IBPS put the Online Main Examination call letter for CRP SPL-XVI online on 22 October 2026. The exam is on 1 November 2026. That is the short version, and it is the only part most pages will tell you.
The same day IBPS also quietly published a second document that matters far more than the call letter: the Process for Arriving at Scores, which carries the actual prelims cut-offs — sectional and total, category by category, for all six posts. Those numbers were not knowable a week ago. They are below, in one table you can compare across posts, which is something the official PDF does not let you do because it prints six separate tables.
If you cleared the prelims, two of the facts in here change how you should spend the next nine days. If you did not clear, the cut-off tables tell you exactly how far off you were and which post to target next cycle.
What IBPS released on 22 October 2026
Five things went live under CRP SPL-XVI on the same day, and they are easy to confuse with the 15 October release:
- Online Main Examination call letter — download it with your registration number and password/date of birth.
- Scores of the Online Preliminary Examination — your actual marks. This is new. On 15 October IBPS released only the result status (qualified or not). The scorecard is a separate login.
- Process for Arriving at Scores — the cut-off document.
- Information Handout for the Main Exam, in English and Hindi — the pattern, sample questions and instructions.
- Guidelines for Scribe plus the online scribe declaration form.
The notice itself is dated 22.10.2026, signed by the Director, IBPS, Mumbai, and opens with the line that the Main Exam "is expected to be conducted on 01.11.2026". The word expected is IBPS's, not ours — the recruitment is for vacancies of 2027-28 and the entire schedule has always been labelled tentative.
The prelims cut-offs, post by post
This is the part worth reading twice. The prelims paper was 125 marks — English Language 25, Reasoning 25, General Awareness with special reference to the Banking Industry / Quantitative Aptitude 25, and Professional Knowledge 50. There was a penalty of one-fourth of the marks for every wrong answer, and scores were rounded to two decimal places.
IBPS applied cut-offs in two stages: first on each individual test, then on the total score. You had to clear both.
Cut-offs on total score, out of 125
| Post (Scale I) | SC | ST | OBC-NCL | EWS | General |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IT Officer | 67.25 | 56.50 | 74.50 | 70.75 | 75.50 |
| Agricultural Field Officer | 63.50 | 60.75 | 63.50 | 63.50 | 63.50 |
| Rajbhasha Adhikari | 24.00 | 33.25 | 35.25 | 35.25 | 35.25 |
| Law Officer | 57.25 | 47.50 | 63.50 | 63.25 | 66.00 |
| HR / Personnel Officer | 76.25 | 72.00 | 76.25 | 73.00 | 76.25 |
| Marketing Officer | 86.50 | 78.25 | 92.50 | 92.50 | 92.50 |
Cut-offs on each individual test
Each cell reads reserved / General. IBPS prints a single cut-off column covering SC, ST, OBC-NCL, EWS and PwBD candidates, and a second for General.
| Post (Scale I) | English (of 25) | Reasoning (of 25) | GA / QA (of 25) | Prof. Knowledge (of 50) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IT Officer | 9.75 / 12.50 | 3.50 / 6.75 | 5.75 / 8.75 | 9.50 / 13.75 |
| Agricultural Field Officer | 8.25 / 11.25 | 3.00 / 6.00 | 5.00 / 8.00 | 12.50 / 16.50 |
| Rajbhasha Adhikari | 6.75 / 9.75 | 1.50 / 4.50 | 3.00 / 4.75 | 6.50 / 10.75 |
| Law Officer | 8.25 / 11.25 | 3.00 / 6.00 | 3.75 / 5.50 | 10.75 / 15.50 |
| HR / Personnel Officer | 9.75 / 12.50 | 3.50 / 6.75 | 5.75 / 8.75 | 20.50 / 25.50 |
| Marketing Officer | 8.25 / 11.25 | 3.00 / 6.00 | 5.00 / 8.00 | 20.75 / 26.00 |
What the two tables together actually tell you
Put them side by side and the real structure of this exam appears. Clearing all four sectional cut-offs does not come close to clearing the total cut-off:
| Post (Scale I) | Sum of 4 sectional cut-offs (General) | Total cut-off | Shortfall | Total cut-off as % of 125 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IT Officer | 41.75 | 75.50 | +33.75 | 60.4% |
| Agricultural Field Officer | 41.75 | 63.50 | +21.75 | 50.8% |
| Rajbhasha Adhikari | 29.75 | 35.25 | +5.50 | 28.2% |
| Law Officer | 38.25 | 66.00 | +27.75 | 52.8% |
| HR / Personnel Officer | 53.50 | 76.25 | +22.75 | 61.0% |
| Marketing Officer | 51.25 | 92.50 | +41.25 | 74.0% |
Read the Marketing Officer row. A General candidate who scraped past every single sectional cut-off and nothing more would have been 41.25 marks short of the total cut-off. The sectional cut-offs are a floor to keep out people who skipped a section entirely. They are not the exam.
The second thing the table shows is the spread. The hardest and easiest posts in the same examination, on the same paper structure, were 57.25 marks apart on the General total cut-off — Marketing Officer at 92.50 out of 125 against Rajbhasha Adhikari at 35.25. The reason is in the vacancy table further down: Marketing Officer had 10 posts in the entire country, Rajbhasha Adhikari had 94.
And a third, less comfortable finding. For Agricultural Field Officer, Rajbhasha Adhikari, Marketing Officer, the OBC-NCL, EWS and General total cut-offs are identical. At the total-score stage of the prelims, being OBC or EWS bought those candidates nothing at all. Only SC, ST and PwBD candidates got a lower bar. That is not a policy statement — it is simply where the shortlisting boundary landed once IBPS went deep enough into the merit list to fill its quotas.
PwBD cut-offs on total score, out of 125
| Post (Scale I) | HI | OC | VI | ID |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IT Officer | 33.25 | 36.25 | 37.75 | 44.00 |
| Agricultural Field Officer | 39.00 | 40.25 | 45.50 | 49.75 |
| Rajbhasha Adhikari | NA | 48.75 | 44.25 | NA |
| Law Officer | NA | 61.00 | 42.25 | NA |
| HR / Personnel Officer | NA | 60.50 | 55.00 | NA |
| Marketing Officer | NA | 66.50 | 65.50 | NA |
NA is IBPS's own marking and means no vacancy or no candidate was available in that combination. The identified disabilities and functional requirements for each post were clarified in a separate notice dated 12 August 2026, issued against the RPwD Act 2016 schedule — we mirror it at the bottom of this page.
Your prelims marks are now worthless. So are three of the four Mains papers.
Point 9 of the 22 October notice is one sentence long and it decides the entire recruitment:
"Marks obtained only in the Online Main Examination will be considered for provisional shortlisting for Interviews and Final Merit Listing."
So a candidate who topped the prelims and a candidate who cleared by 0.25 marks walk into the Main Exam on exactly level terms. Whatever you scored on the prelims scorecard IBPS has just released, it carries forward nothing.
Then the Information Handout narrows it much further:
"In the Main examination, all tests except Professional Knowledge will be qualifying in nature and merit listing will be done on the basis of candidates' scores in test of Professional Knowledge."
Read that against the pattern. The Main Exam is 225 marks. English Language, Reasoning and the third paper account for 100 of them and are qualifying only — you must pass them, but the marks do not enter the merit list. The merit list is built from Professional Knowledge alone.
Which means that for the IT Officer, Agricultural Field Officer, HR/Personnel Officer, Marketing Officer and Law Officer posts, 100 marks out of 225 decide your rank. If you have nine days and you are splitting them evenly across four subjects, you are spending roughly three-quarters of your effort on marks that cannot improve your position.
There is one exception, and it is the kind of detail that gets flattened out of summaries. For Rajbhasha Adhikari, the descriptive paper is not an essay — the handout lists it as "Professional Knowledge (Descriptive Paper)". For that post alone the descriptive 25 marks are Professional Knowledge, so 125 marks feed the merit list, not 100. A Rajbhasha candidate treating the descriptive paper as a qualifying formality is throwing away a fifth of their merit score.
Mains exam pattern, 1 November 2026
There is no single IBPS SO Mains pattern. The handout prints three, and the difference is in the third paper and the time split — so a wrongly-copied pattern will have you walking in expecting Quantitative Aptitude when your paper is General Awareness.
Both the objective and descriptive tests are online, and the descriptive test is typed on the computer. It begins immediately after the objective test ends — there is no break. Negative marking on the objective tests is one-fourth (0.25) of the marks assigned to that question; a blank answer carries no penalty.
IT Officer, Agricultural Field Officer, HR/Personnel Officer and Marketing Officer
| Test | Questions | Marks | Medium | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English Language | 30 | 30 | English | 25 min |
| Reasoning | 40 | 40 | English & Hindi | 35 min |
| Quantitative Aptitude | 30 | 30 | English & Hindi | 25 min |
| Professional Knowledge (Objective) | 50 | 100 | English & Hindi | 40 min |
| Objective total | 150 | 200 | — | 125 min |
| Descriptive Paper (Essay and Comprehension) | 2 | 25 | English | 30 min |
| Grand total | — | 225 | — | 155 min |
Law Officer
| Test | Questions | Marks | Medium | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English Language | 30 | 30 | English | 25 min |
| Reasoning | 40 | 40 | English & Hindi | 35 min |
| General Awareness with Special Reference to Banking | 30 | 30 | English & Hindi | 20 min |
| Professional Knowledge (Objective) | 50 | 100 | English & Hindi | 45 min |
| Objective total | 150 | 200 | — | 125 min |
| Descriptive Paper (Essay and Comprehension) | 2 | 25 | English | 30 min |
| Grand total | — | 225 | — | 155 min |
Rajbhasha Adhikari
| Test | Questions | Marks | Medium | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English Language | 30 | 30 | English | 25 min |
| Reasoning | 40 | 40 | English & Hindi | 35 min |
| General Awareness with Special Reference to Banking | 30 | 30 | English & Hindi | 20 min |
| Professional Knowledge (Objective) | 50 | 100 | English & Hindi | 45 min |
| Objective total | 150 | 200 | — | 125 min |
| Professional Knowledge (Descriptive Paper) | 2 | 25 | English & Hindi | 30 min |
| Grand total | — | 225 | — | 155 min |
Note the two differences that are easy to miss. Law Officer and Rajbhasha Adhikari take General Awareness with special reference to the Banking Industry as the third paper, in 20 minutes; the other four take Quantitative Aptitude, in 25 minutes. And the Professional Knowledge paper is 45 minutes for Law and Rajbhasha but 40 minutes for the other four — same 50 questions, five fewer minutes.
Rajbhasha Adhikari candidates typing Hindi in the descriptive paper need to be comfortable with one of two keyboard layouts, because the handout names exactly these: Inscript and Remington (GAIL). Find out now which one you can actually type on, not on 1 November.
The document you may already have thrown away
This is the single most expensive mistake available on 1 November, and it is point 3 of the notice:
"Call letter of Preliminary Exam was not collected at the time of examination. Shortlisted candidates will be required to bring the duly authenticated/ stamped preliminary exam call letter (along with authenticated/ stamped copy of the ID proof) along with Main Exam call letter and other requisite documents."
Because the prelims call letter was never taken from you at the centre, you still have it — stamped and signed by the invigilator, with your stamped ID proof photocopy attached. IBPS wants both of those, plus the new Mains call letter. Candidates who treated the prelims call letter as spent paper after the exam cannot reproduce the stamp.
The notice adds that "all documents as prescribed in the notification and/ or call letter should be produced without any exception". Read your own call letter's document list the day you download it, not the night before.
ID proof and biometrics
Two ID documents are specifically ruled out for the Main Exam:
- Ration Card — not accepted.
- Learner's Driving Licence — not accepted.
If your name has changed, you will be allowed in only on production of the original Gazette notification, original marriage certificate or affidavit in original. A photocopy will not do.
Biometric data — right thumb impression, or another finger if that one is injured — and a photograph are captured at the venue. The notice is blunt that refusal to participate "on any occasion may lead to cancellation of candidature", and that the verification authority's decision on whether your print matched is final. The practical instructions are worth following literally:
- Mehndi, stamp ink or any coating on the fingers must be completely washed off before exam day — not at the centre.
- Dirty or dusty fingers must be washed and dried first.
- Fingers must be dry. Wipe each one if they are moist.
- If the right thumb is injured, tell the centre authority immediately so another finger or toe can be captured.
IBPS also records that it will conduct online Aadhaar verification of the candidate and the scribe at different stages, and advises candidates to acquire a valid Aadhaar card for the CRP process.
Vacancies: 1,035 posts, bank by bank
The 1 July 2026 notification carried indicative vacancies; a corrigendum dated 20 July 2026 replaced Annexure I with an updated set. These are those updated figures. The official annexure prints six separate post-wise tables, so the obvious question — what is my bank actually hiring? — takes a calculator. Here it is the other way round:
| Participating bank | AFO | HR | IT | Law | Mktg | Rajbhasha | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bank of Baroda | 100 | 50 | 0 | 10 | 0 | 7 | 167 |
| Bank of India | 0 | 0 | 110 | 0 | 0 | 10 | 120 |
| Bank of Maharashtra | 90 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 100 |
| Canara Bank | 0 | 0 | 0 | 30 | 0 | 20 | 50 |
| Central Bank of India | 0 | 0 | 50 | 30 | 0 | 31 | 111 |
| Indian Bank | 180 | 0 | 75 | 20 | 10 | 5 | 290 |
| Indian Overseas Bank | 0 | 0 | 25 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 35 |
| Punjab National Bank | 0 | 0 | 100 | 25 | 0 | 10 | 135 |
| Punjab & Sind Bank | 0 | 0 | 16 | 0 | 0 | 11 | 27 |
| UCO Bank | NR | NR | NR | NR | NR | NR | NR |
| Union Bank of India | NR | NR | NR | NR | NR | NR | NR |
| Total | 370 | 60 | 376 | 125 | 10 | 94 | 1035 |
NR is IBPS's marking for Not Reported — UCO Bank and Union Bank of India had not reported numbers when the annexure was updated, so their posts are not in the 1,035 and not in any column total. IBPS also notes the figures "may include backlog vacancies for some banks".
Three things in that table are worth acting on. Indian Bank alone accounts for 290 of the 1,035 posts, 180 of them Agricultural Field Officer. Marketing Officer exists only at Indian Bank, 10 posts nationally — which is why its cut-off was the highest of the six. And the two biggest streams, IT Officer at 376 and AFO at 370, together are over seven-tenths of the recruitment.
The notification is explicit that these are indicative and anticipated numbers communicated by the banks, and that provisional allotment will be made on the actual vacancies reported later. There are no state-wise vacancies in IBPS SO — unlike SBI Clerk, the merit list is all-India per post, so a candidate from Andhra Pradesh or Telangana competes against the whole country for the same pool.
What happens after 1 November
From the detailed notification's own schedule and selection clauses:
- Mains result — November 2026.
- Interview — November / December 2026, conducted by the participating banks. 100 marks. Minimum qualifying marks will not be less than 40%, or 35% for SC/ST/OBC/PwBD candidates.
- Final score — the relative weightage of the Online Main Examination and the interview is 80:20. You must qualify in both; failing either removes you, and the interview score of a candidate who does not reach the qualifying mark is not even disclosed.
- Provisional allotment — January 2027.
So the Main Exam carries four-fifths of the final score, and within the Main Exam only Professional Knowledge counts. Trace that through and the Professional Knowledge paper on 1 November is, in effect, 80% of this recruitment.
If you need a scribe
PwBD candidates using a scribe must complete the online scribe declaration form, which IBPS hosts separately at scribe.ibps.in, in addition to the scribe guidelines issued on 22 October. Do this before exam day — the Aadhaar verification mentioned above applies to the scribe too, not only to you. We mirror the guidelines document below.
Questions candidates are asking right now
"Is the IBPS SO Mains call letter out?" Yes, since 22 October 2026, for the Main Exam expected on 1 November 2026. Download it with your registration number and password or date of birth.
"I cleared the sectional cut-offs but my result says not qualified." That is normal and the tables above explain it. Cut-offs were applied in two stages, and the total-score cut-off is far above the sum of the four sectional cut-offs — by between 5.50 and 41.25 marks depending on the post.
"Where do I see my prelims marks?" In the Scores of Online Preliminary Examination login, which is separate from the 15 October result-status link. Both are on the CRP Specialist Officers page on ibps.in.
"Do my prelims marks help in the Mains?" No. Only Main Exam marks are considered for interview shortlisting and the final merit list.
"Is the descriptive paper qualifying?" For every post except Rajbhasha Adhikari, yes. For Rajbhasha Adhikari the descriptive paper is the Professional Knowledge descriptive paper and it counts towards the merit list.
"Can I change my exam centre or date?" No. The notification states that no request for change of centre, date, session or venue is entertained, and IBPS reserves the right to change them itself.
"Which bank should I prefer?" You do not choose. Provisional allotment in January 2027 is made by IBPS against the vacancies the banks actually report, on the basis of your final score and your category.
Source documents
We mirror every official PDF so the link still works after IBPS reorganises its site. Each of these is the unmodified file as published on ibps.in:
- Notice under CRP SPL-XVI, 22 October 2026 — the Main Exam notice quoted above.
- Process for Arriving at Scores — the source of every cut-off on this page.
- Information Handout for the Online Main Examination (English) — pattern and sample questions.
- Guidelines for Scribe.
- CRP SPL-XVI Detailed Notification, 1 July 2026 — eligibility, selection and the 80:20 weightage.
- Annexure I, updated vacancies as on 20 July 2026 — the 1,035 figures.
- Corrigendum, 20 July 2026.
- Important notice for PwBD candidates, 12 August 2026.
The live notice board is IBPS's own CRP Specialist Officers XVI page, which is where the call letter and scorecard logins sit.
Related reading on this site: IBPS SO Prelims Result 2026, written when the result status went live, SBI Clerk Prelims Result 2026, SBI Clerk Mains Call Letter 2026 for the backlog drive and UIIC AO Prelims Result 2026.