How many Public Administration candidates actually get selected? UPSC publishes the answer every year in its Annual Report to Parliament, which gives, for each optional, the number of candidates who wrote the Mains and the number finally recommended. This page sets out those figures for Public Administration, compares them with the other popular optionals, and explains what they do and do not tell you.
Public Administration Optional at a glance
- Latest official figure: 46 recommended out of 521 candidates in CSE 2022, a success rate of 8.8% (74th Annual Report, 2023-24), against 8.0% across all optionals that year.
- Three-year total, CSE 2020 to 2022: 115 recommended out of 1,391, or 8.3%, against an average of 8.1% across all optionals.
- Popularity: Public Administration was the sixth most chosen optional in CSE 2019 (705 candidates) and the seventh in each of CSE 2020, 2021 and 2022, behind PSIR, Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, History and Mathematics.
- Trend: the pool shrank from 705 in CSE 2019 to 361 in CSE 2021 before recovering to 521, while the success rate has stayed between 7.5% and 8.8%, close to the all-optional average every year.
Year-wise success rate
| CSE year | Annual Report | Candidates appeared | Recommended | Success rate | All optionals |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 74th (2023-24) | 521 | 46 | 8.8% | 8.0% |
| 2021 | 73rd (2022-23) | 361 | 31 | 8.6% | 8.4% |
| 2020 | 72nd (2021-22) | 509 | 38 | 7.5% | 8.1% |
| 2019 | 71st (2020-21) | 705 | 58 | 8.2% | 8.0% |
We have checked all four Public Administration rows against Table-5 of the reports themselves. Each Annual Report covers the examination whose final result was declared in that financial year, which is why the 74th report (2023-24) carries CSE 2022. As of October 2026 the 74th is the latest report on the UPSC website. The all-optional rate in the last column is the total of each year’s Table-5. Over the four years together, 173 of 2,096 Public Administration candidates were recommended, or 8.3%.
The 70th report (CSE 2018) is published as scanned page images and we have not extracted its table, and figures for earlier years that circulate online could not be traced to a report, so we have left them out of the table rather than guess.
Share of candidates and of selections
Another way to read the same tables is to compare Public Administration’s share of the Mains pool with its share of the final list. If the optional neither helped nor hurt, the two would be about equal.
| CSE year | Share of Mains candidates | Share of candidates recommended |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 4.1% | 4.5% |
| 2021 | 4.0% | 4.1% |
| 2020 | 4.9% | 4.6% |
| 2019 | 6.1% | 6.3% |
In three of the four years Public Administration candidates took a slightly larger share of the final list than of the Mains pool; CSE 2020, the one year its success rate (7.5%) fell below the all-optional average (8.1%), is the exception. The differences are small, a few tenths of a point, and they move in both directions. What the data shows is a mid-sized optional whose candidates are selected at almost exactly the general rate.
How Public Administration compares with the other big optionals
Seven optionals account for most Mains candidates. Over CSE 2020 to 2022 their combined figures were:
| Optional | Appeared (3 years) | Recommended | Success rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Political Science and International Relations | 5,812 | 481 | 8.3% |
| Anthropology | 4,170 | 329 | 7.9% |
| Sociology | 4,168 | 350 | 8.4% |
| Geography | 3,661 | 255 | 7.0% |
| Mathematics | 1,932 | 129 | 6.7% |
| History | 1,791 | 87 | 4.9% |
| Public Administration | 1,391 | 115 | 8.3% |
| All optionals | 32,048 | 2,601 | 8.1% |
Public Administration matches PSIR, sits within a point of Sociology, Anthropology and the all-optional average, and is well above Geography, Mathematics and History. In CSE 2022 alone its 8.8% was the highest of these seven subjects. The full table for every optional is in our optional subject success rate analysis.
What the numbers mean for you
- A success rate is not a score. It counts final selections, which depend on GS, Essay and the interview as much as on the optional. It says little about how the optional itself is marked.
- A smaller pool means a wider margin. With about 1,400 candidates over three years, the Public Administration rate could plausibly lie anywhere between roughly 6.8% and 9.7% (a 95% interval of about ±1.4 points). Year-to-year moves of a point either way are noise, not a trend.
- What sets candidates apart is preparation. The syllabus is fixed and the themes repeat, so the gap between an average and a high score comes from coverage, thinkers and Indian examples (see the strategy guide).
- Count the overlap as well as the rate. Paper II covers much of the governance, civil service and local government material of GS Paper II, and administrative ethics in Paper I feeds GS Paper IV; our all-optionals analysis rates this overlap as moderate. Time saved in GS is a gain the success rate does not measure.
- Choose for fit. If you enjoy theory and are comfortable with Indian polity and governance, which you will study for GS anyway, Public Administration’s data gives no reason to avoid it.
Complete your Public Administration toolkit
Pair this page with the unit-wise notes and the full question bank:
Free notes index → Topic-wise PYQs → Public Administration hub →