1,064 Scores Above 500: What J&K's NEET-UG Merit List Says About the Seats Ahead

1,064. That is how many NEET-UG 2026 candidates from Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh scored more than 500 marks out of 720 this year. Stretch the line down to exactly 500 and the number becomes 1,087. To sit inside the top 100 of the union territory, you needed 602 or better.

Those figures come from the provisional merit list that the J&K Board of Professional Entrance Examinations (BOPEE) issued on 12 August 2026 under Notification No. 145-BOPEE of 2026. If you sat NEET this year and registered with BOPEE, your name and your position are on that list. If you did not register in the window that ran from 7 to 10 August, you are not on it, and that is the harder half of this story.

What the list actually is

It is a ranking, not an admission. BOPEE takes the NEET-UG scores of candidates who hold J&K or Ladakh domicile, checks the documents each of them uploaded during registration, and produces a Provisional UT Merit List. Everything that follows this year, every round of counselling and every seat allotment, is read off that list.

The word doing the work is provisional. The list is published so that candidates can find errors in it before it hardens. BOPEE set 14 August, 1 pm, as the deadline for representations against a merit position or against a recorded document deficiency, and it was explicit that objections would be accepted only in person or through an authorised representative at its Jammu or Srinagar office. Not by email. Not by any other mode.

The same deadline covered candidates flagged for missing paperwork: domicile certificates, date-of-birth certificates, marks cards, category certificates, service bonds. Those candidates were told they could still take part in counselling provided the missing document reached BOPEE by 14 August.

How many seats are we talking about?

For the 2026-27 session, 1,675 MBBS seats have been approved for J&K, made up of 1,525 government seats and 150 private ones. Set that against a merit list where more than a thousand candidates cleared 500, and the shape of the year becomes clear enough without anybody having to guess a cutoff.

And guessing is exactly what you should not do. Plenty of coaching-adjacent sites are already publishing predicted closing scores for open merit. None of those are official. A cutoff is not a number BOPEE announces in advance; it is whatever score the last allotted seat happens to land on once counselling actually runs. Anyone quoting you a figure today is quoting you an estimate.

Who is at the top

One detail from this year's list is worth pausing on. Twenty-eight of the top 100 candidates are women, and the highest-ranked candidate from J&K is a woman with an All India Rank of 99. In a merit list this compressed, that is not a footnote.

What happens next

BOPEE said the counselling schedule would be notified separately, which means the single most useful thing a candidate can do right now is watch jkbopee.gov.in rather than a WhatsApp forward. When the schedule does land, the sequence in J&K generally runs like this:

• Choice filling and locking. You rank the colleges you are willing to attend. This is the step people rush and regret, because an unlocked or thoughtlessly ordered choice list can hand you a seat you did not want or no seat at all.

• Seat allotment, round by round. Allotment is made against the merit list and your locked choices, in successive rounds.

• Reporting and document verification at the allotted college, within whatever window the allotment notice specifies. Miss it and the seat goes.

• Later rounds and mop-up for seats that fall vacant.

Two practical points. First, keep every original document in one folder now, before the schedule is announced. The reporting windows in J&K counselling are short, and travelling from Kathua or Udhampur to a college in Jammu or Srinagar on two days' notice is a lot easier when you are not also hunting for a category certificate. Second, read each notice yourself, in full, on the BOPEE site. The specifics in this process change year to year, and the version circulating on social media is usually last year's.

If you are not on this list

If you cleared NEET but never registered with BOPEE, the UT merit list route is closed to you for this session. What remains is the all-India quota counselling run by the Medical Counselling Committee, and the deemed and private routes outside J&K. Both are separate processes with separate registrations and their own deadlines, and neither of them uses BOPEE's list.

It is also worth knowing that the UT merit list is not the only J&K pathway that ran this month. The sports-quota route for medical admissions had its own eligibility test earlier in August, which we covered in this piece on the 149 J&K students who cleared it.

The bit nobody says out loud

A merit list is a brutal document to read when your name sits below the line you were hoping for. It is worth remembering what it is not: it is not a verdict on whether you belong in medicine. J&K's own seat pool has been growing, more paramedical and allied-health recruitment is moving through JKSSB and JKPSC this year, and a great many people in this field started a year later than they planned to. The merit list decides one admission cycle. It does not decide the rest of it.

Sources

• Greater Kashmir, "1064 candidates score above 500, 28 women in top 100", 13 August 2026

• JK Student Alerts, "JKBOPEE NEET UG 2026 Provisional Merit List Out; Objections by Aug 14"

• J&K Board of Professional Entrance Examinations, jkbopee.gov.in — Notification No. 145-BOPEE of 2026, dated 12 August 2026