How many IOE seats are reserved for teachers, staff and their children?
Four in total across the whole Institute, not per campus. Two are self-advancement seats at BE and B.Arch level for permanent teachers and staff past probation, and two are Regular-side scholarship seats for permanent TU and IOE staff and their children.
Four seats in total, and both provisions are smaller than almost anyone expects. Two are reserved across all IOE campuses at BE and B.Arch level for the self-advancement of permanent teachers or staff who are past probation. Separately, two Regular-side scholarship seats at bachelor level are provided for permanent teachers and staff of Tribhuvan University and TU’s Institute of Engineering, and for their children, admitted on merit. Both figures are totals for the whole Institute rather than per campus, so Pulchowk, Thapathali, Purwanchal, Paschimanchal and Chitwan share two of each between them. If no teacher or staff member applies for the first pair, those seats pass to the children of permanent teachers past probation, or to children of permanent staff with at least one year of service in IOE bodies, admitted on merit. The scholarship pair comes from a standing committee decision rather than from the reservation rules.
The two provisions, side by side
- Self-advancement seats
- 2 seats in total across IOE campuses at BE and B.Arch level, for permanent teachers or staff past probation
- If no staff member applies
- Those vacant seats pass to children of permanent teachers past probation, or children of permanent staff with at least one year of service in IOE bodies, admitted on merit
- Scholarship seats
- 2 Regular-side scholarship seats at bachelor level for permanent teachers and staff of TU and TU-IOE, and their children, admitted on merit
- Where the scholarship pair comes from
- IOE Academic Council Standing Committee, meeting no. 351 of 2078-07-15, decision no. 1, rather than from the reservation rules
How small is four seats, really?
Small enough that it should not be planned around. Two self-advancement places and two scholarships cover every programme at every constituent campus for a whole intake year, against a system that admits both Regular and Full Fee cohorts at five campuses. Anyone treating a staff connection as a route into engineering is relying on a provision that may be taken by one person somewhere else in the Institute.
The documents, which must come first
A teacher or staff member applying needs a prior approval letter from the Dean’s office of IOE, submitted as an attested copy with the application. A child of a teacher or staff member needs a recommendation letter from the office where the parent works. The campus will not attest your copies; that is the applicant’s own responsibility under the booklet’s standing note.
And the deadline that applies to every quota route
Documents must reach the place IOE designates within five days of the entrance result being published. After that date no action is taken on them, and neither letter is the kind an office issues on the day it is asked for.
This is not the government-sponsored quota
The two are confused constantly, because both get described as staff seats. A separate provision, section 6.4, covers people whose employer pays. A government office or a government-owned institution that wants to sponsor a member of its own staff may do so against seats equal to one twelfth of the admission number in the full-fee programmes at constituent campuses, and a second clause of the same size covers people from communities the Government of Nepal has listed as marginalised whom a government body wants to sponsor and pay for. Those allocations are far larger than the four seats above, they sit on the full-fee side rather than the Regular side, and the fee is paid by the sponsoring institution, by cheque, rather than by the student. The test that separates them is simply who is paying.
Who counts as permanent, exactly
The booklet’s phrase is permanent appointment with the probation period completed, and both halves are doing work. A teacher or staff member on contract, on temporary appointment, or still inside probation is outside the provision, however long they have been at the campus. The children’s route adds its own qualification on the staff side: the parent has to be a permanent staff member with at least one year of service in a body under IOE, while for a teacher parent the past-probation test alone applies. It is worth checking which of those describes your household before the priority form is filled in, because the letter you can obtain follows from it.
Section 6.2 of the BE/B.Arch Booklet 2083, page 13; the letters at section 7.3, page 18; the five-day deadline from the preamble to section 6, page 12; the sponsored quota at section 6.4, page 17. The scholarship provision follows IOE Academic Council Standing Committee meeting no. 351 of 2078-07-15, decision no. 1. These are very small numbers: two seats and two scholarships in total, not per campus.
Sources
- IOE B.E./B.Arch Booklet 2083published 7 August 2026 · read 18 August 2026
Last reviewed by Ram Raj Thapa, Admissions Officer, Imperial College of Engineering. Every figure on this page is cited to the document it came from.
