If you sat the RRB NTPC Undergraduate CBT 1 exam this year, your provisional answer key is out — and you have a real, formal window to challenge any answer you think is wrong before the result gets finalized. Here's how it works.
What This Exam Actually Is
RRB NTPC Undergraduate (CEN 07/2025) is the 12th-Pass-level recruitment exam conducted by the Railway Recruitment Board (RRB) to fill 3,058 vacancies for the posts of Commercial cum Ticket Clerk, Junior Clerk cum Typist, Accounts Clerk cum Typist, and Trains Clerk (CareerPower; sarkariinaukrii). This runs as a genuinely large-scale exam — over 63,27,474 (63 lakh) candidates were set to appear for the UG CBT 1 exam this cycle (PW Live), spread across roughly 200 exam centres nationwide (PW Live).
Because of that scale, the exam itself didn't run on a single day — it was conducted in phases across multiple dates: May 7, 8, and 9, 2026, and then again on June 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, and 21, 2026 (PW Live) — matching the broader window of May 7 to June 20, 2026 reported elsewhere for the CBT 1 exam (CareerPower). If your exam date doesn't match a friend's, that's completely normal — the exam simply ran across many separate shifts and dates to accommodate the scale of applicants.
The Answer Key Release
RRB released the UG Answer Key for CBT 1 on June 27, 2026, from 7:00 PM onwards (sarkariinaukrii; Utkarsh). Along with the provisional answer key itself, RRB also made your individual response sheet and the actual question paper available (CareerPower; Adda247) — so you're not just seeing the correct answers, you can compare them directly against exactly what you answered.
To access all of this, log in using your Registration Number and Date of Birth (or your password, depending on the portal) on the official RRB website (rrb.indianrailways.gov.in) or the regional RRB site relevant to your exam centre (CareerPower; Adda247).
How the Objection Window Actually Works
Here's the part worth understanding in detail, since it's a genuine formal process, not just a complaint box. The objection window opened June 27, 2026, alongside the answer key itself, and stays open until July 5, 2026, at 11:55 PM (CareerPower; sarkariinaukrii; Indian Express).
Raising an objection isn't free — RRB charges Rs. 50 per question you challenge, payable online via Debit Card, Credit Card, UPI, or Net Banking, plus applicable bank service charges (Utkarsh; Adda247). This fee structure is actually a fairer deal than it might first sound: if your objection is reviewed and found valid, the Rs. 50 fee gets refunded back to the same account, card, or UPI ID you paid with, minus the bank's service charges (Utkarsh). In other words, the fee mainly filters out frivolous or unfounded objections rather than penalizing genuinely correct challenges — if you're right, you get your money back.
Once the objection window closes, RRB reviews every submitted challenge and then publishes a final answer key, which is the version actually used to calculate the CBT 1 result (careerjobalert) — meaning your final score can genuinely shift from what the provisional key initially suggested, if enough valid objections change the accepted answer for a given question.
What Comes After: The Path to CBT 2
Once the final answer key is locked in and the CBT 1 result is calculated, qualified candidates move on to CBT 2. The tentative CBT 2 exam date for RRB NTPC Undergraduate posts is September 17, 2026 (sarkariinaukrii; CareerPower) — giving qualified candidates a reasonable runway of a couple of months to prepare once the final CBT 1 result is out.
What You Should Do Right Now
If you appeared for RRB NTPC UG CBT 1, download your response sheet and the provisional answer key immediately and go through it question by question against your own recorded answers. If you spot a genuine discrepancy — a question you believe has the wrong marked answer, or one with more than one defensible correct option — raise a formal objection before July 5, 11:55 PM, and don't let the Rs. 50 fee deter you if you're confident in your challenge, since a valid objection gets that fee refunded anyway. Once the window closes, shift your attention forward: start preparing for CBT 2, tentatively set for September 17, 2026, rather than waiting for the final result to be announced before you begin.