The National Testing Agency (NTA) on Thursday declared the result of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Undergraduate), NEET (UG) 2026.The highest score of 715 out of 720 was obtained jointly by Aryan Gupta (Punjab) and Panshul Bansal (Haryana).The 138 top rankers come from 66 cities across the country. The top 17 rankers who scored more than 705 marks span eight states, namely Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Telangana, as per NTA.Of 20 lakh candidates who appeared in NEET (UG) 2026 at 5,440 centres in 551 cities in India and 14 cities abroad, 11.21 lakh candidates have qualified for admission to undergraduate medical, dental, AYUSH and allied programmes.More than 58 per cent of the qualified candidates are women. Women also qualified at a higher rate than men: 56.8 per cent of women who appeared qualified, as against 55.1 per cent of men.The majority of the top-performing candidates are between 17 and 19 years of age; 138 candidates scored above 690 marks out of 720. Of these over 93 per cent appeared for NEET (UG) for the first time.Candidates appeared from every state and Union Territory of the country, in 13 languages.“Qualified candidates have emerged from every one of the 36 states and Union Territories, ranging from over 1.7 lakh in Uttar Pradesh to 43 in Lakshadweep. State toppers include Jigmet Yangchan Lamo (Ladakh, 530 marks), Dhruv Tripathi (Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 606 marks) and Fahmida Anees (Lakshadweep, 573 marks), and cover every north-eastern state; 17 state toppers scored 700 or above; 26 scored above 690,” the NTA said.The examination was conducted in 13 languages: Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and English.The result was declared within time through re-engineering of the process, with stages designed to run in parallel rather than in sequence, and with the de-linking of OMR sheet challenge from answer key release. Each stage was completed in full and made available for candidate view:The provisional answer key was published on June 25 and the challenge window was opened from June 25 to 28. Scanned OMR answer sheets and recorded responses were displayed to the candidates from July 13 to 15. The final answer key was published on July 16 and the result was declared the same day.Score distribution and highest scorers19 candidates scored above 700 out of 7201,492 candidates scored 650 and above10,160 candidates scored 600 and above90,780 candidates scored 500 and above