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AIBE 22 (2026): date, pattern, bare acts and what actually decides it

AIBE XXII is on 29 November 2026. It is open-book in a very specific and frequently misunderstood sense, and that one fact should shape how you prepare.

The facts

Exam	AIBE XXII (All India Bar Examination 22)
Conducting body	Bar Council of India
Exam date	29 November 2026
Mode	Offline, pen and paper, OMR
Questions	100 multiple choice
Duration	3 hours 30 minutes
Negative marking	None
Pass mark	45 for General and OBC, 40 for SC, ST and PwD
Books permitted	Bare acts only, unmarked. No notes, commentaries or study material
Result	Expected early January 2027

Timeline

18 July 2026	AIBE 22 notification released
19 August 2026	Registration opens
27 October 2026	Registration closes
28 October 2026	Last date for fee payment
28–30 October 2026	Correction window
14 November 2026	Admit card released
29 November 2026	Examination
Early January 2027	Result expected

Dates are as announced. Confirm against the official Bar Council of India notification before acting on any of them.

Is AIBE open book? The honest answer

Partly, and the qualification is the whole story. Since AIBE XVI you may carry bare acts only. Not commentaries. Not guides. Not photocopied notes. Not a bare act with handwriting in the margins, or with section numbers written on the page edges, or with anything written on the sticky tabs. Books are checked at the gate and confiscated when they fail that test — every year, to people who did not expect it.

Blank index tabs are generally accepted. Anything written on them is not.

So the paper does not test recall. With 100 questions in 210 minutes you have 2 minutes 6 seconds per question, and a large share of that is spent finding the provision. AIBE tests navigation speed. That is a trainable skill and almost nobody trains it deliberately.

Bare act checklist & tabbing plan

You need 45, not 100

The pass mark is 45 out of 100 for General and OBC candidates, and 40 for SC, ST and PwD candidates. There is no negative marking, so an unanswered question and a wrong guess cost exactly the same — never leave a blank. AIBE 21 saw its cut-off moderated down by three marks by the Monitoring Committee, which is a reminder that the threshold is a floor, not a target to beat comfortably.

Subject weightage

All 19 subjects, exactly 100 marks, from the Bar Council of India Trust syllabus.

Subject	Marks
Constitutional Law	10	practise
CrPC & Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita	10	practise
Code of Civil Procedure	10	practise
IPC & Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita	8	practise
Evidence Act & Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam	8	practise
Contract, Specific Relief, Property & NI Act	8	practise
Family Law	8	practise
Torts, Motor Vehicles & Consumer Protection	5	practise
ADR & Arbitration	4	practise
Public Interest Litigation	4	practise
Professional Ethics & BCI Misconduct	4	practise
Labour & Industrial Law	4	practise
Taxation	4	practise
Administrative Law	3	practise
Company Law	2	practise
Environmental Law	2	practise
Cyber Law	2	practise
Land Acquisition Act	2	practise
Intellectual Property Laws	2	practise

The top four subjects — Constitutional Law, CrPC/BNSS, CPC and IPC/BNS — carry 38 marks between them. The bottom five carry 10. If you are short on time, that ratio is your study plan.

The 2023 codes

The BNS, BNSS and BSA replaced the IPC, CrPC and Evidence Act with effect from 1 July 2024, and renumbered essentially the whole of criminal law. Questions can cite either. The three free converters below map them in both directions.