JEE Main vs JEE Advanced: What's Actually Different
CompetitionBazaar Research Team · 19 August 2026
How JEE Main and JEE Advanced actually differ: who conducts each, what each one admits you to, and why clearing JEE Main doesn't require clearing JEE Advanced too.
JEE Main and JEE Advanced are often talked about as one continuous exam, but they're run by different bodies, serve different purposes, and lead to different sets of colleges.
JEE Main is conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA). It does two separate jobs at once: it's the entrance exam that NITs, IIITs, and other Centrally Funded Technical Institutes (CFTIs) use directly through JoSAA counselling, and it's also the qualifying exam that decides who is even allowed to attempt JEE Advanced. A candidate who wants an NIT or IIIT seat does not need to clear JEE Advanced at all — a JEE Main rank alone can get them into JoSAA's counselling for those institutes.
JEE Advanced is conducted separately by the seven Zonal Coordinating IITs, under the Joint Admission Board (JAB), on a rotating basis each year. It is the sole route into undergraduate seats at the IITs. Only candidates who rank within a cutoff set by the JAB each cycle among JEE Main's Paper 1 candidates are even eligible to register for JEE Advanced — so JEE Main functions as a qualifying filter for JEE Advanced, on top of being a full entrance exam in its own right.
JEE Main is held across two sessions in a year (commonly called the January and April sessions), and a candidate's better score across the two is what counts. JEE Advanced is held once, and requires attempting both of its papers (Paper 1 and Paper 2) — a candidate who misses either paper gets no result at all.
Both exams draw from the same broad Class 11-12 Physics-Chemistry-Mathematics syllabus, but JEE Advanced is generally regarded as testing that material with more depth and more application-heavy problem-solving, while JEE Main's question style is comparatively more direct.
Finally, clearing JEE Advanced doesn't automatically hand you an IIT seat — like JEE Main candidates aiming for NITs/IIITs, JEE Advanced qualifiers still have to separately register with JoSAA and fill in their institute-and-branch preferences before any seat is actually allocated.