Everything below comes from the Reserve Bank of India's advertisement for the post of Assistant, Panel Year 2025, published on 16 February 2026, and the notices the Bank issued afterwards. This is the newest notified cycle as of 13 November 2026. RBI has not advertised the next cycle yet, so treat this page as the last official pattern, and check opportunities.rbi.org.in when a new advertisement appears. Our own comments are labelled.
Stages at a glance
| Stage | Mode | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Preliminary Examination | Online, multiple choice | Shortlisting for the Main Examination |
| Main Examination | Online, multiple choice | Decides the order of merit |
| Language Proficiency Test (LPT) | At the Bank's Regional Offices | Qualifying; mandatory for every shortlisted candidate |
| Medical fitness and verification of certificates | By the Regional Office applied to | Eligibility check before appointment |
The advertisement describes selection as "through Preliminary Examination, Main Examination and Language Proficiency Test". It lists no interview and no typing test. The educational requirement includes "knowledge of word processing on PC", but the advertisement does not set a separate test for it.
How the cycle actually ran (per RBI notices):
- Applications: 16 February to 8 March 2026, extended by a corrigendum to 23:59 hours on 10 March 2026.
- Edit window: 14 and 15 March 2026, with a correction fee of Rs 200 (inclusive of GST).
- Preliminary Examination: 11 and 13 April 2026. Candidates with centres at Imphal and Kakching sat it on 30 April 2026.
- Main Examination: RBI's Prelims result notice fixed it for 7 June 2026 (Sunday), which is also the tentative date in the advertisement.
- After the Main Examination, RBI published the roll numbers of provisionally shortlisted candidates. That list is subject to clearing the LPT, medical fitness and document verification.
We did not find a final-selection notice for Panel Year 2025 as of 13 November 2026.
Posts, pay and eligibility
- Vacancies: 650 posts across 17 recruiting offices: SC 110, ST 37, OBC 99, EWS 58 and General 346. Mumbai has the most (249) and Thiruvananthapuram the fewest (6). The Bank reserves the right to change the number. The office-wise table is on the cut-off page.
- One office only: you can apply for the vacancies of one office, and you choose an exam centre in the state or states under that office.
- Age: 20 to 28 years as on 1 February 2026 (born between 2 February 1998 and 1 February 2006, both days included). Upper-age relaxation is 5 years for SC and ST, 3 years for OBC, and 10, 13 or 15 years for PwBD depending on category. Relaxations are not cumulative.
- Education: at least a bachelor's degree in any discipline with a minimum of 50% marks in aggregate (pass class for SC, ST and PwBD candidates), and knowledge of word processing on a PC. Ex-servicemen have a separate rule: graduation, or matriculation with at least 15 years of defence service.
- Language: you should be able to read, write, speak and understand the language of the state, or of any of the states, under the recruiting office you apply to.
- Fee: Rs 450 plus 18% GST for General, OBC and EWS candidates. Rs 50 plus 18% GST (intimation charges only) for SC, ST, PwBD and ex-servicemen. RBI staff candidates who meet the Bank's conditions pay nothing.
- Pay: starting basic pay of Rs 29,000 a month in the scale Rs 29,000 to Rs 78,640. The advertisement puts initial monthly gross emoluments at approximately Rs 58,514 without House Rent Allowance. HRA of 15% of pay is paid in addition to those who do not stay in the Bank's accommodation.
Preliminary Examination scheme
| Test | Questions | Marks | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| English Language | 30 | 30 | 20 minutes |
| Numerical Ability | 35 | 35 | 20 minutes |
| Reasoning Ability | 35 | 35 | 20 minutes |
| Total | 100 | 100 | 60 minutes |
- Multiple choice, one mark per question. Negative marking: one-fourth of a mark for each wrong answer.
- The advertisement gives a time against each test, so plan for 20 minutes per test and not a free 60 minutes.
- Apart from the Test of English Language, the tests are available in English, Hindi and certain other languages listed in Appendix-II of the advertisement.
- You have to qualify in each test separately, and on the total.
- Where the exam runs in more than one session, scores are equated across sessions following IBPS's standard practice, and the corrected scores are normalised by the equipercentile method. The cut-offs are applied on these equated marks.
Main Examination scheme
| Test | Questions | Marks | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Test of Reasoning | 40 | 40 | 30 minutes |
| Test of English Language | 40 | 40 | 30 minutes |
| Test of Numerical Ability | 40 | 40 | 30 minutes |
| Test of General Awareness | 40 | 40 | 25 minutes |
| Test of Computer Knowledge | 40 | 40 | 20 minutes |
| Total | 200 | 200 | 135 minutes |
- Multiple choice, one mark per question, with the same one-fourth negative marking.
- General Awareness and Computer Knowledge appear only here. Together they are 80 of the 200 marks, which is 40% of the paper (arithmetic).
- The advertisement says the centres for the Main Examination will be limited, and that requests to change a centre are not entertained.
- Detailed instructions come in an Information Handout that candidates download with the call letter. We have not reproduced that handout here.
Language Proficiency Test
Candidates provisionally shortlisted from the Main Examination must take the LPT. The advertisement is firm about it: the LPT is mandatory, no exemption of any sort is given, and a candidate who is not proficient in the official or local language is disqualified. RBI's shortlist notice adds that the test is of qualifying nature. It is conducted at the Bank's Regional Offices, and the office you applied to tells you the centre after the Main result.
| Recruiting office | Languages for the LPT (Appendix-I) |
|---|---|
| Ahmedabad | Gujarati |
| Bengaluru | Kannada |
| Bhopal | Hindi |
| Bhubaneswar | Odia |
| Chandigarh | Punjabi / Hindi |
| Chennai | Tamil |
| Guwahati | Assamese / Bengali / Khasi / Manipuri / Bodo / Mizo / English (English only for candidates from Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh) |
| Hyderabad | Telugu |
| Jaipur | Hindi |
| Jammu | Urdu / Hindi / Kashmiri |
| Kanpur & Lucknow | Hindi |
| Kolkata | Bengali / Nepali |
| Mumbai | Marathi / Konkani |
| Nagpur | Marathi / Hindi |
| New Delhi | Hindi |
| Patna | Hindi / Maithili |
| Thiruvananthapuram | Malayalam |
The advertisement does not describe the format, marks or duration of the LPT, so this page does not either. Our comment: choose your office with this table open. A high Main score does not help if you cannot read, write and speak the office's language.
Qualifying standards and shortlisting
The advertisement says three things about qualifying:
- A candidate has to qualify in each part of the objective test separately.
- A candidate has to qualify in the Preliminary Examination to appear in the Main Examination.
- Minimum qualifying standards are prescribed by the Bank, and its decision is final.
It does not print the minimum marks in advance. RBI shows them with the result. For the Preliminary Examination of Panel Year 2025, the published sectional cut-offs were:
| Category | English Language (30) | Numerical Ability (35) | Reasoning Ability (35) |
|---|---|---|---|
| General and EWS | 12.00 | 14.00 | 14.00 |
| SC, ST, OBC, PwBD-A, PwBD-C, EXS-2 | 10.50 | 12.25 | 12.25 |
That is 40% of each test for General and EWS and 35% for the second group (arithmetic). Lower sectional cut-offs applied to PwBD-B, PwBD-D&E and EXS-1. These figures belong to that cycle. The Bank can set them differently next time.
Clearing the sectional marks is not enough. The advertisement says an adequate number of candidates in each category are shortlisted in descending order of aggregate marks: approximately 10 times the number of vacancies from the Preliminary Examination, and approximately 2 times the number of vacancies from the Main Examination, subject to availability. On 650 vacancies that is roughly 6,500 for the Main Examination and 1,300 for the LPT (arithmetic, and "approximately" is the Bank's word). The total cut-offs that resulted, office by office, are on the cut-off page.
How the final selection is made
According to the advertisement:
- Candidates are called for the LPT on the aggregate marks of the Main Examination.
- Final selection is "on the basis of candidate's performance in the online examination (in the order of merit)", subject to qualifying in the LPT, medical fitness and verification of certificates to the Bank's satisfaction.
- Vacancies, cut-offs and merit are office-wise. You compete only with candidates who applied to the same office in your category.
- Selected candidates are first posted in the office within the recruitment zone they applied for, and can be transferred within the East, West, North or South zone that the office belongs to.
- The advertisement states no tie-break rule, so we have not given one.
What this means for your attempt strategy
- Break-even for guessing: +1 for a right answer and -0.25 for a wrong one means a guess pays on average only when your chance of being right is better than 1 in 5. If a question has five options, a blind guess sits exactly on that line and gains nothing, so guess only after removing at least one option. The sectional cut-offs make careless negatives costly too. This is arithmetic from the marking scheme, not RBI advice.
- Time per question in Prelims: 40 seconds in English (30 questions in 20 minutes) and about 34 seconds in Numerical Ability and Reasoning (35 questions in 20 minutes).
- Time per question in Mains: 45 seconds in Reasoning, English and Numerical Ability, 37.5 seconds in General Awareness and 30 seconds in Computer Knowledge.
- You cannot carry a weak section. Each test has its own cut-off and its own clock, so a strong Reasoning score does not rescue a failed English section.
- The total cut-off is the real bar. In Panel Year 2025 the General cut-off on the Prelims total was above 90 out of 100 in every office. See cut-offs and preparation strategy.
Practise in this format: a 10-question mini-mock is free to try, and so is the Daily Dangal quiz. Full Prelims-pattern mocks and topic practice are Pro.
What this page does not have
- The pattern for the next cycle. RBI has not advertised it as of 13 November 2026. The scheme above is from the Panel Year 2025 advertisement.
- The list of exam languages in Appendix-II and the list of centres in Appendix-III. We did not open those appendices, so we have not reproduced them.
- The format, marks and duration of the Language Proficiency Test. The advertisement does not give them.
- The Information Handout issued with the call letter, including the number of options per question.
- A tie-break rule and the exact dates on which RBI published each result. We did not find them stated in the documents we opened.
Related: Syllabus · Cut-offs · Preparation strategy