College of Engineering Pune (COEP Technological University) Admission 2026: Cutoff, Fees & Placements

COEP publishes a single first-year fee circular covering every admission category, signed by the Registrar. The figures below are that table as printed. Each column total is the sum of its own five heads, and every one reconciles against the total the document itself states.

The All-India quota pays the most, not the least. A candidate admitted through the All-India JEE quota pays ₹1,95,790 against ₹1,71,790 for a CAP Open candidate — ₹24,000 more, entirely because the Development Fee is ₹49,000 for that column instead of ₹25,000. Everything else is identical. This is the opposite of what most applicants assume, and it is worth building into the budget before you rank an All-India seat.

The girls' concession is the largest single reduction in the table. A girl candidate in the Open, OBC, SBC, EWS or SEBC categories with family income below ₹8 lakh pays ₹84,790 rather than ₹1,71,790 — the tuition head is reimbursed in full, cutting the first-year outlay by roughly half. SC, ST and PWD candidates pay ₹11,760, being exam and miscellaneous heads only.

The trap is the ACAP round. Read the bottom four rows against their CAP equivalents. A VJ/NT/SBC/OBC candidate pays ₹84,790 through CAP but ₹1,71,790 through ACAP — the same category, the same institute, ₹87,000 more, because the tuition waiver does not carry into the ACAP round. The same applies to EWS/EBC/SEBC and to girls. If you are weighing a CAP seat against an ACAP seat, the fee difference belongs in that decision.

An asterisk is a reimbursement, not a discount. COEP's note is explicit: for SC, ST, PWD, VJ/NT, OBC, SBC, EWS, SEBC and PMSSS candidates the starred heads are reimbursed by the State or Central Government as freeship or scholarship, and the student must apply on the MAHADBT portal within the stipulated period. The circular states plainly that if the student does not apply, they must pay the full fees applicable to an Open-category student — and that if the Government does not reimburse for any reason, the difference becomes payable within three weeks of that information appearing on MAHADBT. Treat the concession as conditional on a deadline you personally have to meet.

COEP's own note adds that this structure applies to students newly admitted for AY 2026-27 and may change from time to time under State Government and university guidelines. The university lists 020-25507056 as the scholarship section contact for freeship and scholarship deadlines.

COEP Technological University is listed by the Maharashtra State Common Entrance Test Cell under institute code 16006, with its status printed on the official cut-off list as University Autonomous and Home University shown as "Autonomous Institute". That status has a direct counselling consequence: COEP's closing scores appear under State Level rows only, so there is no Home University versus Other-Than-Home split to compare against.

This is the single most useful fact about COEP admission. Across all nine branches the official seat matrix records zero institute-level seats: 240 Maharashtra plus 60 All-India in Computer Science and Engineering, 120 plus 30 in each of Civil, Electrical, Electronics & Telecommunication and Mechanical, and so on down the list — with nothing in the institute column. Every seat is allotted on CAP merit.

So if anyone offers a "COEP management quota seat", a "direct admission" or an "institutional seat", there is no such seat pool to offer. The only route is the CET Cell option form, on merit, in a published round. We can help you read the routes, order preferences and prepare documents — nobody can allot a COEP seat outside CAP.

The table below is the 2025-26 State CET Cell seat matrix for institute 16006, reproduced as published. Note the consistent 80/20 split between Maharashtra and All-India seats, and the zero institute column across every row.

What the intake shape tells you. Computer Science and Engineering alone carries 300 of the 1,185 seats — roughly a quarter of the institute — while Instrumentation and Control has 60. That matters when you read cutoffs: a branch with 300 seats reaches further down the merit list than a branch with 60, so a large intake and a high closing percentile together mean genuinely heavy demand rather than simple scarcity.

The three smallest branches — Manufacturing Science, Metallurgy and AI & Machine Learning at 75 seats each — behave very differently from one another in the cutoff table below, which is the clearest evidence that seat count alone does not set the bar.

These are 2025-26 figures. The 2026-27 seat matrix is published by the CET Cell each cycle and can change; confirm the current matrix before you fill the option form.

Why merit numbers and not percentiles here. CAP allots against the state general merit number, and it is the value that can be read unambiguously from all three documents. A lower number is a harder seat.

Two branch changes you must not read across. In 2023 COEP's computing seat was listed as Computer Engineering under choice code ending 24510; from 2024 it appears as Computer Science and Engineering under code ending 24210. Those are different CET Cell course codes, so the 2023 figure describes a differently-coded seat and the three years are not a clean like-for-like series. Separately, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (code ending 26610) ran in 2023 and 2024 but is absent in 2025, while AI & Machine Learning (code ending 92110) appears only in 2025. They carry different codes, so we show them as separate rows rather than implying one became the other.

What the three years show where the series is clean. The two hardest engineering branches moved in opposite directions to the easiest ones. Computer Science closed at merit 96 in 2024 and 243 in 2025, so the seat got materially easier to reach in the most recent round. Electronics & Telecommunication moved the other way across the full period, from 346 to 736 — roughly twice as far down the merit list. Meanwhile the branches at the back of the list eased consistently: Manufacturing Science went 4,729 → 3,877 → 3,105 and Metallurgy 6,691 → 6,313 → 5,522, both tightening year on year. Civil sat almost still across all three, between 4,466 and 4,694.

None of this predicts 2026. Closing merit numbers move with the applicant pool, the seat matrix and how candidates order preferences in that cycle. Three years is a short series, and one of its rows changes course code partway through. These are Round I values only; later rounds close at different points, and a branch that looks out of reach in Round I can move.

COEP's Training and Placement Cell publishes something unusual and genuinely useful: a median salary per branch, alongside the average. Most institutes publish only the average, which a handful of large offers can pull upward. Where the two differ, the median is the better guide to what a typical graduate of that branch actually received.

Read the median column first. For the institute as a whole the median is ₹10.50 LPA against an average of ₹12.50 LPA — a ₹2 lakh gap that tells you the average is being lifted by a smaller number of high offers. The gap is widest in Instrumentation and Control (₹9.00 median against ₹11.49 average) and in Planning (₹6.38 against ₹10.10), where a single large offer moves the average a long way on a small cohort. In Manufacturing Science the two are almost identical (₹10.00 and ₹10.21), which indicates a tightly clustered outcome.

Placement rate and salary are not the same signal. Electrical Engineering placed 98.67% of registered students — the highest rate at COEP — on a median of ₹8.50 LPA. Computer Science placed 90.81% on a median of ₹16.15 LPA. A high placement percentage tells you how many found a role; the median tells you what that role paid. Metallurgy shows the same pattern from the other side: 94.55% placed, on the lowest median at COEP of ₹6.50 LPA.

Core versus non-core matters here. The same report splits placements into core and non-core roles. Computer Science placed all 168 of its students in core roles. Electronics & Telecommunication placed 37 in core and 24 in non-core, so roughly two in five placed E&TC students took a role outside their discipline. Mechanical placed 129 core against 6 non-core. If working in your own branch matters to you, that split is worth as much attention as the salary.

One reconciliation note, stated rather than hidden. COEP's own placement page also carries a three-year summary showing 631 students enrolled and 534 placed (85%) for 2024-25 with 248 companies, while the detailed sheet above records 630 enrolled, 528 placed (83.81%) and 245 companies as at 28 August 2025. The difference is a snapshot-date effect — the detailed sheet was frozen in August 2025 and the summary was updated later. We publish the detailed sheet because it is dated and branch-wise, and flag the summary rather than silently choosing whichever number reads better.

Note also that the 2025-26 table counts registered students and the 2024-25 table counts enrolled students. Those denominators are not the same thing, so the two years' percentages should not be subtracted from one another to claim a trend.

COEP admits entirely through CAP, so the State CET Cell's round mechanics decide the outcome as much as your score does. These rules are published in the Information Brochure for Academic Year 2026-27 dated 2 July 2026 and apply to every participating institute.

What this means for a COEP preference list. Putting COEP Computer Science and Engineering at preference 1 is a decision, not an aspiration: if it is allotted, the seat auto-freezes and your counselling ends there. Given COEP CSE closed at merit 243, most candidates listing it first will not be allotted it — but the ones who are should be certain they want it, because Round II will not be available to them.

The quieter risk is forfeiture, which needs no decision from you at all. Missing the ARC reporting window or failing to complete self-scrutiny releases the seat by default. Diarise the reporting deadline the day the allotment is published.

COEP's admission process is unusually simple — one route, published merit — which is precisely why the errors below are so costly. Each row names the confusion and the official reference that settles it.

None of these is a scoring problem, which is why they are worth checking twice. A valid merit number still loses the seat if the option form is filled against the wrong row, and no counselling service — including ours — can reopen a round once it closes.

The three institutes Maharashtra candidates weigh against each other are COEP, VJTI Mumbai and PICT Pune. All three appear on the same State CET Cell cut-off list for CAP Round I 2025, which makes a like-for-like comparison possible without relying on anyone's marketing.

What the merit numbers say. For the computing seat in that round, VJTI closed hardest at merit 103, COEP next at 243, and PICT at 791. The ordering is consistent on percentile too. A candidate around merit 500 was out of range for both VJTI and COEP computing that year, but within range at PICT — which is a real, checkable planning fact rather than a ranking opinion.

Where the axes genuinely diverge. The status line drives cost: COEP is a state university, VJTI is government-aided, PICT is un-aided. We are deliberately not printing a fee comparison, because PICT's fees have been verified against its own fee page and COEP's and VJTI's have not — an unverified cost comparison is worse than none. The second divergence is breadth: COEP spans nine branches including civil, mechanical and metallurgy, while PICT is computing and electronics only. If a core branch is a real possibility for you, COEP and VJTI can serve it and PICT cannot.

The third is structural: COEP has no institute-level pool at all, so CAP merit is the only way in. PICT publishes institute-level and NRI seats alongside CAP. That changes what a fallback plan can look like at each institute.