UPSC NDA & NA (II) 2026 Answer Key: Expected Release, QPRep Objection Window & Score Estimate

Exam Snapshot / परीक्षा अवलोकन

Important Dates & Event Schedule / तिथियां

Answer Key & Objection Window Highlights / उत्तर कुंजी मुख्य बिंदु

Raw Score Calculation Formula / प्राप्तांक गणना नियम

Answer Key Download & Challenge Instructions / निर्देश

UPSC releases the provisional NDA answer key through its QPRep objection portal within days of the written exam. Based on the NDA 1 2026 cycle, where the key came out just four days after the exam, the NDA 2 2026 provisional answer key for Mathematics and GAT is expected soon after the 13 September exam.

Because the NDA 2 2026 written exam is still ahead of us on the calendar — scheduled for 13 September 2026 — there is, as of this update, no provisional answer key to check yet, and any website claiming to already have one should be treated with suspicion until UPSC's own QPRep portal goes live after the exam. What can be said with real confidence, though, is how the process is likely to unfold, because UPSC has now run this exact playbook once already in 2026 for the NDA 1 cycle, and the results were unusually fast by the commission's historical standards. For NDA 1 2026, held on 12 April, UPSC released the provisional answer key for both the Mathematics and General Ability Test papers on 16 April — just four days after the exam — through the QPRep (Question Paper Representation) portal, a considerably quicker turnaround than the multi-week or even multi-month gaps that used to be typical for UPSC's defence-exam answer keys in earlier years. The objection window that followed ran for exactly five days, from 18 to 22 April 2026 until 6:00 PM, during which candidates who believed a specific question had an incorrect or ambiguous marked answer could log in and formally raise a representation with supporting justification, rather than simply being handed a static, unchallengeable PDF. If UPSC maintains this same cadence for NDA 2 2026 — and there is no indication so far that it won't — candidates appearing on 13 September should reasonably expect the provisional answer key to appear on the QPRep portal within roughly four to seven days of the exam, likely in the third or fourth week of September 2026, followed by a similarly short, five-day-or-so objection window. It is worth being precise about what the provisional key will and will not tell a candidate once it does arrive: it lets you calculate your own approximate raw score using UPSC's standard NDA marking formula, but it will not, by itself, confirm whether you have cleared the written qualifying threshold, because UPSC has never published an official written-stage cutoff for NDA at any point in the answer-key or result process — that information, along with individual marks, only becomes available (if at all, in scorecard form) much later in the cycle. The marking scheme itself is fixed and worth knowing well ahead of exam day rather than learning for the first time at the answer-key stage: Mathematics, worth 300 marks across 120 questions, awards 2.5 marks for every correct answer and deducts roughly 0.83 marks (one-third of 2.5) for every incorrect one, while the General Ability Test, worth 600 marks across 150 questions, awards 4 marks per correct answer and deducts roughly 1.33 marks (one-third of 4) per incorrect one — in both papers, questions left unattempted carry no penalty at all, which is why serious aspirants build their exam-day strategy around a deliberate accuracy threshold rather than attempting every single question regardless of confidence. Unlike UPSC's civil-services exams, where one paper is purely qualifying and only the other feeds into the merit calculation, both NDA papers count fully toward the 900-mark written total, and there is no internal qualifying-only component to worry about — a candidate's overall written score is simply the sum of their Mathematics and GAT raw scores after negative marking is applied. Once the provisional key and its objection window have both closed, UPSC compiles a final answer key incorporating any accepted objections, though this finalised key, like the individual marks and the official cutoff, is not published separately for public download in the way the provisional key is; it feeds directly into the written result UPSC eventually declares as a roll-number qualifying list. In the meantime, the practical value of the provisional answer key for NDA 2 2026 aspirants will be almost entirely forward-looking: candidates whose self-assessed score sits comfortably above the historical cutoff range — roughly 350 to 365 out of 900 for the General category, based on the most recent NDA 1 2026 and NDA 2 2025 trend lines — typically use the weeks immediately following the answer key's release to pivot straight into SSB preparation, given how much lead time a genuinely thorough five-day SSB process demands compared to the relatively compressed written-exam prep window. Working through a worked example makes the marking scheme far more intuitive than reading the formula alone: a candidate who attempts 100 of the 120 Mathematics questions and gets 80 right and 20 wrong would score (80 x 2.5) - (20 x 0.83), which works out to 200 minus roughly 16.6, or about 183.4 marks out of 300 — leaving the remaining 20 questions unattempted costs nothing beyond the marks those questions could theoretically have added, since UPSC applies zero penalty to blanks. Run the same logic on GAT: a candidate answering 130 of 150 questions, with 100 correct and 30 incorrect, would score (100 x 4) - (30 x 1.33), or 400 minus roughly 40, for about 360 out of 600. Add the two papers together and that hypothetical candidate lands at roughly 543 out of 900 — comfortably above every recent cycle's estimated cutoff, illustrating why accuracy-first attempting, rather than maximizing the raw number of questions attempted, tends to serve NDA aspirants better than an all-out attempt-everything approach. On the QPRep objection process itself, it is worth knowing what actually qualifies as valid grounds for a representation, since UPSC does not entertain generic disagreement with a marked answer: valid objections typically cite a factual error in the marked option, an ambiguity where more than one option can be defended as correct based on standard reference material, or a genuine discrepancy between the English and Hindi versions of a bilingual question paper — vague objections without supporting reference material are routinely rejected without individual response, and UPSC's own guidance stresses that only representations backed by authoritative textbook or NCERT-level references are reviewed by the subject-expert panel. Once the panel completes its review, UPSC either retains the original key, drops the disputed question from evaluation entirely (in which case marks are awarded to every candidate regardless of their answer choice), or occasionally re-keys the question to a different option — any of these three outcomes can shift a candidate's effective raw score by a small margin, which is exactly why serious aspirants track the final compiled key rather than relying solely on the provisional version to estimate where they stand.

चूंकि एनडीए-2 2026 की लिखित परीक्षा अभी 13 सितंबर 2026 को होनी है, इसलिए फिलहाल इस चक्र के लिए कोई उत्तर कुंजी उपलब्ध नहीं है। संदर्भ के लिए, एनडीए-1 2026 (परीक्षा 12 अप्रैल) की अनंतिम उत्तर कुंजी परीक्षा के केवल चार दिन बाद, 16 अप्रैल 2026 को, क्यूपीरेप पोर्टल के माध्यम से जारी की गई थी, और आपत्ति दर्ज करने की खिड़की 18 से 22 अप्रैल तक पांच दिनों के लिए खुली थी। यदि यूपीएससी यही गति बनाए रखता है, तो एनडीए-2 2026 की उत्तर कुंजी सितंबर के तीसरे-चौथे सप्ताह के आसपास जारी होने की उम्मीद है। स्कोर गणना: गणित में सही उत्तर पर 2.5 अंक, गलत उत्तर पर 0.83 अंक की कटौती (कुल 300 अंक); जीएटी में सही उत्तर पर 4 अंक, गलत उत्तर पर 1.33 अंक की कटौती (कुल 600 अंक)। अनुत्तरित प्रश्नों पर कोई नकारात्मक अंकन नहीं है। आधिकारिक कट-ऑफ और व्यक्तिगत अंक पूरी चयन प्रक्रिया (एसएसबी सहित) समाप्त होने के बाद ही उपलब्ध होते हैं।

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