Six different vacancy numbers are in circulation. Coaching sites publish Prelims syllabus tables with no source and contradict each other — and themselves. BPSC has had to ask candidates publicly to trust official notices only. So here is every claim we could find, graded by how good the evidence actually is. Sources are linked. Nothing is smoothed over.
Last reviewed: 19 August 2026
Yes — advertisement 14/2026, dated 18 August 2026, 24 pages. This is the real one: category-wise vacancies, eligibility, the exam pattern for both stages, and the application schedule. It is not the short press note of 11 Feb 2026 that was mistaken for it for six months. Everything below is now answered from this document rather than from press reports.
1 September to 30 September 2026. Payment opens the same day but closes a day earlier, on 29 September. Fee is ₹100 per level — apply for two levels and you pay twice — plus ₹200 biometric fee if you do not enter an Aadhaar number. Every certificate you claim must be issued on or before 30 September 2026; if the deadline is extended, that certificate date is not extended with it.
Still not announced — and now that is a much stronger statement. The advertisement is the document that would carry the date, we have read all 24 pages of it, and it gives an application window and nothing more. Mains cannot be dated yet even in principle, because you apply for it separately after the Prelims result. The “22–27 September” still circulating is BPSC's own tentative calendar entry for the old single-paper design, under a header reading “All dates are tentative” and an advertisement number of “NA”. Headlines saying “Exam Date Out” this week are recycling it.
32,388, now advertised rather than merely requisitioned: 3,847 (classes 1–5) + 8,563 (6–8) + 3,877 (9–10) + 16,101 (11–12). Every subject row and every category row in the advertisement sums exactly to its printed total. Classes 11–12 alone are 49.7% of the exam, and Chemistry alone is 3,695 posts. Vacancies for Bangla, Maithili, Bhojpuri, Magahi, Pali, Prakrit, Arabic, Farsi, Fine Arts, Dance, Agriculture and Special School teachers are not in this count and will be notified separately.
Yes, settled. §4 of the advertisement: selection is on the basis of a Preliminary and a Main examination, and successful Prelims candidates will be invited to apply for Mains separately. That last part matters — clearing Prelims does not carry you into Mains automatically; you file a second application, and any discrepancy between the two can cost you the Mains seat.
General Studies only: 150 questions, 150 marks, 2 hours, one mark each. One single paper for every level and every subject — a Class-1 Urdu candidate and a Class-12 Chemistry candidate sit exactly the same paper. The syllabus is BPSC's standard civil-services GS paper, not a teaching paper: general science, current affairs, Indian and Bihar history, general geography, Bihar's geographical divisions and rivers, Indian polity and economy, changes in Bihar's economy since independence, the national movement and Bihar's role in it, and general mental ability. Four of those nine areas are Bihar-specific.
No. The advertisement calls it महज जाँच परीक्षा — merely a screening test. Its marks never reach the merit list; the entire final ranking comes from Mains. So Prelims is pass-or-go-home, and a high Prelims score buys you nothing but certainty. Qualifying marks are 40% general, 36.5% BC, 34% EBC, 32% for SC/ST/women/PwD. The shortlist for Mains is 2.5 to 10 times the vacancies, and everyone on the same category cut-off goes through.
Yes, one-third of a mark for every wrong answer, in both Prelims and Mains — and there is a trap in how it is applied. Each question has five options, A to E, where (E) means “I do not wish to answer”. If you leave a question completely blank, you are docked one-third anyway, exactly as if you had answered it wrong. To skip a question without losing marks you must actively darken (E). TRE 1–3 had no negative marking at all, so every candidate carrying habits from those papers is exposed to this twice over.
Objective MCQ, 150 questions, 150 marks — not the 300 that circulated for months, which was Rajasthan REET's figure borrowed by analogy. There are four papers, one per level. Classes 6–8, 9–10 and 11–12 all split 30 language + 40 general studies + 80 subject, and the merit comes from the last two, so the subject paper is two-thirds of your score. Classes 1–5 are the exception: 30 language + 120 general studies, no subject paper at all, and merit from the general studies part alone.
The advertisement contradicts itself. Its exam-structure table on pages 14–15 gives 2 hours 30 minutes for all four papers; the summary bullet on page 16 says the duration will be 2 hours. Both are in the same official document. We show 2:30, because it is the specific per-paper figure and it appears four times against the bullet's once — but this is an open question until BPSC issues a corrigendum, and anyone stating either figure without qualification has not read both pages.
Confirmed, and it is identical across all four levels: Part I is 30 questions on English plus one of Hindi, Urdu or Bangla, you need at least 30% in it, and those marks do not enter the merit list. It is purely an elimination — the only paper in the exam where a good score is worth nothing and a poor one ends your candidature. Two of the most-read Bihar aggregator sites list this paper without mentioning that it eliminates.
Between 2.5 and 10 times the notified vacancies — a very wide band, roughly 81,000 to 324,000 candidates. Everyone scoring the same as the category cut-off is taken through. One thing the advertisement does not say: whether that ratio is applied to the total overall, or separately per level, subject and category. The category-wise cut-off wording points to the latter, but it is not spelled out — so treat any per-subject shortlist estimate you are shown as invented, including ours.
Confirmed means an official BPSC or government document says so — a newspaper reporting one is not enough on its own, and a coaching site never is. Reported means credible press with no official document behind it. Disputed means the sources actively contradict each other. Not stated means nobody has published it, so anything you have read about it was invented.
BPSC has now said so: advertisement 14/2026 confirms Prelims and Mains, with Prelims qualifying only. Your syllabus was already tagged for the split, so it happened without anything to re-learn. We still show no exam countdown, because no exam date has been announced — only an application window, which has its own page. We would rather show you nothing than a confident guess.
The syllabus is the same under both patterns. Only the last few weeks differ, so there is nothing to wait for.