New Delhi, 30 Oct

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) will conduct class 10 and 12 board exams from 17 February, 2026, officials announced on Thursday.

While the class 10 exams will conclude on 10 March, class 12 exams will end on 9 April, 2026, according to the final datesheet.

This is the first time that the CBSE has released the final datesheet nearly 110 days in advance.

The date sheet can be downloaded from the board’s official website — cbse.gov.in.

The board had announced a tentative datesheet last month. The final datesheet has certain changes, including adding an extra day for class 10 exams.

This is the first time that board exams for class 10 will be conducted twice in an academic session. The second edition of the class 10 board exam is scheduled from 15 May to 1 June, 2026.

"A sufficient gap has been given between two subjects generally offered by a student in both classes. The dates of conduct of entrance examinations meant for the students of Class 12 have been taken into consideration, and efforts have been made to complete the examination much before the entrance exams.

"This will help the students in better time management for both the Board and entrance examinations," said Examination Controller Sanyam Bhardwaj.

While in class 10, dates for subjects like Data science, French, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil, Retail, Security and Automotive have been altered, in class 12 subjects including Business Studies, Business administration, Psychology and Accountancy have also been changed from the schedule listed in tentative datesheet.

Bhardwaj explained that the date sheet has been prepared by avoiding more than 40,000 subject combinations to ensure that no two subjects' examinations offered by a student fall on the same date.

"To ensure that JEE (Main) and CBSE examinations of the subjects do not coincide, NTA will require the registration number of students of class 11 to be filled in the JEE-Main application. Accordingly, all the schools have been requested to provide the registration number of class 11 to their students applying for the engineering entrance exam," he said.

For class 10, the second phase of Board exams in May will be optional for students who wish to improve their performance. In case a student appears for both phases, the best score of the two will be retained.

Both examinations will be conducted on the full syllabus meant for the year, and the scheme of studies and scheme of examinations will remain the same.

The CBSE has clarified that no separate supplementary exams will be conducted under this system. Instead, the second session of the board exam will serve as the supplementary exam for those who wish to improve their scores.

At present, students have an opportunity to improve their scores in supplementary exams.