GATE 2027 in Lucknow: IIT Kanpur Zone, UP Exam Cities and Institutes

Uttar Pradesh has sixteen exam cities on the official GATE 2027 list, and they do not all sit in the same zone:

Zone (coordinating institute)	Uttar Pradesh exam cities
IIT Kanpur	Agra, Aligarh, Bareilly, Gorakhpur, Jhansi, Kanpur, Lucknow, Prayagraj, Varanasi
IIT Roorkee	Ghaziabad, Meerut, Moradabad, Muzaffarnagar, NOIDA
IIT Delhi	Greater NOIDA, Mathura

Lucknow is a single entry. You cannot ask for a particular part of the city; you select "Lucknow" and GATE allots a centre, which the admit card will name.

The rule that matters: all six choices must come from the same zone. Since Lucknow is in the IIT Kanpur zone, the other five must be too. The list is tentative, GATE may add or remove cities and may allot one outside your options, and GATE 2027 is held only in India.

The IIT Kanpur zone has nine Uttar Pradesh cities and five in Madhya Pradesh: Bhopal, Gwalior, Jabalpur, Sagar and Satna. That is plenty, and you can stay inside UP for all six.

One workable list from Lucknow:

1. Lucknow
2. Kanpur
3. Prayagraj
4. Varanasi
5. Gorakhpur or Bareilly
6. Agra, Aligarh or Jhansi

Swap the last three around according to where you have family or a friend's room. If your home is in Gorakhpur, say, move it up to second. The choice only helps if you can get there and sleep nearby the night before, because a February morning centre in an unfamiliar city leaves no slack for a missed train.

The Madhya Pradesh cities in the zone are an option if you are from there. Indore and Ujjain, the other MP cities on the list, are in the IIT Delhi zone, so they are not.

The zone lines run through western Uttar Pradesh, and some of them separate cities that most of us think of together:

• NOIDA and Greater NOIDA: NOIDA is IIT Roorkee zone; Greater NOIDA is IIT Delhi zone. They cannot even go on the same form as each other, and neither can go with Lucknow.
• Agra and Mathura: Agra is IIT Kanpur zone, so it fits with Lucknow. Mathura is IIT Delhi zone and does not.
• Bareilly and Moradabad: Bareilly is IIT Kanpur zone. Moradabad is IIT Roorkee zone.
• Ghaziabad and Meerut: both IIT Roorkee zone, with Muzaffarnagar and NOIDA.

Outside UP, the same logic rules out New Delhi, Gurugram and Faridabad (IIT Delhi zone), Dehradun and Haldwani (IIT Roorkee zone), and every Bihar city including Patna (IIT Guwahati zone). If you are from Patna or Muzaffarpur and studying in Lucknow, that is a zone decision, not a back-up choice.

Some of us work in NOIDA and go home to Lucknow at weekends. GATE 2027 is on three weekends, 6 and 7, 13 and 14, and 20 and 21 February, so ask yourself where you will be on those Saturdays and Sundays.

If you plan to take leave and write from home, build the Lucknow list above. If you would rather write near the office, pick one of the western zones and stay inside it. An IIT Roorkee-zone list could run NOIDA, Ghaziabad, Meerut, Muzaffarnagar, Moradabad and Dehradun. An IIT Delhi-zone list could run Greater NOIDA, New Delhi, Gurugram, Faridabad, Mathura and Jaipur. The Delhi page is written for students in the NCR.

Registration closed with the special window on 16 October 2026. The data correction window is TBA on the official dates page, so check there before assuming your choices can still change.

Exam-city questions from Lucknow go to IIT Kanpur, the coordinating institute for the zone. As listed on the official page:

• IIT Kanpur, Kanpur 208 016: gate@iitk.ac.in, 0512-2596962, 0512-2596963

Use the email ID you registered with and quote your enrolment ID. The organising institute for GATE 2027 is IIT Madras (helpdesk@gate.iitm.ac.in, 044-22578200), for questions about the portal or the paper.

The city allotment notification is due on 4 January 2027. The admit card date is TBA, and the admit card is where your centre and reporting time appear. Do not assume your centre is near home or hostel; when the admit card comes out, look up the centre that evening and plan the route from where you will spend the night before. If you are writing DA and CS as two papers, GATE says the second centre may differ from the first but will be in the same city.

Take the printed admit card, the original photo ID you entered in the form, and anything else the admit card asks for. Its rules on what you may carry are final. Results are due on 19 March 2027.

Two are in the state, and each page explains its GATE routes for DA and CSE candidates:

• IIT Kanpur, in Kanpur, which is also your zone office
• IIT (BHU) Varanasi, in Varanasi

Further afield, IIT Delhi, IIT Roorkee in Uttarakhand and IIT (ISM) Dhanbad in Jharkhand all have pages, and the full list is on /institutes.

Where you sit the exam makes no difference to admission. Writing in Kanpur does not help with IIT Kanpur. Pick the exam city for the day and the institutes separately.

GATEiit runs online only. It has no centre, office or classroom in Lucknow or any other city, and the material is free.

Start from the paper page: GATE DA for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, GATE CSE for Computer Science and Information Technology. Each has the syllabus and the WhatsApp group link. DA and CS are an allowed two-paper combination in GATE 2027.

Past papers are on /pyq, sorted by year, and topic-wise questions are on /practice. For a plan, read the GATE DA 2027 guide or the GATE CSE 2027 guide, and browse /guides for the rest. Because every GATE 2027 session is on a weekend, weekend mocks are the closest rehearsal.

The GATE 2027 page has the national dates and the exam-city overview covers other cities.