CAT Syllabus 2026: What the Papers Test and How to Check a Course

As of 7 November 2026, CAT 2026 is scheduled for 29 November 2026, in three sessions, conducted by IIM Indore. There is no official topic list. The exam has three sections: Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension (VARC), Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning (DILR) and Quantitative Ability (QA). The information bulletin on the official CAT website gives the 2026 paper as 68 questions, 204 marks and 120 minutes, split 24, 22 and 22 across VARC, DILR and QA.

Data Interpretation (DI) means reading tables and charts. Logical Reasoning (LR) means solving puzzles, arrangements and grouping problems. Quantitative Ability is the maths section.

Every topic list online, including a PDF titled "syllabus", is compiled from past papers. Read the information bulletin on the official CAT website yourself, because it is the only document that governs the exam.

Old PDFs also describe an older exam. DILR rose from 20 to 22 questions in 2025, taking the paper from 66 to 68 questions, according to the official CAT information bulletins on iimcat.ac.in. A 2018 or 2019 file therefore cannot tell you the current split.

Each page groups and trims topics differently, and the exam is not different. Four widely read syllabus pages list between about 8 and 28 Quant topics (read on 7 November 2026). We counted each named topic or sub-topic once, including a group heading such as Arithmetic where the page lists it as an item beside its sub-topics. Counts are approximate, because one page lists "Arithmetic" and its sub-topics separately and another lists them together.

The longest lists include items such as analogies, fill-in-the-blanks and critical reasoning in VARC. The 2025 slot breakdowns we checked show the 8 verbal ability questions as para-based tasks, with no analogies or fill-in-the-blanks. That does not prove those items can never return. It does mean you should not assume a long list is a safer list.

Weightage percentages on some of these pages are harder to trust than topic lists, because they do not show the papers they were counted from. The next section shows a count you can redo.

In all three CAT 2025 slots (the three sittings held on exam day), 16 of the 24 VARC questions were reading comprehension (RC), and Arithmetic plus Algebra made up 47 of the 66 Quant questions across the slots. These counts come from a published topic-wise analysis of CAT 2025 by an education portal.

Quant (22 questions per slot)

Our working: Arithmetic 27 plus Algebra 20 is 47, and 47 divided by 66 is 71%. Modern Maths means permutation and combination, probability and set theory.

VARC (24 questions). RC is 16 questions, which is 67% of the section. The other 8 are verbal ability questions: parajumbles (re-ordering jumbled sentences), para summary and odd sentence out. GradSquare's reports for slot 1, slot 2 and slot 3 match on RC and also list para completion.

DILR (22 questions per slot, 66 across three). The same analysis classifies 39 as logical reasoning, 12 as data interpretation and 15 as mixed DI-LR caselets (short data sets mixing text and numbers). Those are 59%, 18% and 23%, which add to 100%. Pure chart-reading was the smallest group, and logic-heavy sets were the largest.

Limits. Labelling a question as Arithmetic or Algebra is a judgement. GradSquare's slot reports match the portal analysis in slot 1. In slot 2 they give Arithmetic 9 (not 8), Number System 3 (not 2) and Modern Maths 0 (not 2). In slot 3 they give Algebra 7 (not 6) and Geometry 3 (not 4). On GradSquare's counts, Arithmetic plus Algebra is 17, 16 and 16, which is 49 of 66 (74%). This is also one year of papers. We would treat the pattern (RC first, then Arithmetic and Algebra) as a strong guide and the exact counts as approximate. Repeat the count on the previous papers you practise with.

Ask the provider for its module list, then test it with five checks, each with a pass and a fail. The checks below are our recommendation, built on the 2025 counts above.

Send the provider this message and keep the reply:

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Study reading comprehension, Arithmetic and Algebra first, then Geometry and Mensuration, then DILR set practice, and leave Number System and Modern Maths for last. This is our recommendation from the 2025 counts, not an official plan.