: I found no official numeric cut-off for UPPSC Review Officer (RO) and Assistant Review Officer (ARO) in either of the two cycles that searches mix together. The 2023 cycle ended with a provisional final result on 5 April 2026, and the notice reportedly said marks and category-wise, post-wise cut-offs would be posted later. As of 16 October, a guide by ExamDetail said that follow-up had not appeared on uppsc.up.nic.in. The new 2026 recruitment is only at the application stage, so it has no cut-off at all. I could not open the Commission’s website myself, so everything below is as reported by job portals and needs checking against it.
The short answer
There is no UPPSC RO ARO cut-off for 2026. A prelims cut-off cannot exist before a prelims has been held, and the new cycle’s prelims date is not announced. For the completed 2023 cycle, the Commission’s own category-wise and post-wise cut-offs had not been posted when I last found a dated report.
Many pages show a table headed ‘UPPSC RO ARO Cut Off 2026 (expected)’. Those numbers are the page-writer’s estimate. They come from no official source, and the Commission does not publish expected cut-offs. ExamDetail’s guide, which I found more careful than most, says an older version of its own page gave approximate ranges such as 130 to 145 and that this was a mistake, because an RO ARO cut-off has to be tied to a specific cycle, stage, category and post. It now publishes numbers only when they match an official notice. That is the right standard, and it is the one I have followed here: this article gives no cut-off figure.
What it does give is the structure of the exam and the numbers from the last completed cycle. Those tell you how competitive the exam is and what a cut-off will be measuring, which is more use than a guessed mark.
Two cycles, easily confused
| 2023 cycle | 2026 cycle | |
|---|---|---|
| Advertisement | A-7/E-1/2023, dated 9 October 2023 | Reported as A-4/E-1/2026 (short notification) |
| Posts | 411 advertised, 419 selected | 501 reported (one outlet says 502: 129 RO, 373 ARO) |
| Status | Complete; final result provisional, 5 April 2026 | Applications reported to open 26 October 2026 |
| Cut-off | Promised in the result notice; not found | Not possible yet |
A reader who searches for the cut-off will find pages about both and sometimes a mix of the two in one paragraph. When you see a figure, ask which cycle it belongs to.
What the 2023 cycle actually looked like
The timeline below follows ExamDetail’s account, which cites UPPSC notices and news reports. Where a date is marked as reported, ExamDetail says the official PDF is no longer available.
| Stage | Date or outcome |
|---|---|
| Advertisement and applications | 9 October 2023, 411 posts |
| First prelims | 11 February 2024, cancelled after paper-leak complaints |
| Prelims held again | 27 July 2025 (reported) |
| Prelims result | 16 September 2025 (reported); 7,509 qualified for mains |
| Mains | 2 and 3 February 2026; 5,930 appeared |
| ARO typing test | 16 to 19 February 2026 |
| Final result | 5 April 2026; 419 provisionally selected (338 RO, 81 ARO) |
The 7,509 who qualified for mains were made up of 6,093 for RO, 1,386 for ARO and 30 for ARO (Accounts).
Run the figures and the competition becomes concrete. About 6,093 RO candidates qualified for mains against 338 RO selections, which is roughly 18 for each seat. For ARO, about 1,416 qualified against 81 selections, roughly 17 or 18 for each. Of those who qualified, 5,930 actually sat the mains, about 79 per cent. Against the 419 final posts, that is about 14 candidates sitting mains for every place.
Three lessons follow. The first is that the prelims is a filter and not the contest. It reduced a very large field to a list of about 15 times the vacancies, according to the advertisement as ExamDetail summarises it. The second is that the real competition happened in mains. The third, easy to miss, is time. From advertisement to final result took about two and a half years, mostly because the first prelims was cancelled. No one should plan a career around a fixed annual rhythm for this exam.
What a cut-off will measure in this exam
Because the 2023 advertisement said final merit is prepared from marks in the main written examination, the cut-off that decides selection is a mains cut-off. The prelims has its own cut-off, but it only decides who gets into the mains.
ExamDetail reports the 2023 prelims as two objective papers: General Studies with 140 questions and 140 marks in two hours, and General Hindi with 60 questions and 60 marks in one hour, 200 marks in all. The mains was 400 marks: General Studies 120, General Hindi and Drafting 160 (100 marks conventional, 60 objective), and a Hindi essay of 120.
So the cut-offs you will eventually see are likely to be of two kinds. A prelims cut-off out of 200, which decides whether you move on, and a mains cut-off out of 400, which decides whether you are selected. They are not comparable, and quoting one as if it were the other is a common mistake on coaching pages. Both are also usually category-wise, and for RO ARO they may be post-wise as well, since RO and ARO and ARO (Accounts) have separate lists.
There is a floor underneath all this that is not the cut-off. The 2023 advertisement reportedly set a minimum efficiency standard of 35 per cent for SC and ST candidates and 40 per cent for others. Meeting it makes you eligible to be considered. It does not make you competitive, and the real cut-off is expected to sit well above it.
Negative marking and the arithmetic of guessing
The 2023 advertisement reportedly applied a penalty of one-third of a question’s marks for each wrong answer in the objective papers, with no penalty for leaving a question blank. If the new advertisement keeps that rule and the questions have four options, as UPPSC objective questions normally do, a blind guess has an expected score of zero: a one in four chance of gaining one mark against a three in four chance of losing a third of a mark. If you can eliminate even one option confidently, the guess becomes worth making. If you cannot eliminate any, leaving it blank costs nothing.
This matters for cut-offs in a way few pages explain. Raw cut-off marks in an exam with negative marking depend on how aggressively the field guesses. A cut-off that looks low may reflect a hard paper, careful candidates, or heavy penalties, and you cannot tell which from the number alone. That is one more reason to be cautious about last year’s figure.
How to read an ‘expected cut-off’ table
When you meet a table that claims to show previous-year or expected cut-offs, a few checks take a minute and remove most of the unreliable ones.
Does it name the exact cycle, such as Advertisement A-7/E-1/2023, and the stage, prelims or mains? Does it link to the Commission’s notice, with the date and number? Does it give figures by category and by post, as the Commission would? Does it say what the maximum marks were? A table that fails these checks may mix cycles. One previous-year table in my results had columns for RO (Secretariat) with ARO (Accountancy) and ARO (Secretariat) grouped separately, which looks like a post grouping from an older cycle, and the page does not say which. I could not verify it.
For the 2023 cycle, there is a specific caution. The result notice of 5 April 2026 was described as provisional, with recommendations to follow after document verification and cut-offs to be posted later. If a page claims final cut-offs before that notice exists on the Commission’s site, treat it as an estimate.
The new 2026 notification
Reports dated 25 October describe a short notification, Advertisement No. A-4/E-1/2026, for 501 posts of Review Officer and Assistant Review Officer. Haryana Jobs, Indianewjobs and Jobsarkariupdate report online applications from 26 October to 26 November 2026, with fee payment and corrections until 3 December. Others, including Testbook and Adda247, still describe the notification as expected on 26 October. The reports agree on the dates, so the likely reading is that a short notice is out and the detailed notice follows with the opening of applications.
The reported details are these. Age is 21 to 40 years. A bachelor’s degree is required. The selection process is a preliminary examination, a main examination and a typing test, with no interview. The number of vacancies is given as 501 in the short notification and as 502 in earlier news reports that split it into 129 RO and 373 ARO. The prelims date has not been announced.
Treat these as reported. ExamDetail’s 16 October guide, written before the short notice, warned that qualifications, typing and computer requirements can differ post by post, and that a generic line such as ‘any degree plus 25 words per minute Hindi typing for every post’ is too simple. One portal says ARO requires an O Level certificate and 25 words per minute Hindi typing. The full notification will tell you which post needs what.
Check which website you are on
Two address mistakes appear in the pages I read. Testbook’s headline for the new notification names upsssc.gov.in, which is the website of a different body, the Uttar Pradesh Subordinate Service Selection Commission. The RO ARO exam is run by the Uttar Pradesh Public Service Commission, and the other reports point to uppsc.up.nic.in. Adda247 and some others use uppsc.gov.in for the older result. If you register through the wrong site, or pay a fee on a page that merely looks like the Commission’s, you can lose both money and the chance to apply.
Start from uppsc.up.nic.in and open the notification list from there. The reports say applications go through the Commission’s one-time registration, and that registration is also on a Commission page. A cut-off notice, when it comes, will be on the same site.
A way to size up your own position
Without an official cut-off, the reported counts still let you work out what share of mains candidates were selected last time. This is my arithmetic from the reported figures, and it is a rough guide, not a prediction.
Of the 5,930 candidates who sat the 2023 mains, 419 were provisionally selected, which is about 7 per cent. For the RO post alone, 338 selections from 6,093 mains qualifiers is about 5.5 per cent, if every qualifier had appeared. In plain terms, you needed to finish in roughly the top one in fourteen to one in eighteen of the mains field. That figure ignores categories: a seat reserved for one category is contested only within it, so the share you must beat is different for an unreserved candidate and for a reserved one.
If the 2026 notification keeps the 501 posts, the number of seats is larger than in 2023, but the field may be larger too, and nobody can say which grows faster. The more useful habit is to measure yourself against a mock-test field of serious candidates and ask whether you are consistently in the top 5 to 7 per cent of it.
Why last cycle’s numbers cannot simply be reused
A cut-off is an outcome of one exam, not a rule. It reflects how hard that paper was, how many people sat it, how many seats there were in each category, and how heavily negative marking bit. None of those carries over automatically to a new cycle with a different paper, a different field and, possibly, a different number of posts.
There is also a gap in what 2023 can show. That cycle’s prelims was held twice, with the second sitting about seventeen months after the first, and the candidates who qualified in 2025 had been preparing for far longer than usual. A field with that much preparation behind it may look different from a field in a normally paced cycle. So even when the 2023 cut-offs appear on the Commission’s site, treat them as one data point and not as a forecast.
What to do while there is no cut-off
You cannot prepare against a number that does not exist, but you can build a target from the structure. This is my suggestion.
First, plan for the mains, not the prelims. If final merit again rests on the 400-mark mains, then Hindi drafting and the essay, which together account for 280 of those marks according to the 2023 scheme, deserve daily practice from the start, not after the prelims result. The wait between stages in 2023 was long, but a new cycle may move faster, and a candidate who has never written a précis in exam conditions will lose marks to one who has.
Second, set a prelims target by mock test, not by rumour. Take full-length papers under exam conditions, note your score and your accuracy, and track the trend. A candidate scoring consistently in the upper part of a mock-test field is better placed than one chasing a rumoured figure.
Third, look after your documents. Check your one-time registration, make sure your name and date of birth match your certificates, and have your degree and category papers ready. If you are aiming for ARO, find out whether you hold the computer qualification the notification requires, since that may take weeks to arrange.
Fourth, wait for the notification before you spend money on a course that promises a cut-off. Nobody knows it.
What is not yet known
- Any official numeric cut-off for the 2023 cycle, including category-wise and post-wise figures.
- The 2026 prelims date, pattern and negative-marking rule.
- Whether the vacancy count is 501 or 502.
- Post-wise qualification, typing and computer requirements.
- The date of the 2023 cycle’s document verification and final recommendations.
Important Links
- Visit uppsc.up.nic.in.
FAQs
Is the UPPSC RO ARO 2026 cut-off out? No. The new cycle has not reached its prelims. For the 2023 cycle, the Commission’s notice reportedly promised cut-offs later, and I found no report of them being posted.
The cut-off table on a coaching site shows numbers for 2026. Are they real? They are estimates. The Commission does not publish an expected cut-off, and the exam has not been held.
What was the final selection in the previous cycle? UPPSC’s notice of 5 April 2026 provisionally selected 419 candidates, 338 RO and 81 ARO, according to ExamDetail and Adda247. The result is provisional until documents are verified.
Does the prelims score count towards the final merit? In the 2023 advertisement as ExamDetail reports it, final merit was based on marks in the mains, and the prelims selected candidates for the mains. Confirm this in the 2026 notification.
Which website should I use? uppsc.up.nic.in. One headline names upsssc.gov.in, which belongs to a different commission.