IIM Ahmedabad Ranking 2026: NIRF & QS Ranking & More

IIM Ahmedabad topped the NIRF Management ranking in 2025, for the sixth consecutive year. NIRF published the rankings on 4 September 2025. Internationally, its PGPX programme climbed to 27th in the Financial Times Global MBA ranking for 2026.

Its QS Global MBA rank for 2026 sits at 58th, two places above its 2025 position. All three are real, current rankings measuring different things.

Every rank on this page comes from Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad's own rankings page. This page cross-checks each one against the ranking body's own methodology and year. This page never uses a blended "world ranking" figure, the kind some pages build by averaging unrelated lists.

Read the IIM Ahmedabad ranking one list and one year at a time. That is the only honest way to compare it against another institute.

Each row below names the exact programme the rank applies to, because the institute holds different positions for different programmes.

IIM Ahmedabad has held NIRF's top Management rank every year from 2020 through 2025, six years without interruption. It does not appear in NIRF's Overall category listing at all. It competes only in Management. That matters if you are comparing it against a multi-disciplinary university that enters both.

Where do the IIM Ahmedabad rankings stand for 2026?

NIRF had not published its 2026 Management result when this page was checked. The most recent confirmed figure remains the 2025 result: rank 1 in Management, announced 4 September 2025.

QS moved both IIM Ahmedabad programmes up in its 2026 edition. The Masters in Management list had declined for four years before that.

The QS Masters in Management rank for the PGP fell from 29th in 2022-23 to 56th in 2025. That is a real decline over four editions. It then recovered 8 places to 48th in 2026. The QS Global MBA rank for PGPX followed a smaller version of the same curve. It moved from 44th in 2023 to 60th in 2025, then back to 58th in 2026. The institute's domestic NIRF rank stayed at number one throughout.

Two ranking systems measuring different things can move in opposite directions at the same institute in the same years. The IIM Ahmedabad ranking on QS and the IIM Ahmedabad ranking on NIRF are not the same measurement. A reader comparing colleges should never treat them as interchangeable.

The Financial Times moved IIM Ahmedabad up on all three of its lists between 2022 and 2026.

The FT Global MBA rank for PGPX moved from 62nd in 2022 to 27th in 2026. That is a real five-year improvement, non-monotonic but net-positive. Treat a single-year shift of a few places as noise. Treat a five-year direction as the meaningful trend.

PGP-FABM is its food and agribusiness management programme. It has held first place in Eduniversal's Agribusiness and Food Industries category for five straight years, 2021 through 2025. That is a course-specific ranking, distinct from the institute-wide NIRF and FT numbers.

Domestic media rankings add another layer. Businessworld, The Week, Fortune India and Business Today each ranked Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad first among Indian B-schools. All four did so in their own 2025 lists, alongside its NIRF position. The record before 2025 is less uniform. Business Today did not participate in 2024 and ranked the institute second in 2021, 2022 and 2023. Fortune India ranked it second in 2023.

IIM Ahmedabad publishes no official ranking comparison table against named peer IIMs. This page states that gap directly rather than inventing a comparison. NIRF's own published data confirms one thing. IIM Ahmedabad has held Management rank 1 continuously since 2020.

Industry commentary commonly names IIM Bangalore and IIM Calcutta alongside Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad as its closest domestic peers. That is a general industry pattern, not an official comparison the institute itself publishes.