CAT Question Papers: Previous Year Papers with Solutions

IIM Indore has never released the actual CAT question paper to the public. This is true for 2025 and for every cycle before it. No official archive of past CAT papers exists on iimcat.ac.in either. Most candidates searching for a CAT question paper PDF expect a genuine downloadable exam paper here. CAT 2026 and every past CAT year do not publish one.

Coaching institutes rebuild past papers from candidate recall after each exam. Those recreations are what circulates online as a "CAT previous year paper." It states that distinction plainly in every section below. It does not let the heading imply an archive that does not exist. See the CAT 2026 overview page for the exam's full official structure and dates. This page stays narrowly on question papers.

Three CAT 2026 facts are officially confirmed. The exam runs 3 sections in a fixed order. Each section carries its own fixed 40-minute clock. A candidate cannot switch between sections mid-exam. These structural facts come straight from IIM Indore's own Information Bulletin. They are exactly what makes a well-built unofficial paper useful for timed practice. That holds true even without an official source behind it.

No official CAT question paper PDF exists to download, for 2026 or any earlier year. This section does not link to one. IIM Indore's Information Bulletin contains no mention of a public paper release or an archive page. This is true for the complete CAT 2026 bulletin, read end to end.

Two things stand in for it, at different distances from "official":

• A candidate's own response sheet: recent-cycle reporting says IIMs have made a candidate's own recorded responses available through the candidate login. This happens in the window around the provisional answer key. That is a real, source-backed document. But it only ever shows one candidate's own paper, not a public one. It is also not confirmed for 2026. The full mechanics sit on the CAT 2026 answer key page.
• Coaching-recreated papers: rebuilt from what candidates across multiple test slots remember afterward, cross-checked across sources by whichever platform publishes them. These are unofficial by definition and should carry that label wherever they appear, including here.

CAT does not officially publish papers with solutions either. That package does not exist as an IIM Indore document for any year. Coaching platforms sell or share their own reconstruction online under that name. Each reconstruction comes paired with that platform's own worked solutions. This is not an answer key that IIM Indore issued.

The reconstruction process stays fairly consistent across platforms. First, the platform gathers recall from many candidates who sat different slots of the same exam. Next, it cross-checks overlapping questions between them to settle on a likely final version. Then in-house faculty solve each question. That process builds a genuinely useful practice set. The underlying questions did appear somewhere in a real CAT. It does not build an official record. A platform's own solution can also be wrong on an individual question. This can happen even when the recalled question itself is accurate.

No official "CAT 2025 question paper with answer key" package exists. Nothing similar exists for any other CAT cycle either. That is because IIM Indore does not release the paper itself, for any cycle. Non-official but consistent reporting across recent cycles confirms something narrower for CAT 2025 specifically. That confirmed pattern is a provisional answer key and a candidate's own response sheet. Both are made available through login, roughly one to two weeks after the exam. It also included a short objection window that reportedly carried a Rs 1,500 fee per objection.

That is an answer-key process, not a question-paper release. It lets a candidate check their own recorded answers against a claimed correct answer. It does not let them download the exam booklet itself. The full mechanics of that process sit on the CAT 2026 answer key page. That page also covers how much of it is confirmed versus reported. Online bundles sold as "CAT 2025 paper with answer key" are, again, a coaching platform's reconstructed paper. That paper comes paired with its own solutions. That is not the IIM's own key attached to the IIM's own paper.

CAT runs in 3 sessions on exam day, per IIM Indore's own Press Release. Each session sits a different question set. That is exactly why IIM Indore normalises scores across slots before reporting a percentile. That structural fact is official. No official slot-wise PDF archive exists, though. No CAT paper is ever released publicly. So no official slot 1, slot 2 or slot 3 PDF exists for any year, including 2025.

Coaching platforms publish "slot-wise papers" using the same recall-based reconstruction used everywhere else here. They just organise it by the slot candidates reported sitting. That organisation is a reasonable filing convenience for practice, and worth using for that. It is not proof that a given question came from exactly that slot. Platforms match recall from many candidates to a slot label after the fact. They do not read it off an original document.

IIM Indore does not publish an official CAT sample paper, for 2026 or any other cycle. The closest official equivalent is narrower and different. The CAT 2026 Press Release confirms a mock exam will go live on the official website ahead of the November exam. This will happen ahead of the November exam. That mock will match the real test format. The bulletin does not state an exact release date for it, though.

That mock deserves priority over any unofficial "2026 sample paper" circulating online. It is the one item on this list that traces back to IIM Indore itself. A coaching platform's sample paper is only ever a guess at what 2026 might look like. Anything sold as a "CAT 2026 sample paper with solutions" ahead of the exam is someone's estimate of the pattern. That is true by definition. That estimate is built from recent years. It is not a document IIM Indore issued for this specific cycle.

The benefit of solving unofficial CAT papers does not depend on the paper being official. It depends on the paper matching CAT's real, confirmed structure closely enough to train the right habits. IIM Indore's own Information Bulletin fixes three things a candidate can practise against directly. These are 3 sections in a fixed order, and a hard 40-minute clock on each. There is also no switching between sections once inside one.

A well-built recreated paper, solved under those exact conditions, exposes a candidate to two things a syllabus list cannot. The first is how it feels to run out of time inside a single 40-minute block. There is no way to borrow minutes from another section. The second is how the mix of MCQ and TITA questions actually plays out under that pressure. Recent-cycle papers also carry a consistent difficulty range across VARC, DILR and QA. Solving several builds a working sense of pace, even though the exact questions never repeat. That timed pace is the best available proxy for how a candidate might perform. This holds once IIM Indore reports the real percentile. See the CAT 2026 result page for how that percentile itself gets calculated.