After the MDCAT, all of KP’s public medical and dental colleges admit students through one system, run by Khyber Medical University (KMU). When admissions finish, KMU publishes final merit lists. Those lists answer the question every student asks: what did it take to get a seat?
This page turns KMU’s official 2025-26 lists (dated 12 December 2025) into simple charts. Every number is shown exactly as KMU published it.
Read this first: what these numbers mean
Two words to know before the charts:
- Aggregate — your admission score. It is not your MDCAT marks. It is 50% MDCAT + 40% FSc + 10% Matric (set by PMDC). Our aggregate calculator works it out from your three results.
- Called — placed high enough on a list to be invited for a seat.
The closing number in each chart is the lowest aggregate that was called in a group. It is the cutoff to get onto the list. It is not the last mark that got into one particular college. KMU’s lists are ordered by aggregate only, and they do not name a college for each student. So we cannot work out “the closing merit of College X” from them, and we do not guess it.
Open merit: the main number
To be called on open merit in 2025-26, you needed an aggregate of 92.30%. This was the same for MBBS and BDS. The top student in the province had 97.70%. So the whole open-merit race sat in a narrow range — about 92% to 98%.
Dashed line: open-merit cutoff (92.3%)
Self-finance is not an easy shortcut
Many students think self-finance is an easy way to get in. It is not. General Self Finance closed at 92.22% (MBBS) and 92.00% (BDS) — only a little below open merit’s 92.30%. Paying the self-finance fee did not really lower the cutoff. The college-specific lists (KIMS Open Merit 92.27%, KIDS Open Merit 92.19%) are in the same range.
Reserved-seat categories close lower — but vary a lot
Reserved-seat categories (quotas) have lower cutoffs. That is their purpose. But they differ widely. Overseas Pakistanis closed near open merit (90.74%). Backward Areas and ex-FATA/NMTD went down into the 50s and 60s.
Dashed line: open-merit cutoff (92.3%)
One number hides a lot: district. The Backward Areas quota is not one cutoff. It is a separate race in each district. Where you are domiciled (your home district) changes the cutoff by more than 30 aggregate points:
A student domiciled in Kohistan needed 88.4% to be called. A student in Balakot needed 54.6%. If you apply on a backward-area or ex-FATA seat, only your own district’s number matters — not the overall category number.
Where would your aggregate land?
Work out your aggregate on the calculator. Then compare it to the charts above. If it is 92.3% or higher, you were in the open-merit race in 2025-26. If it is lower, a reserved category you qualify for may still have called you. Remember: the MDCAT is half of your aggregate. So a few more marks on exam day change your aggregate — and your place on these lists — more than anything else you can still control.
The MDCAT scores behind a seat
The merit lists also show each student’s actual MDCAT marks. We took those marks from the official lists and removed duplicates using CNIC (one student appears on several lists). This leaves 3,959 different students who were called for a KP public seat. 3,909 of them sat MDCAT 2025. So we can compare their real marks with the marks of everyone who took the exam — with no estimating.
One caution first. These are the marks of the students who succeeded. They are not a target you must reach. Being called depends on your full aggregate, not the MDCAT alone. That is why the called students’ marks go all the way from 70 to 178 out of 180 — some got in with a strong school record and only an average MDCAT. Read this as what the successful students looked like, not as a cutoff.
The two groups look completely different. Among everyone who took the exam, the biggest group scored 89 or below — about one in three students. The called students are the opposite: nearly half scored 160–169, and about one in five scored 170 or more. Very few of those called scored below 130.
There is a clear pattern. For each score band, we can ask: of all the students who scored in this band, how many ended up on a KP public merit list?
96% of the students who scored 170 or above were called — score at the top and you were almost certainly on a list. That share drops to about half at 160–169, about one in six at 150–159, and close to zero below that. (This compares called students to everyone who appeared. It also includes the choice to apply for a KP public seat — a student who scored high but went private, or to another province, counts here as “not called.” So treat the lower bands as a minimum, not a maximum.)
The lesson is the same one the whole exam teaches: a high MDCAT score is the safest way onto these lists, because it is half your aggregate — but it is not the only way, and not a guarantee. Work out your aggregate on the calculator, and compare it to the category cutoffs above. The marks here show what the students who succeeded were actually carrying.
Numbers change every year
These are 2025-26 figures. Cutoffs move each year with the number of applicants, the number of seats, and how hard that year’s paper was. Use them as a well-sourced guide to what the cutoffs have been — not as a promise for 2026. We will add the next year’s lists when KMU publishes them.