Every seat you can list during counselling is one of two kinds — scholarship or paying — and the difference is not a discount. It is a different pool of seats, filled by a different rule, at a different price. Understanding the categories before choice filling is the single most useful hour you can spend after the exam.
Scholarship seats
A scholarship seat is tuition-free (hostel, food and some fees may still apply — check the college's own notice). They come from two sources:
- Government and autonomous institutions — the Institute of Medicine, BPKIHS, Patan Academy of Health Sciences, the Karnali, Rapti and Pokhara academies, and others. Under the National Medical Education Act 2075, government institutions offer the large majority of their seats as scholarships; the commonly cited figure is 75%.
- Private colleges — the same Act requires every private medical college to reserve 10% of its seats as full scholarships, allocated by MEC through the common counselling, not by the college.
Scholarship seats are filled strictly by merit within each category. There is no interview, no recommendation and no application to the college: if your rank reaches the seat and you listed it, you get it.
Reservation clusters
Scholarship seats are further split into an open cluster and several reserved clusters. The clusters and their shares are fixed by law and MEC's counselling directive, and typically include:
- Women
- Dalit
- Adivasi/Janajati
- Madhesi
- Backward region (candidates from designated remote districts)
- Persons with disability
- Families of martyrs and conflict victims
- Muslim and other minority clusters
Two things matter about clusters. First, a reserved cluster is also merit-ranked — within the women's cluster, say, seats go to the highest-ranked women who listed them. Second, you compete in the open cluster as well as your reserved one: a reserved category never lowers your chances, it only adds a second pool. To use a cluster you must upload the supporting certificate at counselling registration; a claim without proof is silently treated as open.
Paying seats
Everything that is not a scholarship seat is a paying seat, and the price is not set by the college. MEC fixes a fee ceiling for the full MBBS and BDS course, and colleges may not charge above it. The figures most recently published are approximately:
| Program | Inside Kathmandu Valley | Outside the Valley |
|---|---|---|
| MBBS | ~NPR 38.5 lakh | ~NPR 42.5 lakh |
| BDS | ~NPR 19.3 lakh | ~NPR 19.9 lakh |
These are approximate and change between cycles — verify the current ceiling on mec.gov.np before you commit to a choice. The ceiling covers tuition for the whole course; hostel, food, examination and university registration fees are usually on top, and colleges publish those separately.
Some government institutions also have a small number of paying seats, priced below the private ceiling. They are popular for exactly that reason and usually close at ranks not far behind the scholarship seats of the same college.
How this shapes your choice list
- If your rank is inside scholarship range for any college, list every scholarship seat you would accept above every paying seat — a scholarship at a college you like slightly less is worth roughly forty lakh rupees more than a paying seat at your favourite.
- Reserved-cluster scholarship seats close at later ranks than open ones. If you qualify for a cluster, list its seats explicitly; they are separate choices.
- Paying seats at government institutions sit between scholarship and private paying in both price and closing rank.
The college predictor shows historical closing ranks for scholarship and paying seats side by side, so you can see where a given score has landed before. For what to bring on counselling day, read the document checklist.
Scholarship percentages, cluster shares and fee ceilings are set by the Act and by MEC's annual directive. Where this page and the current MEC notice disagree, the notice is right.