Quarterly earnings and EPFO payroll data tell you what already happened. Campus placement season tells you what’s coming — it’s the first place employers vote with real hiring budgets, months before that shows up in a company’s headcount disclosures. And the placement data from IITs and NITs over the past three seasons lines up almost exactly with the AI-driven slowdown showing up everywhere else in Indian IT.
Packages are compressing at the top of the pyramid
At IIT Hyderabad, the average CTC for the 2025-26 season fell to roughly ₹30 lakh per annum, down from ₹35+ lakh in prior years. IIT Bombay’s CSE average dropped to around ₹40 lakh from ₹55 lakh previously. International offers — historically a marker of elite placement seasons — collapsed from 150+ pre-2023 to just 24 in Hyderabad’s most recent cycle, and multi-crore packages fell from 25+ students in earlier years to just 2-4 in 2026. This isn’t confined to India’s most selective campuses either: at IIT Dharwad, average salary fell 23% and median salary fell 37.5% between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 seasons, with the number of unplaced students rising 158% year over year.
The real divide is branch, not brand
The more interesting signal is inside each campus, not between them. Computer science and AI branches are holding up — placement rates around 80-85% at top IITs — while core engineering branches are in genuine crisis. Mechanical, civil, and chemical engineering placements fell sharply across nearly every top institute between 2023 and 2024: IIT Palakkad’s mechanical placement rate dropped from 96.67% to 62.5%, IIT Hyderabad’s civil engineering placements fell from 87.5% to 41.3%, and NIT Raipur’s civil placements crashed from 78.67% to 30.09%. By the 2025-26 season, IIT Kanpur’s mechanical placement rate stood at just 42%, and IIT Roorkee’s civil branch at 28%. This is the campus-level mirror of the exact bifurcation showing up in the broader IT sector — AI-adjacent skills holding value, everything else compressing.
The nuance: “unplaced” numbers are contested, and worth reading carefully
It’s worth building in one important caveat before treating any single “X% unplaced” headline as gospel. In 2023, media reports claimed 36% of IIT Bombay’s graduating class had failed to find jobs; the institute’s own exit survey countered that only 6.1% of students were actually still job-hunting — the rest had gone into higher studies (12.2%), off-campus offers (10.3%), civil services preparation (8.3%), or startups (1.6%). “Unplaced through the campus process” and “unemployed” are not the same number, and institutes have an obvious incentive to blur that distinction in either direction depending on the story being told. The directional trend across seasons — packages down, core-branch placement rates down, IT services volume hiring down — is real and consistent across multiple institutes and years; the precise headline percentage at any single campus in any single season is worth treating skeptically.
Even the positive-looking numbers have an asterisk
Some 2025-26 data looks encouraging at first glance — IIT Delhi reported 1,275 job offers and a 33% year-over-year rise in pre-placement offers (PPOs) through December 2025, with recruiters including Google, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, and Microsoft making double-digit offers. But a rising PPO share is itself a signal worth reading carefully: it means more of the season’s hiring is being locked in early through internships — a known quantity — rather than through open, competitive recruitment drives. That’s consistent with employers narrowing the funnel and taking fewer bets on unknown candidates, not necessarily with overall demand increasing. Nationally, one industry tracker cited in NIT placement coverage put IT services campus hiring volume down 31% year-over-year, even as recruiter counts held up or improved at the very top NITs (Warangal, Calicut, Jalandhar, Patna) — again, concentration at the top rather than broad-based recovery.
Where new graduates are actually looking
For students navigating this bifurcated market directly, Chuno is a job-discovery platform covering current openings across India, with dedicated search filters for software engineering, product management, data, and remote roles — a useful complement to campus placement cells for graduates casting a wider net beyond their institute’s registered recruiters, especially in a season where off-campus and self-sourced offers make up a growing share of how students actually land jobs.
Why this matters as a leading indicator
This data predates and foreshadows the fresher-hiring collapse visible in industry-wide numbers — the drop from roughly 600,000 fresher hires in FY22 to about 120,000 in FY25 that shows up in NASSCOM-adjacent reporting didn’t appear out of nowhere; it was previewed a full hiring cycle earlier on campus, branch by branch, package by package. If campus data is a genuine leading indicator, the branch to watch next season isn’t CSE — it’s whether the AI/CSE placement rate itself starts softening the way core engineering already has, because that would be the signal that AI-driven hiring caution has moved from “we need fewer generalist engineers” to “we need fewer engineers, period.”
Sources:
IIT Placement Crisis 2026 (EvePlacement)
IIT Dharwad Placements 2023-24 (Careers360)
IIT/NIT Core-Branch Placement Decline (Careers360)
IIT Bombay’s Placement Data Rebuttal (Careers360)
IIT Delhi Placements 2025-26 (Careers360)
