the reference date for age and qualification by three days.
When is the SSC CGL 2026 Tier 1 exam?
Tier 1 runs from 30 September to 30 October 2026 as a Computer Based Examination across multiple days. SSC confirmed this in the schedule notice dated 12 September 2026. The date-wise and shift-wise schedule has not been released yet, so you do not know your individual date until the city slip or admit card appears.
How many vacancies are there in SSC CGL 2026?
12,256 vacancies, described as tentative in the Notification, across roughly 40 Group B and Group C posts. No corrigendum has revised the figure so far. More than 28.5 lakh candidates applied, which works out to about 233 applications for every advertised vacancy.
What is sectional timing in SSC CGL Tier 1?
Each of the four sections has its own 15-minute timer, adding up to 60 minutes. Once a section's timer ends, that section locks. You cannot go back to it and you cannot carry unused time into the next section. Confirm the figure in the Scheme of Examination annexure on ssc.gov.in before rebuilding your strategy.
Do Tier 1 marks count in the final SSC CGL merit?
No. Tier 1 is qualifying only. It decides who reaches Tier 2 and contributes nothing to the final merit list. Your selection and your post are decided by Tier 2, where Paper 1 is written by everyone, Paper 2 by JSO candidates and Paper 3 by AAO candidates.
When will the SSC CGL 2026 admit card be released?
SSC has not announced an admit card date. Based on past cycles, expect the city intimation slip around 22 September 2026 and the admit card around 27 September 2026, or 2 to 4 days before your own exam date, released region-wise on the regional SSC websites. Treat both as expected dates, not official ones.