JLPT Exam Centres in India: Every City, and How to Pick One

By the Wabi-Sabi Japanese team · Last updated: July 28, 2026 · 9 min read

There are eight official JLPT test-site cities in India — and one of them does not run the December sitting, which is the kind of detail that ruins a plan quietly. Below is the full list: city, the local host institution, and which of the two annual sittings each one runs, checked against the official JLPT site (jlpt.jp) in July 2026. This is an independent guide, not an official JLPT page. Then the part almost nobody tells you plainly: there is no national registration. Every centre runs its own.

Where can you take the JLPT in India?

Eight cities, as of the 2026 cycle. The host institution column matters more than it looks — that organisation, not any national body, is who you will actually be dealing with.

Two rows in that table deserve a second read.

• Santiniketan runs the July sitting only. Visva-Bharati hosts in July and not in December, as of the 2026 cycle. So a December attempt at Santiniketan is not a thing you can book — it is a trip to another city that you have not planned yet.
• Mumbai and Pune are administered by the same host. Both sit under JALTAP, the Japanese Language Teachers' Association, Pune, on the official list as of the 2026 cycle. Two cities, two venues, one organisation to correspond with — worth knowing before you spend an evening hunting for a separate "Mumbai JLPT office". The official list does not name one. It names JALTAP.

Why is there no single national registration?

Because outside Japan the JLPT is run on a host-institution model. Each test site is operated by a local organisation — a teachers' association, a cultural association, a university — that takes on the administration for its own city. India has eight sites and seven distinct hosts, since Mumbai and Pune share JALTAP.

This is the fact the rest of the page turns on. As of July 2026 nothing on the official site points to an Indian JLPT authority sitting above those hosts — and so there is no single national fee, no single national deadline, and no one page where all of it is collected. Those things sit with the host institutions, centre by centre.

Which explains something you may already have noticed: search for the JLPT fee in India and you will get confident, specific rupee figures that disagree with each other. We have no way of telling you which of them, if any, applies to your centre this cycle — so we are not going to add another number to that pile. What we can tell you, checked in July 2026: the fee is not published centrally on the official site. It is set by the host institution and it varies by centre, which means the only authoritative version of it is the one that organisation gives you directly. A single national JLPT fee for India is not a thing the official site publishes, so treat any figure presented to you as one with suspicion — including a figure that sounds about right.

The official guidance is exactly as unglamorous as it sounds: "For details, please contact your local host institution." That is not a brush-off. It is the actual system.

How do you actually register?

In general terms, and as of the 2026 cycle, it goes like this.

1. Find your city in the table above and note the host institution. That name is your search term and your point of contact.
2. Go to that institution's own website, or contact them directly. The application details for your centre — the fee, the form, the payment method, the closing date — come from them. As of July 2026 none of those four things is published in one national list, so there is genuinely nowhere else to get them.
3. Work to their window, not to a window you read somewhere else. Application periods vary by centre, and a deadline someone posted for a different city in a different year is worth nothing to you. If a date did not come from your host institution, it is not your date.
4. Write their deadline down the day you learn it and treat it as fixed. The date that governs whether you sit the exam is your centre's closing date, not the test date. Diarise the closing date and the test date will look after itself.

Here is the part that catches people out, so it is worth saying flatly: there is no central Indian registration page. As of July 2026 the official jlpt.jp site publishes the test sites and the test dates, and for everything past that it refers you to your local host institution, in those words. That referral is not a gap in the documentation. It is the documentation. People assume a national portal must exist somewhere, spend weeks looking for it, and find out late that the hunt itself was the delay. Skip that stage. Go to your host institution first and let them tell you the rest.

Which centre should you choose?

For most people this is a short decision with three filters.

• Nearest city, first. Exam day is tiring enough without a pre-dawn journey bolted onto the front of it. Distance costs you sleep, and sleep is not a thing you want to be short of walking into a listening section.
• Check it runs the sitting you want. Seven of the eight run both July and December as of the 2026 cycle. Santiniketan is the exception, and it is July-only.
• Confirm your level is offered — do not assume it. Whether a given centre runs all five levels from N5 to N1 in a given sitting is not something published in a national list as of July 2026, and we are not going to guess on your behalf. Ask the host institution named in the table above, naming the level you want. It is one email, and it is a much better email to send in August than to have answered for you in November.

If you are still deciding which level to sit at all, that is a separate question from where to sit it — our complete N5 guide covers what the entry-level exam actually contains, section by section, so you can judge honestly whether it is this December or the July after.

What if your city isn't on the list?

Then you travel, and there is no gentler version of that answer. As of the 2026 cycle there is no JLPT site in Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Chandigarh or Kochi — the list above is the whole list, not a selection from it.

Two practical moves:

• Pick the nearest of the eight and build the travel into the plan early. Budget the trip and a night before the exam at the same time you budget the fee. Arriving the morning of, off an overnight train, is a decision you make once.
• If you are near Santiniketan and you want a December sitting, look at Kolkata — the other West Bengal site, and one that runs both sittings. Or accept the wait and sit in July, which is a real option and not a failure.

Either way, the waiting time is not dead time. It is the difference between scraping a pass and being comfortable, and a spare few months is a genuinely good position to be in — you can work through the full free N5 course in that window rather than compressing it into six panicked weeks.

When is the test?

The JLPT runs on a July/December rhythm — two sittings a year, and in 2026 both fall on a Sunday. From the official calendar:

• Sunday, 5 July 2026 — the July sitting. This has already passed at the time of writing (28 July 2026).
• Sunday, 6 December 2026 — the December sitting. This is the one still ahead of you.

Worth knowing about that rhythm: the official site is explicit that "Outside Japan, the test may be held only in July or December in some cities." India's example is Santiniketan, which as of the 2026 cycle runs July and not December. It is not an oddity or an error on someone's part — it is a normal feature of how overseas test sites work, and it is the reason to read your own centre's row rather than assume the national pattern covers it.

If December 2026 is your target, count the weeks now rather than in October. A structured runway to N5 is laid out in our month-by-month N5 study plan, and if listening is the section you have been quietly avoiding, it is the one that benefits most from starting early — speaking practice with an AI tutor counts as listening practice too, which is the least obvious thing on this page.

What should you check with your centre before you commit?

Four questions, one message, and you have removed most of the ways this goes wrong. As of July 2026 not one of these four answers is published in a single national place, which is exactly why they are worth asking rather than assuming. Ask your host institution:

• The fee, and how they want it paid. It is set locally and varies by centre, so take the number from them and from nobody else — this page included.
• The application deadline — the closing date, not the test date — and when the window opens, so you are not applying to a form that is not live yet.
• Which levels they are running this sitting. Ask specifically about the level you want, by name.
• The exact venue address. The host institution's office and the exam hall are not necessarily the same building, or even the same part of the city. Get the address in writing, then look at how you would get there on a Sunday morning.

Then stop refreshing forums. The information you need for your centre exists in exactly one place, it is held by exactly one organisation, and asking them takes less time than reading the fourth contradictory answer about it. If you would rather spend the wait doing something useful, the beginner roadmap is a better use of an evening than the search results are.