The CLAT 2027 last date to apply is 31 October 2026. The exam follows on Sunday, 6 December 2026, from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM, in pen-and-paper mode. The Consortium of NLUs announced both in its July notification, along with one piece of good news for repeat aspirants: the exam pattern has not changed this year.
This note is organised in the order the next six weeks will actually unfold: finish the form, understand the paper, prepare for admit card day, then think about what comes after.
CLAT 2027 last date to apply: closing the form before 31 October
Whatever the CLAT 2027 last date to apply says on the calendar, treat this week as your real deadline. Not the 31st. The portal tends to slow down in the last twenty-four hours of any national application window, and payment gateways time out at the worst possible moment.
Before you start, assemble the following. A recent passport-size photograph and a scanned signature in the format the portal specifies. Your Class 10 details, since date of birth is taken from there. Class 12 marks, or a statement that you are appearing in 2027. Category and domicile certificates, if you are claiming a reservation. A working email and mobile number, which will be used for every communication, including the admit card.
Treat the category and domicile fields with particular care. Several NLUs run state-domicile and other horizontal quotas, and the data you enter here is the data the counselling stage will rely on. An inconsistency discovered in January is far harder to correct than one noticed today.
Read the final preview page line by line before paying. Fix what you can; once payment is confirmed, assume nothing is editable unless the Consortium says so.
Eligibility, in plain terms
For the undergraduate programme, applicants must have passed Class 12, or be appearing in it in 2027, with a minimum aggregate that has been 45 percent for general candidates and 40 percent for SC and ST candidates in recent notifications. There has been no upper age limit in recent cycles. Check the current notification, because eligibility language is the one area where assumptions get people into trouble.
Postgraduate applicants sit the LL.M. paper on the same day and have their own eligibility criteria.
How the CLAT UG paper is built
The undergraduate paper runs for two hours and carries 120 multiple-choice questions, each worth one mark. A wrong answer costs a quarter mark. The questions are passage-based and are spread across five areas: English language, current affairs including general knowledge, legal reasoning, logical reasoning, and quantitative techniques.
Two features of this design shape every sensible preparation plan. Passages are long, so reading speed is a skill in its own right. And negative marking is small but real, which means blind guessing across the paper is a bad idea while educated elimination is a good one.
Quantitative techniques is the smallest section, drawn from basic mathematics up to Class 10 level. Many aspirants spend less time on it than it deserves. A reliable ten marks there, earned by consistent practice, is a sturdier foundation than hoping for a lucky streak in legal reasoning.
Questions that come up after you submit
Once the form is in, a different set of worries takes over. Here are the ones students raise most often.
When is the admit card released? The Consortium usually releases it about two weeks before the exam, so the fourth week of November is the likely window. Download it at once and print more than one copy. You'll also need a government photo ID, and the name on both should match.
What if I notice a mistake after submitting? Look for a correction facility on the official site. If none is announced, write to the Consortium's helpdesk quickly and keep a record of the exchange.
How many marks do I need? There's no single answer. Cut-offs differ by NLU and category and move each year, and the older NLUs close at far higher ranks than the newer ones. The more useful exercise is to study last year's closing ranks for the three or four NLUs you would actually join, then work out what score that implies.
When will the answer key and result be out? The provisional answer key has been tentatively placed around 9 December, and the result about a week after the exam. Both depend on the Consortium's confirmation.
Can I take other law entrance tests too? Yes, and many applicants do. AILET and the various university-level tests have their own dates, so build a calendar and note clashes now.
Should I begin counselling research now? Yes, a little. Not a full study, but knowing which NLUs you'd accept and what each charges in fees helps you act quickly once the first allotment list appears.
A five-week preparation plan
You have roughly five weeks between the application deadline and the paper. Use them in layers.
In the first two weeks, take one full-length mock every other day and read the solutions slowly. The goal here is diagnosis. Which section eats time? Which type of passage do you misread? Keep a log, in one notebook, with a line per mistake.
In the next two weeks, switch to sectional work on weak areas, plus a daily dose of current affairs. For legal reasoning, practise reading the principle given in the passage and applying only that principle. That sounds obvious, but the commonest error in this section is bringing in outside legal knowledge. The paper rewards you for using the rule it hands you.
Alongside the mocks, build a daily reading habit that has nothing to do with test papers. Spend thirty minutes on a long editorial or a magazine feature, then write two sentences summarising its argument and one sentence saying what the author assumed without proving. That's close to what the passages in English, legal reasoning and logical reasoning ask you to do, and it builds stamina for reading dense text on a Sunday afternoon, which is exactly what the paper demands. For current affairs, keep a single notebook with one line per event and its date, and revise it every weekend rather than rereading everything daily.
In the final week, run two or three mocks at the real exam time, 2 PM on a weekend. The hour matters. Many students perform differently at 2 PM than at 10 AM, and it's better to find out now.
Keep one more thing in mind: the weeks between the deadline and the exam are also when application fatigue sets in. You've done the form, paid the fee, and feel as if something has been achieved. Resist that feeling for a few more weeks, because the paper itself has not been touched yet, and the students who gain most are those who keep the same daily routine through November without needing a deadline to push them.
Exam-day logistics worth planning early
Locate your centre a day before if you can. Pen-and-paper exams reward calm arrivals. Carry the admit card, a valid ID, and the stationery the notice permits, and leave everything else behind. Eat something light before a two-hour paper that begins in the afternoon.
Remember that reporting is expected at least an hour before the start. Plan travel for the traffic you'd face on a Sunday afternoon in your city, not for the best case.
One note on information sources
Every CLAT season brings a flood of coaching posts with "expected" dates for everything. The Consortium's own website is the only place where the schedule, admit card and result will be confirmed. If a date matters to your plan, check the notice itself.