You are filling the CAT 2026 form, everything is going fine, and then you hit the "select your preferred cities" field and freeze. Five slots. A dropdown of 170-odd cities. And a nagging feeling that this small box matters more than it looks. You are right that it matters, and you are also right that nobody explains it properly — every guide just says "pick five cities" and moves on. This blog is the honest version of CAT test city selection: which city goes first, what happens if your choice fills up, and the one mistake that traps aspirants every single year.
Here is the thing to understand before you touch that dropdown. You do not choose your exam centre. You choose cities, in order, and the conducting IIM allots you one centre inside one of those cities based on your preference and seat availability. Once that centre lands on your admit card, it is final. No changes. That is why CAT test city selection is a decision, not a formality.
How CAT Test City Selection Actually Works
The mechanics are simple once someone spells them out. During the CAT 2026 form, you pick up to five cities and rank them one to five. IIM Indore, the expected convening IIM this year, tries to give you a centre in your first-choice city. If that city is full, it moves to your second choice, then third, and so on. The exam runs across roughly 170 cities and 370-plus computer labs, in three slots on one day in late November.
So your ranking is doing real work. CAT test city selection is not five equal options — it is a priority list, and the system respects the order. Put the city you actually want first, because that is the one it tries hardest to give you. Sound CAT test city selection means aspirants who scatter their choices randomly, or list far-off cities out of some vague "backup" logic, are the ones who end up allotted somewhere inconvenient.
One hard fact worth repeating, because it catches people out: the centre allotted on your admit card cannot be changed afterwards. The only chance to edit your city preferences is during the correction window, which usually opens in late September, after registration closes. After that, whatever the system gave you is where you sit. Getting your CAT test city selection right the first time is far easier than hoping the correction window saves you.
The Mistakes Aspirants Make Every Year
The first mistake is treating a small home town as an automatic safe first choice. If your city has only one or two labs, those seats fill fast, especially near the registration deadline. When they run out, the system pushes you to your next preference — which, if you filled it carelessly, could be three hours away. A small city is fine as first choice only if you also rank a realistic bigger city nearby as your second.
The second mistake is picking cities you have no connection to. Some aspirants list a random metro because they heard "the centres are better there," then get allotted a place where they have no idea about the route, traffic, or where to stay the night before. Good CAT test city selection is about a centre you can actually reach calmly on exam morning, not a centre that looks nicer on paper.
The third mistake is leaving preferences blank or duplicating. If you only fill two cities and both fill up, you have handed the system a hard problem and yourself a bad outcome. Use all five slots, in genuine order of what works for you. It costs nothing and it is the cheapest insurance in the whole CAT test city selection process, so skipping it makes no sense.
Consider a real pattern that repeats every cycle. Take an aspirant in a small town like Nanded, whose town has just one test lab. She lists Nanded first and leaves the other four slots blank because "that is where I want to sit." She registers in the second week of September, near the deadline. By then Nanded's single lab is full, the system has nothing else from her to work with, and she is allotted a centre in a city four hours away that she has never visited. None of that was bad luck — it was three avoidable errors stacked together: one weak first choice, four empty slots, and late registration. A second aspirant in the same town who ranked Nanded first, its nearest bigger city second, and three more realistic options after that, and who registered in the first week, sat comfortably in his own town. Same town, opposite outcomes — decided entirely by CAT test city selection.
The Registration-Timing Angle Nobody Mentions
Here is a detail the coaching blogs skip because it does not sell a course. Seats in popular cities fill on a first-come basis as registration progresses. Registration is expected to open around 1 August 2026 and stay open till roughly mid-to-late September, but experts quietly advise finishing before mid-August. The reason is simple: the earlier you register, the better your odds of getting your top-choice city before its labs fill. So CAT test city selection is partly a timing game — a strong preference list submitted in the last week is weaker than the same list submitted in the first week.
This is also why "I'll do the form later, prep first" is a false economy. The form takes an hour, and settling your CAT test city selection early locks in your best shot at a convenient centre and takes one variable off your plate for the two months of actual preparation that follow.
Getting It Right for Your Specific Case
The tricky part is that the best CAT test city selection depends on your exact geography — where you live, which bigger city is genuinely reachable, whether you would rather travel and stay over for a calmer centre or stay local. A generic list cannot answer that for you, and the official portal certainly will not advise you.
This is where a short conversation with someone who has already sat CAT helps more than another checklist. Someone who chose their own cities, got allotted a centre, and travelled to it can tell you whether your home-city-first plan is safe or risky, and what the exam-morning logistics actually felt like. Platforms like eSalahKaar let you talk to verified people who have been through the CAT process, at per-minute pricing, so you pay only for the actual conversation rather than a big package. Worth bookmarking if you want to pressure-test your city list before you submit the form.
The point of that call is not to be handed a list of cities. It is to sanity-check your own CAT test city selection against someone who remembers the real trade-offs between convenience, seat availability, and exam-day calm.
Other Ways to Get This Right
A mentorship call is one way to get your CAT test city selection right, not the only one. Here are other legitimate routes, honestly weighed:
Read the official CAT notification carefully. The notification released in late July spells out the exact number of city preferences, the correction window dates, and the process. Free and authoritative — but it tells you the rules, not what is smart for your situation.
Ask on aspirant communities. Threads on PaGaLGuY and similar forums are full of people describing which cities got them convenient centres and which did not, city by city. Free and specific — you just have to filter the outdated and the anxious posts.
Talk to a senior who took CAT recently. Someone from your own college or network who sat the exam last year knows the local centres and can tell you which are easy to reach. Costs nothing; the catch is their experience is limited to their own city.
Do a quick map check before you rank. For each city you are considering, look at where its known test labs sit and how you would reach them at 7am. Ten minutes of this beats any generic advice about your CAT test city selection.
Each has a trade-off. The notification is authoritative but not personalised. Communities are specific but noisy. A senior is grounded but narrow. A map check is quick but only as good as your own judgement. Do the free things first and use a paid conversation only if you are genuinely stuck between two real options.
A Simple Rule of Thumb
If you want one clean heuristic for CAT test city selection: rank the city you can reach most calmly first, put a reliable bigger city with many labs second, and fill the remaining three with realistic nearby options — never blanks, never random metros. Register early enough that your first choice still has seats. That single approach avoids almost every trap that catches aspirants each year.
The One Thing to Do This Week
Before the form even opens, decide your top two cities and why. Write them down. When registration goes live around 1 August, you will not freeze at the dropdown — you will fill it in two minutes and move on to actual preparation. Good CAT test city selection is not complicated; it just rewards the aspirant who thought about it for ten minutes instead of clicking in a panic on the last day. Which two cities are yours?
If you want an outside read on your city list before you submit, you can see how a per-minute call works on the how it works page, and the FAQ covers the common doubts about pricing and how the conversations are structured.