The Medical Counselling Committee has put out the Round 2 seat matrix for NEET UG 2026 counselling. It came on 3 September, as three separate PDFs covering MBBS, BDS and B.Sc Nursing: a clear vacancy list, a virtual vacancy list, and a list of newly added seats.
We read all three in full. Here is what they contain.
The headline numbers
- 11,302 seats are on the clear vacancy list.
- 12,283 seats are on the virtual vacancy list.
- 659 seats are new, added at 13 colleges.
For scale, MCC’s Round 1 seat matrix carried 31,728 seats in total. So the clear vacancy list is a little over a third of the pool that Round 1 started with.
Of the 11,302 clear vacancy seats, 9,870 are MBBS, 1,121 are BDS and 311 are B.Sc Nursing. There are 272 seats reserved for candidates with a disability.
Clear vacancy and virtual vacancy are not the same seats
The two numbers should never be added together.
MCC does not define either term. It is not in the 2026 information bulletin, not in the Round 2 schedule, and not anywhere on the MCC website. So we checked the lists against MCC’s own Round 1 final allotment result instead, matching college, quota, course and category.
The answer is clean. Every seat on the virtual vacancy list was a seat MCC allotted in Round 1. All 12,142 of the MBBS and BDS seats we could match, which is 100 per cent of them. These are seats that already have a candidate sitting on them, someone who chose to Float rather than Freeze. The seat opens up only if that candidate actually moves to a better one in Round 2.
The clear vacancy list behaves differently. Only 83 per cent of it maps to seats Round 1 allotted. Over a thousand of those seats were never filled at all.
Put simply: clear vacancy is what is free right now. Virtual vacancy is what may come free, and only if the upgrades happen.
Half the vacant MBBS seats need money, not just rank
This is the part the headline count hides. Of the 9,870 vacant MBBS seats, 4,908 sit in deemed universities. Break those down and 3,530 are self-financed merit seats and 1,317 are NRI seats. The rest are minority quota seats.
That leaves 4,962 MBBS seats in the government, central university, AIIMS, ESIC and JIPMER pool. So a little over half the vacant MBBS seats sit outside the deemed university fee bracket.
The same pattern shows up when you sort by college. The twelve largest single pools of vacant seats are all deemed universities. J R Medical College in Villupuram has 213 vacant seats. Sri Lakshmi Narayana Institute in Puducherry has 192. Karpaga Vinayaga in Tamil Nadu has 150.
Where the seats are
Vacancy is heavily concentrated in the south and west.
| State | Clear vacancy | Of which deemed |
|---|---|---|
| Tamil Nadu | 2,508 | 1,880 |
| Karnataka | 1,539 | 1,094 |
| Maharashtra | 1,476 | 990 |
| Uttar Pradesh | 625 | 82 |
| Puducherry | 580 | 514 |
| Telangana | 459 | 177 |
| Rajasthan | 415 | 0 |
Tamil Nadu alone holds 22 per cent of the entire clear vacancy, and three quarters of that is deemed university seats. Rajasthan, by contrast, has 415 vacant seats and not one of them is in a deemed university.
The 659 new seats
Thirteen colleges brought new seats into the All India Quota pool for Round 2. Two of them account for well over a third of the total: Karpaga Vinayaga Institute of Medical Sciences added 150 MBBS seats, and its dental college added 100 BDS seats.
Four more deemed universities added 50 MBBS seats each. Aarupadai Veedu in Puducherry, Dhanalakshmi Srinivasan and J R Medical College in Tamil Nadu, and Graphic Era in Dehradun.
The government additions are smaller and spread out. Tomo Riba Institute in Arunachal Pradesh, Bongaigaon Medical College in Assam and the Autonomous State Medical College at Lakhimpur Kheri in Uttar Pradesh each added 15 MBBS seats. Government Dental College Ahmedabad added 18 BDS seats and Government Dental College Thrissur added 7.
The remaining 139 seats are B.Sc Nursing seats at two Delhi colleges, Florence Nightingale College of Nursing and the College of Nursing at Lady Hardinge Medical College. All 139 are marked female only.
Round 2 dates
From MCC’s Round 2 schedule dated 27 August:
- Registration and payment: 3 to 8 September. Registration closes at 3:00 PM on 8 September, payment at 6:00 PM.
- Choice filling: 3 to 9 September, open until 10:00 AM on 9 September.
- Choice locking: 4:00 PM on 8 September to 10:00 AM on 9 September.
- Seat allotment processing: 9 and 10 September.
- Result: 11 September.
- Reporting and joining: 12 to 18 September.
All times are server time.
What this means when you fill choices
A candidate allotted a seat in Round 1 has three options under the MCC bulletin. Freeze means keeping the allotted seat and dropping out of upgradation. Float means giving willingness to be upgraded in the next round. Resign means giving up the seat.
The vacancy lists sit behind that decision in a specific way. Seats on the clear vacancy list are available in Round 2 regardless of what anyone else does. Seats on the virtual vacancy list depend on a candidate ahead of you moving on, and there is no way to know in advance whether that will happen. A choice list built only on virtual vacancy seats carries that uncertainty. A choice list built only on clear vacancy seats does not, but it is also a smaller list.
Which way to go is your decision and your family’s. We lay out what the numbers say and stop there.
Official links
- MCC Clear Vacancy, Round 2, UG 2026 (PDF)
- MCC Virtual Vacancy, Round 2, UG 2026 (PDF)
- MCC Newly Added Seats, Round 2, UG 2026 (PDF)
- MCC UG Medical Counselling portal
Source: Medical Counselling Committee, Round 2 seat matrix for NEET UG 2026, published 3 September 2026, and the MCC Round 2 counselling schedule dated 27 August 2026. Seat counts in this article were read from the three MCC PDFs and reconcile exactly with the totals MCC prints in each document.