TISS Mumbai Admission 2027: Cutoff, Fees & Placements

The Tata Institute of Social Sciences was established in 1936 as the Sir Dorabji Tata Graduate School of Social Work and renamed TISS in 1944. It was declared a Deemed to be University under Section 3 of the UGC Act, 1956 in 1964, and became a Grant-in-Aid Institute under the Ministry of Education, Government of India, in 2023 (AY2026-27).

It is not a business school. The Mumbai campus hosts 12 Schools, 6 Independent Centres and 3 Resource Centres (AY2026-27), one of which - the School of Management and Labour Studies - runs the MA in Human Resources Management & Labour Relations through its Centre for Human Resources Management and Labour Relations. TISS also has campuses at Tuljapur, Guwahati and Hyderabad; HRM&LR is offered only at Mumbai.

The programme was formerly the MA in Personnel Management and Industrial Relations and originated from a department established in 1965 (AY2025-27). It is a two-year, four-semester MA carrying 88 credits, of which 18 are internship and 12 dissertation, at NHEQF level 6.5, and sanctioned intake is 60 (AY2026-27).

On the national ranking, On the national ranking, TISS placed 72nd in the University category with a score of 49.89 (NIRF 2025, TISS submission IR-O-U-0331). It does not appear in the NIRF 2025 Management category at all - a reminder that TISS is a social-sciences university that happens to run a strong HR programme, not a ranked B-school.

For AY2026-27, admission to MA HRM&LR at TISS Mumbai is based on the CAT 2025 score. TISSNET is not used for this programme, and neither is CUET-PG, which TISS applies to its other postgraduate programmes. There is also no MAH MBA-CET or CAP route: TISS is a central deemed university, so reservation follows Government of India rules - SC 15%, ST 7.5%, OBC non-creamy-layer 27% and EWS up to 10% (AY2026-27).

Selection runs in two stages. Stage A shortlists candidates for an Online Assessment on CAT score weighted 97% plus 3% gender diversity - 3 extra marks for female and transgender candidates. Stage B builds the final merit list on CAT score 70% and the Online Personal Interview 30% (AY2026-27).

Eligibility is a Bachelor's or Master's degree of at least three or four years, or equivalent fifteen years of formal education, from a UGC-recognised university; final-year candidates apply provisionally. There is no work-experience requirement - that condition belongs to MA ODCL, which needs two years of full-time post-graduation experience as on 1 May 2026.

The CAT-PG cycle opened on 3 November 2025 and ended with merit lists on 20 April 2026.

The published programme fee for MA HRM&LR is ₹1,85,000 for the full two years (AY2025-27). Year one is ₹1,09,000 and year two ₹76,000, and that total includes a refundable ₹10,000 caution deposit returned on exit against a No Dues Certificate.

Tuition is only ₹16,000 a semester - the rest of the bill is funds and charges, heavily front-loaded into semester one.

TISS has not published a programme fee for AY2026-27. The 41-page CAT-PG admission brochure for 2026-27 carries no course-fee table at all — every rupee amount in it is an application fee, and the one fee schedule it does print covers basic non-tuition components for GOI-PMS-eligible SC/ST candidates rather than the programme fee. Each School's fee chart appears inside the SMLS prospectus for that intake, and TISS reserves the right to revise fees, so the 2026-28 prospectus is where the confirmed number will appear. Do not assume the 2025-27 figure carries over.

Application fees for AY2026-27 are ₹1,750 for General, ₹1,250 for OBC-NC and EWS, and ₹750 for SC/ST and GoI-PMS eligible candidates, plus bank charges (AY2026-27). Withdrawal refunds follow a published sliding scale - 100% if you withdraw 15 days or more before the notified last date of admission, falling to nil beyond 30 days after it, with a processing charge capped at ₹5,000.

TISS publishes minimum CAT percentile floors for Online Assessment shortlisting rather than a closing cutoff. Clearing the floor gets your application into the pool; it does not get you an interview call, because the shortlist is drawn top-down on the weighted score against 60 seats.

The General-category floor for MA HRM&LR is 70 overall with 60 in each of the three CAT sections.

Read those as floors, not targets. No closing percentile and no final merit cutoff are published for MA HRM&LR — the floors above are the only numbers TISS puts out. Anyone quoting you a specific closing percentile is quoting a crowd-sourced estimate, not the institute.

Two mechanics matter more than the floor itself. First, the 3% gender-diversity weightage applies at shortlisting only, not to the final merit list. Second, the interview carries 30% of final merit weight, so a shortlisted candidate with a lower CAT percentile can displace a higher one. If your CAT sits near the floor, the interview is where the seat is actually won.

TISS publishes a programme-specific final placement report for HRM&LR, and that is the only placement figure worth quoting. For the batch of 2023-25, whose final placement process was conducted in January 2025, the median CTC was ₹28,00,000 and the mean ₹28,20,000 (AY2024-25 batch, TISS HRM&LR Final Placement Report 2023-25).

Median and mean sit ₹20,000 apart across a 70-student cohort - an unusually tight distribution for an Indian placement report.

That closeness matters. Where an average far exceeds the median, a handful of outliers is carrying the headline; here it is not. Recruiters named in the same report include Aditya Birla Group, which made the largest number of offers, followed by Accenture Strategy & Consulting, Asian Paints, Godrej Industries and Kotak Mahindra Bank.

For honest contrast, TISS's institution-wide return for all two-year PG programmes across all campuses reports 987 of 1,321 graduates placed at a median of ₹8,98,976 (NIRF 2025, TISS submission IR-O-U-0331). HRM&LR is an outlier inside TISS, not a representative sample of it.

The two Mumbai campuses - the Main Campus and the Malti and Jal A.D. Naoroji Campus Annexe - are both in Deonar, in north-east Greater Mumbai. The Main Campus sits opposite Deonar Bus Depot on V.N. Purav Marg, and the nearest suburban railway station is Govandi (AY2026-27).

Hostel accommodation is the most misunderstood cost on this page. TISS states plainly that hostel admission is restricted to full-time bonafide Master's students and is not guaranteed. Students who ordinarily reside in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region are not eligible at all, and out-of-town students who have close relatives in Mumbai are also not allotted a place (AY2026-27). Plan for private rent as your base case rather than the exception; TISS itself publishes a list of available rental flats for 2026-27 on the same page.

No separate general-category hostel and dining chart is published for AY2026-27. What is published is the basic fee chart for eligible SC/ST GoI-PMS students, which shows hostel and electricity at ₹18,000 a semester and a dining hall advance of ₹20,000 a semester - ₹38,000 a semester in total (AY2026-27, TISS CAT-PG Admission Brochure 2026-27, page 29). Treat that as the shape of the charge, not as a quote applicable to every category.

The dining hall serves both vegetarian and non-vegetarian meals and is run by a committee with student representatives; default on dining hall payments can cost you both membership and hostel residence.

Against XLRI Jamshedpur, the split is the entrance exam. XLRI publishes its HRM programme cut-offs against XAT rather than CAT, while TISS admits on CAT. If you are sitting only one of those two tests, the choice is largely made for you. Both are specialist HR degrees with long institutional histories, so the real decision axis is exam fit and total cost rather than curriculum breadth.

Against IIM Ahmedabad, or any general two-year PGP, the axis is specialisation. Both run on CAT, so one test cycle covers both applications. A general MBA keeps consulting, finance and marketing open; HRM&LR does not, and does not pretend to. Choose TISS only if you already know you want HR, not as a hedge.

Against SCMHRD Pune and MDI Gurgaon, both of which run long-established HR-side programmes, the honest axis is total cost and city. We do not reproduce their fees or accepted exams here because we have not verified them for AY2026-27 - check each institute's own admissions page before you compare, and treat any third-party fee table as unverified.

One comparison worth making inside TISS itself: MA ODCL runs on the same CAT route from the same School, but it is self-financed with a published total fee of ₹8,49,000 (AY2025-27) and a two-year work-experience requirement. Same institute, very different price and candidate profile.