UPSC CSE Syllabus 2026

The UPSC Civil Services Examination syllabus is four pages of a 160-page notification, and almost every mistake aspirants make in their first year traces back to not having read those four pages properly. This is the full syllabus for CSE 2026, reproduced from the official notification, with the scheme of examination that governs how each paper is marked.

Source. This page reproduces the syllabus from the UPSC Civil Services Examination 2026 Examination Notice (F.No. 1/2/2025-E.I(B)), Appendix I, Section III, issued under the CSE Rules 2026 gazetted on 4 February 2026. Only upsc.gov.in is authoritative. Where a date or a figure is not fixed by the notification, this page says so rather than guessing.

The examination at a glance

The Civil Services Examination runs in two successive stages: a Preliminary Examination that screens candidates for the Main Examination, and a Main Examination — written papers plus an Interview/Personality Test — that decides the final ranking.

Two things follow from that table and are worth internalising early.

The first is that Prelims marks are discarded. The notification is explicit: marks obtained in the Preliminary Examination by candidates declared qualified for the Main Examination "will not be counted for determining their final order of merit." Prelims is a gate, not a score you carry.

The second is that of the 1750 written marks, only 1750 across Papers I to VII count. Papers A and B — an Indian language and English — are qualifying. Fail them and the rest of your scripts are never evaluated; pass them and the marks are discarded.

How many people move between stages

Both cut-offs are defined as multiples of the vacancy count, not as fixed numbers:

• Candidates admitted to the Main Examination: about twelve to thirteen times the number of vacancies.
• Candidates summoned for the Interview/Personality Test: about twice the number of vacancies.

For CSE 2026 the vacancy figure is approximately 933, which includes 33 vacancies reserved for Persons with Benchmark Disability. The notification adds that the final number "may undergo change after getting firm number of vacancies from Cadre Controlling Authorities" — so treat it as an estimate, not a promise.

Preliminary Examination

Two compulsory papers of 200 marks each, both objective, both two hours, both set in Hindi and English.

Paper I — General Studies (200 marks)

• Current events of national and international importance.
• History of India and Indian National Movement.
• Indian and World Geography — Physical, Social, Economic Geography of India and the World.
• Indian Polity and Governance — Constitution, Political System, Panchayati Raj, Public Policy, Rights Issues, etc.
• Economic and Social Development — Sustainable Development, Poverty, Inclusion, Demographics, Social Sector Initiatives, etc.
• General issues on Environmental ecology, Bio-diversity and Climate Change — that do not require subject specialization.
• General Science.

Paper II — CSAT (200 marks, qualifying)

• Comprehension;
• Interpersonal skills including communication skills;
• Logical reasoning and analytical ability;
• Decision making and problem solving;
• General mental ability;
• Basic numeracy (numbers and their relations, orders of magnitude, etc.) (Class X level), Data interpretation (charts, graphs, tables, data sufficiency etc. — Class X level).

Paper II is qualifying at 33%. It is still mandatory to sit both papers — a candidate who does not appear in both is disqualified.

Negative marking

One-third — 0.33 — of the marks assigned to a question is deducted for a wrong answer. Marking more than one option counts as wrong even if one of them was correct. An unattempted question carries no penalty at all.

On a two-mark question that is a loss of about 0.66 marks, which is why blind guessing is close to expected-value neutral and informed guessing is clearly positive. The arithmetic is worked through in UPSC Prelims Negative Marking: When Guessing Actually Pays.

Main Examination

Nine papers, each three hours, all conventional essay type.

The four General Studies papers cover:

• GS I — Indian Heritage and Culture, History and Geography of the World and Society
• GS II — Governance, Constitution, Polity, Social Justice and International relations
• GS III — Technology, Economic Development, Bio-diversity, Environment, Security and Disaster Management
• GS IV — Ethics, Integrity and Aptitude

Each is set out clause by clause in the Mains syllabus.

The standard the Mains papers are set at

The notification states the intent directly, and it is the single most useful sentence in the document: the Main Examination "is intended to assess the overall intellectual traits and depth of understanding of candidates rather than merely the range of their information and memory."

For the GS papers, questions are set so "a well-educated person will be able to answer them without any specialized study" — testing the ability "to analyze, and take a view on conflicting socio-economic goals, objectives and demands."

For the optional papers the bar is different: "broadly of the honours degree level i.e. a level higher than the bachelors' degree and lower than the masters' degree." For Engineering, Medical Science and Law it corresponds to the bachelors' degree.

The qualifying language papers

Paper A and Paper B are of Matriculation standard. The pass marks are 25% in the Indian Language paper and 25% in English. Only candidates who clear both have their Essay, General Studies and Optional scripts taken cognizance of.

Paper A is not compulsory for candidates from Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Sikkim, nor for candidates with a benchmark disability in the hearing-impairment sub-category who have been granted exemption from second or third language courses by their Board or University.

Tie-breaking

Where final aggregates are equal, UPSC resolves rank in this order:

1. More marks in the compulsory common papers (Essay, GS I–IV) and the Personality Test taken together.
2. If still equal, more marks in the compulsory common papers alone.
3. If still equal, the candidate senior in age.
4. If a tie persists, at the discretion of the Commission.

Key dates for CSE 2026

The notification fixes the Prelims date. It does not fix a Mains date — that comes from UPSC's separately published annual Examination Calendar, so check upsc.gov.in rather than relying on a secondary source.

How to actually use this syllabus

Print it. Read it three times. Then map every topic you study back to a specific clause on it — because the clause is the boundary, and everything outside it is optional reading, however interesting.

Two habits pay off immediately. Attempt a previous year paper cold, before preparing, so you calibrate what the questions actually look like rather than what preparation material implies they look like. And when a clause is vague — "issues arising out of their design and implementation" — go to the previous year questions filed under it, because UPSC's own past papers are the only reliable gloss on its own syllabus.

Prelims decides whether the other 2025 marks ever get looked at, and it decides it on 400 marks of multiple choice across a single morning and afternoon. This is the official Preliminary Examination syllabus for UPSC CSE 2026, with the marking rules that govern it.

Source. This page reproduces the syllabus from the UPSC Civil Services Examination 2026 Examination Notice (F.No. 1/2/2025-E.I(B)), Appendix I, Section III, issued under the CSE Rules 2026 gazetted on 4 February 2026. Only upsc.gov.in is authoritative. Where a date or a figure is not fixed by the notification, this page says so rather than guessing.

The structure

Both papers are compulsory. The notification is blunt about this: a candidate who does not appear in both papers is disqualified. There is no partial attempt.

Paper I — General Studies (200 marks, two hours)

The official syllabus, in full:

• Current events of national and international importance.
• History of India and Indian National Movement.
• Indian and World Geography — Physical, Social, Economic Geography of India and the World.
• Indian Polity and Governance — Constitution, Political System, Panchayati Raj, Public Policy, Rights Issues, etc.
• Economic and Social Development — Sustainable Development, Poverty, Inclusion, Demographics, Social Sector Initiatives, etc.
• General issues on Environmental ecology, Bio-diversity and Climate Change — that do not require subject specialization.
• General Science.

Seven lines for what is, in practice, the widest syllabus in Indian competitive examination. A few observations on reading them precisely.

"That do not require subject specialization" appears against environment and ecology, and it is a genuine limit. UPSC is not asking for a botany degree; it is asking whether you can reason about a Ramsar site, a carbon sink or a conservation status.

"Etc." appears twice — in the polity and the economy lines — and is doing real work. Those two clauses are open-ended by design, which is why previous year questions matter more here than anywhere else on the paper.

"General Science" carries no qualifiers at all, and in practice this is where current affairs and static science meet: a space mission, a vaccine platform, a new material in the news.

Paper II — CSAT (200 marks, two hours, qualifying)

The official syllabus, in full:

• Comprehension;
• Interpersonal skills including communication skills;
• Logical reasoning and analytical ability;
• Decision making and problem solving;
• General mental ability;
• Basic numeracy (numbers and their relations, orders of magnitude, etc.) (Class X level), Data interpretation (charts, graphs, tables, data sufficiency etc. — Class X level).

Note the Class X level ceiling, stated twice and applying to both numeracy and data interpretation. It is the only place in the entire CSE syllabus where UPSC names a difficulty level for a Prelims paper, and it is routinely ignored by candidates who prepare CSAT as though it were a quantitative aptitude paper for a banking exam.

CSAT is qualifying at 33% — 66.67 marks out of 200. It contributes nothing to your Prelims rank beyond clearing that bar. Under-preparing it has ended more attempts than over-preparing it, but the correct allocation is "enough to be safe", not "as much as GS".

Negative marking, precisely

The notification sets it out in three parts:

1. Every question has four alternatives. For a wrong answer, one-third (0.33) of the marks assigned to that question is deducted as a penalty.
2. Marking more than one answer is treated as wrong — even if one of the marked answers was correct — and attracts the same penalty.
3. A question left blank carries no penalty.

On Paper I, 100 questions carry 200 marks, so each question is worth 2 marks and a wrong answer costs about 0.66.

That ratio is what makes attempt strategy a real decision rather than a matter of temperament. A pure four-way guess has an expected value of roughly zero. Eliminating even one option turns it positive. The full arithmetic, and what it means for how many questions to attempt, is in UPSC Prelims Negative Marking: When Guessing Actually Pays.

How the Prelims cut-off is drawn

UPSC draws the list of candidates qualified for Mains on two criteria taken together:

• minimum qualifying marks of 33% in General Studies Paper-II, and
• total qualifying marks in General Studies Paper-I, as determined by the Commission.

The Paper I cut-off is not published in advance and is not a fixed number. The size of the qualified pool is, though: about twelve to thirteen times the number of vacancies. With approximately 933 vacancies notified for 2026, that implies a Mains-qualified pool in the region of eleven to twelve thousand candidates.

Date

The Preliminary Examination for CSE 2026 is scheduled for 24 May 2026, per the examination notice. Applications closed on 24 February 2026.

What to do with this

The seven lines of Paper I are a checklist you should be able to recite. When you finish a study session, name the clause it belonged to. If you cannot, you have just spent an evening on something UPSC did not ask for — which is the most common and least visible way a first attempt goes wrong.

For the Mains syllabus that follows this stage, see the complete Mains syllabus; for how both stages fit together, the complete CSE syllabus.

The Main Examination is nine papers over roughly a week, 1750 written marks, and the stage where the ranking is actually decided. This is the official Mains syllabus for UPSC CSE 2026 — Essay, all four General Studies papers, and the qualifying language papers — reproduced clause by clause.

Source. This page reproduces the syllabus from the UPSC Civil Services Examination 2026 Examination Notice (F.No. 1/2/2025-E.I(B)), Appendix I, Section III, issued under the CSE Rules 2026 gazetted on 4 February 2026. Only upsc.gov.in is authoritative. Where a date or a figure is not fixed by the notification, this page says so rather than guessing.

The nine papers

The standard the papers are set at

Two sentences from the notification govern how every GS answer should be written.

The Main Examination "is intended to assess the overall intellectual traits and depth of understanding of candidates rather than merely the range of their information and memory."

And the questions in Papers II to V "will be such that a well-educated person will be able to answer them without any specialized study… likely to test the candidate's basic understanding of all relevant issues, and ability to analyze, and take a view on conflicting socio-economic goals, objectives and demands."

The instruction that follows is the one most often ignored under time pressure: "The candidates must give relevant, meaningful and succinct answers."

Paper I — Essay (250 marks)

Candidates may be required to write essays on multiple topics. They will be expected to keep closely to the subject of the essay to arrange their ideas in orderly fashion, and to write concisely. Credit will be given for effective and exact expression.

There is no topic list, by design. What the syllabus does specify is the marking basis: staying on subject, ordering ideas, concision, and exact expression. All four are style criteria rather than content criteria, which is why essay marks correlate poorly with how much a candidate knows.

Paper II — General Studies I (250 marks)

Indian Heritage and Culture, History and Geography of the World and Society.

• Indian culture will cover the salient aspects of Art Forms, literature and Architecture from ancient to modern times.
• Modern Indian history from about the middle of the eighteenth century until the present — significant events, personalities, issues.
• The Freedom Struggle — its various stages and important contributors/contributions from different parts of the country.
• Post-independence consolidation and reorganization within the country.
• History of the world will include events from 18th century such as industrial revolution, world wars, redrawal of national boundaries, colonization, decolonization, political philosophies like communism, capitalism, socialism etc. — their forms and effect on the society.
• Salient features of Indian Society, Diversity of India.
• Role of women and women's organization, population and associated issues, poverty and developmental issues, urbanization, their problems and their remedies.
• Effects of globalization on Indian society.
• Social empowerment, communalism, regionalism & secularism.
• Salient features of world's physical geography.
• Distribution of key natural resources across the world (including South Asia and the Indian sub-continent); factors responsible for the location of primary, secondary, and tertiary sector industries in various parts of the world (including India).
• Important Geophysical phenomena such as earthquakes, Tsunami, Volcanic activity, cyclone etc., geographical features and their location — changes in critical geographical features (including water-bodies and ice-caps) and in flora and fauna and the effects of such changes.

Paper III — General Studies II (250 marks)

Governance, Constitution, Polity, Social Justice and International relations.

• Indian Constitution — historical underpinnings, evolution, features, amendments, significant provisions and basic structure.
• Functions and responsibilities of the Union and the States, issues and challenges pertaining to the federal structure, devolution of powers and finances up to local levels and challenges therein.
• Separation of powers between various organs dispute redressal mechanisms and institutions.
• Comparison of the Indian constitutional scheme with that of other countries.
• Parliament and State legislatures — structure, functioning, conduct of business, powers & privileges and issues arising out of these.
• Structure, organization and functioning of the Executive and the Judiciary — Ministries and Departments of the Government; pressure groups and formal/informal associations and their role in the Polity.
• Salient features of the Representation of People's Act.
• Appointment to various Constitutional posts, powers, functions and responsibilities of various Constitutional Bodies.
• Statutory, regulatory and various quasi-judicial bodies.
• Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation.
• Development processes and the development industry — the role of NGOs, SHGs, various groups and associations, donors, charities, institutional and other stakeholders.
• Welfare schemes for vulnerable sections of the population by the Centre and States and the performance of these schemes; mechanisms, laws, institutions and Bodies constituted for the protection and betterment of these vulnerable sections.
• Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources.
• Issues relating to poverty and hunger.
• Important aspects of governance, transparency and accountability, e-governance — applications, models, successes, limitations, and potential; citizens charters, transparency & accountability and institutional and other measures.
• Role of civil services in a democracy.
• India and its neighborhood — relations.
• Bilateral, regional and global groupings and agreements involving India and/or affecting India's interests.
• Effect of policies and politics of developed and developing countries on India's interests, Indian diaspora.
• Important International institutions, agencies and fora — their structure, mandate.

Paper IV — General Studies III (250 marks)

Technology, Economic Development, Bio diversity, Environment, Security and Disaster Management.

• Indian Economy and issues relating to planning, mobilization, of resources, growth, development and employment.
• Inclusive growth and issues arising from it.
• Government Budgeting.
• Major crops-cropping patterns in various parts of the country, different types of irrigation and irrigation systems storage, transport and marketing of agricultural produce and issues and related constraints; e-technology in the aid of farmers.
• Issues related to direct and indirect farm subsidies and minimum support prices; Public Distribution System — objectives, functioning, limitations, revamping; issues of buffer stocks and food security; Technology missions; economics of animal-rearing.
• Food processing and related industries in India — scope and significance, location, upstream and downstream requirements, supply chain management.
• Land reforms in India.
• Effects of liberalization on the economy, changes in industrial policy and their effects on industrial growth.
• Infrastructure: Energy, Ports, Roads, Airports, Railways etc.
• Investment models.
• Science and Technology — developments and their applications and effects in everyday life.
• Achievements of Indians in science & technology; indigenization of technology and developing new technology.
• Awareness in the fields of IT, Space, Computers, robotics, nano-technology, bio-technology and issues relating to intellectual property rights.
• Conservation, environmental pollution and degradation, environmental impact assessment.
• Disaster and disaster management.
• Linkages between development and spread of extremism.
• Role of external state and non-state actors in creating challenges to internal security.
• Challenges to internal security through communication networks, role of media and social networking sites in internal security challenges, basics of cyber security; money-laundering and its prevention.
• Security challenges and their management in border areas — linkages of organized crime with terrorism.
• Various Security forces and agencies and their mandate.

Paper V — General Studies IV (250 marks)

Ethics, Integrity and Aptitude.

The notification frames this paper differently from the others: it "will include questions to test the candidates' attitude and approach to issues relating to integrity, probity in public life and his problem solving approach to various issues and conflicts faced by him in dealing with society. Questions may utilise the case study approach to determine these aspects."

• Ethics and Human Interface: Essence, determinants and consequences of Ethics in human actions; dimensions of ethics; ethics in private and public relationships. Human Values — lessons from the lives and teachings of great leaders, reformers and administrators; role of family society and educational institutions in inculcating values.
• Attitude: content, structure, function; its influence and relation with thought and behaviour; moral and political attitudes; social influence and persuasion.
• Aptitude and foundational values for Civil Service: integrity, impartiality and non-partisanship, objectivity, dedication to public service, empathy, tolerance and compassion towards the weaker-sections.
• Emotional intelligence: concepts, and their utilities and application in administration and governance.
• Contributions of moral thinkers and philosophers from India and world.
• Public/Civil service values and Ethics in Public administration: Status and problems; ethical concerns and dilemmas in government and private institutions; laws, rules, regulations and conscience as sources of ethical guidance; accountability and ethical governance; strengthening of ethical and moral values in governance; ethical issues in international relations and funding; corporate governance.
• Probity in Governance: Concept of public service; Philosophical basis of governance and probity; Information sharing and transparency in government, Right to Information, Codes of Ethics, Codes of Conduct, Citizen's Charters, Work culture, Quality of service delivery, Utilization of public funds, challenges of corruption.
• Case Studies on above issues.

Papers VI and VII — Optional Subject

Two papers of 250 marks each in a single optional subject, set "broadly of the honours degree level i.e. a level higher than the bachelors' degree and lower than the masters' degree." For Engineering, Medical Science and Law the level corresponds to the bachelors' degree.

The full list of 25 subjects, plus literature papers in 23 languages, is in UPSC Optional Subjects List 2026.

Papers A and B — the qualifying language papers

Paper A is one Indian language from the Eighth Schedule; Paper B is English. Both are of Matriculation or equivalent standard, and the pattern is the same for each:

1. Comprehension of given passages.
2. Precis Writing.
3. Usage and Vocabulary.
4. Short Essays.

Paper A adds a fifth component: translation from English to the Indian Language and vice-versa.

The aim, per the notification, is "to test the candidates' ability to read and understand serious discursive prose, and to express ideas clearly and correctly."

The rule that catches people out: all scripts are evaluated simultaneously, but the Essay, General Studies and Optional papers "of only such candidates will be taken cognizance who attain 25% marks in Indian Language and 25% in English." Miss either bar and seven well-written papers are never read.

Paper A is not compulsory for candidates from Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Sikkim, or for candidates with a benchmark disability in the hearing-impairment sub-category who hold an exemption from second or third language courses.

Language of answering

Candidates may answer Papers I to VII in any one language included in the Eighth Schedule, or in English. A candidate who writes Papers I to V in an Indian language still retains the choice to write the optional papers in English.

Date

The notification fixes the Preliminary Examination at 24 May 2026 but does not fix a Mains date — that is set by UPSC's separately published annual Examination Calendar. Check upsc.gov.in rather than a secondary source.