NUS Acceptance Rate and Admission for Indian Students

If you are looking for the NUS acceptance rate, the honest answer is that the National University of Singapore doesn’t publish one. No percentage on any NUS page. The figures you will find quoted around the internet are not NUS numbers, and repeating them here would be inventing precision that does not exist.

What NUS does publish is more useful anyway. It publishes exactly what an Indian Class 12 student must have to apply, which tests it will and will not look at, which courses close if your results are not out yet, and two very different tuition prices for the same seat. Those are the things you can actually act on.

Singapore dollar amounts convert at INR 74.33 to the Singapore dollar on 27 July 2026. Your bank will give you a slightly worse rate.

Does NUS publish an acceptance rate, and if not, how do you judge your chances?

NUS publishes no acceptance rate. The closest thing it publishes is the Indicative Grade Profile, which shows the grades most admitted students held. That profile only covers two groups, applicants with the Singapore-Cambridge GCE A-Level and applicants with a Singapore polytechnic diploma.

Indian Class 12 is not one of them. NUS says the number of applicants holding other qualifications is “too small to arrive at a grade profile that accurately reflects the academic requirements”. So there’s no published percentage and no published grade bar for your board.

Instead NUS says international applicants are assessed the same way as local ones, on academic and non-academic achievements together. Your board marks matter, and so does what else you have done.

So any site quoting you a specific NUS acceptance percentage is quoting something NUS never released. If a number can’t be traced back to an NUS page, plan against the published requirements instead.

What does NUS actually require from a CBSE or ISC student?

NUS asks for a good pass in five subjects including English in your Standard 12 examination. That is the stated minimum on the NUS page for Indian Standard 12 applicants from the Central and ISC Boards, and it is the whole academic bar for applying.

NUS doesn’t name a percentage. “Good pass” is doing real work in that sentence, and it is deliberately not a number, because admission is competitive and there is no fixed cut-off. Meeting the minimum lets you apply. It doesn’t get you in.

A few practical points from the same page:

• English must be one of your five subjects. For most CBSE and ISC students it already is.
• An internet print-out of your results is accepted provisionally, as long as it clearly shows your full name.
• ISC results must reach NUS within 3 calendar days of release. That is a short window, so watch the result date rather than waiting for a physical marksheet.
• Architecture, Industrial Design and Landscape Architecture may ask you to sit an aptitude test in June.

Note: the requirements above are the ones NUS publishes for the Central and ISC Boards. State board applicants are covered on a separate NUS page with its own conditions, so check that page before you assume these rules carry across.

Which tests do you not need for NUS?

Three of the tests Indian families spend the most time and money on are not required at all for CBSE and ISC applicants.

• No SAT, no ACT, no Advanced Placement. NUS lists standardised tests as not required for this qualification.
• No IELTS and no TOEFL. English is already a subject in your board exam, and NUS accepts that as the English evidence.
• No JEE. NUS states plainly that the Joint Entrance Examination, Main or Advanced, is not required.

That last one surprises people. You would expect a top engineering school to want a JEE score. NUS doesn’t, and your Class 12 result carries the academic case on its own.

Skipping the SAT and IELTS alone saves roughly INR 30,000 in fees plus a few months of preparation. Put that time into your board marks, which are the thing NUS is actually reading.

Which NUS courses close if your results are not out yet?

If you are still sitting your Standard 12 examination when you apply, four courses are closed to you. Dentistry, Law, Medicine and Nursing all require completed results at the point of application.

This is worth planning around a year in advance, because there’s no workaround inside the cycle. An Indian student sitting the board exam in the spring of the year they want to start simply cannot apply to those four. The route in is to apply in the following cycle with results in hand.

What does NUS cost an Indian student, and why are there two prices?

Every NUS course has two tuition figures, and the gap between them is large. The lower one applies if you take the MOE Tuition Grant. The higher one applies if you do not.

The figures below are the per year fees for students starting in AY2026/2027, from the NUS Registrar’s published tuition schedule. International student fees include 9% GST.

One column matters before you read the table. NUS charges international students at two different rates, one for ASEAN nationals and a higher one for everyone else. Indian students pay the higher rate. Pages that quote “the international fee at NUS” are often quoting the ASEAN number, which you won’t be charged.

For a four year Computing degree the two paths differ by S$73,200, close to INR 54 lakh. What the cheaper path asks from you in return is the subject of the next section.

What is the Tuition Grant bond, and should you take it?

The MOE Tuition Grant is a Singapore government subsidy on your tuition, and taking it as an international student means agreeing to work in Singapore for three years after you graduate. The Ministry of Education states that Tuition Grant recipients who are Singapore Permanent Residents or international students must serve a 3-year bond after graduation.

Nobody wins it on merit. It is a subsidy with a condition attached, and most international undergraduates at NUS take it.

Two limits are worth knowing before you sign. The grant runs only for the normal length of your course, so if you need extra semesters you pay a higher rate for them, per the NUS eligibility guidelines for the Tuition Grant. And if you already hold a bachelor’s degree, your eligibility depends on how that first degree was funded.

Whether to take it comes down to what you want after graduation. If you intend to work in Singapore anyway, the bond costs you nothing you were not already planning to do, and it roughly halves your tuition. If you plan to move on to another country soon after you graduate, you are agreeing to three years you may not want, and paying the full fee is what keeps you free to leave.

When do NUS applications open and close?

For the AY2026/2027 intake, applications from international students opened on 3 December 2025 and closed on 23 February 2026. Outcomes were released from mid-May to end-July, with an appeal window in late May.

That cycle has closed. NUS has not yet published its dates for AY2027/2028, so check the NUS admission requirements page for the current cycle rather than working from last year’s dates.

The shape of the calendar has been stable, though, and it is worth planning against. Applications open in early December and close in late February, months before Indian board results are out. That is why the result-status rule above decides so much, and why students who want Medicine or Law at NUS are usually applying a full year after their Class 12.

Sources

• NUS Office of Admissions, Indian Standard 12 (Central and ISC Boards)
• NUS Office of Admissions, admission requirements for international qualifications
• NUS Office of Admissions, Indicative Grade Profile
• NUS Registrar, undergraduate tuition fees per annum, AY2026/2027
• NUS Registrar, eligibility guidelines for the MOE Tuition Grant
• Ministry of Education Singapore, Tuition Grant Scheme