Rankings for Indian Institute of Management Lucknow need two labels to be useful: which ranking publisher and which subject or programme it assessed. IIM Lucknow’s official NIRF 2025 announcement gives the institute a Management rank of 5, while its IPMX announcement reports a Financial Times Global MBA rank of 58 in 2026. A live NIRF Management table also displays a Lucknow-Lucknow entry at rank 4 and score 86.12, but the table view captured for this guide does not identify its edition. Keep that live entry separate from dated rankings until its year is confirmed.
NIRF 2025: an institute-level Management result
IIM Lucknow’s dated announcement states that the institute ranked fifth in NIRF’s Management category in 2025, with a score of 77.97. The announcement says this was two places higher than its rank of 7 in 2024. Its release headline also describes IIM Lucknow as fourth among IIMs. It identifies the NIRF 2025 release date as 4 September 2025. These are rankings of IIM Lucknow as an institution, not a separate NIRF rank for the Noida campus or for one individual programme.
The institute’s published 2025 score breakdown is more informative than the single position alone: Teaching, Learning and Resources (TLR) 86.37; Research and Professional Practice (RPC) 59.80; Graduation Outcomes (GO) 96.96; Outreach and Inclusivity (OI) 71.82; and Perception 75.51. The announcement describes NIRF as assessing institutions through teaching and resource quality, research and professional practice, graduation outcomes, outreach and inclusivity, and peer perception. For an applicant, this means the overall position combines several institutional dimensions. The high GO component and lower RPC component are part of the same institute-level score; neither is a programme-specific placement rate or a direct estimate of an IPMX or PGPWE applicant’s outcome.
The live NIRF table needs an edition check
The Ministry of Education’s live Management page currently displays “Indian Institute Of Management, Lucknow-Lucknow,” city Lucknow, score 86.12 and rank 4. This is the row as rendered when checked on 6 November 2026. The page view does not show a ranking year next to that row. It should not be silently labelled NIRF 2026 or combined with the institute’s dated NIRF 2025 release as if the two figures were a confirmed year-over-year comparison.
The name and city also matter for this campus page. NIRF’s row names Lucknow-Lucknow and places the institution in Lucknow; it does not name a separate Noida campus. Use the dated 2025 release when an edition-specific result is needed, and verify the current NIRF edition directly before treating the live table’s rank or score as an annual record. The source capture preserves the exact visible row and its missing edition label so a later update can resolve that gap without changing the 2025 history.
FT Global MBA 2026: a separate IPMX result
IIM Lucknow reports that its International Programme in Management for Executives (IPMX) ranked 58th globally in the Financial Times MBA Rankings 2026, rising 13 positions from the previous year. This result is programme-specific: the institute’s release names IPMX, not every Noida-campus programme or the institution’s full portfolio. It is also a global MBA ranking rather than an Indian Management-category position.
The FT result is relevant to applicants considering the one-year IPMX, but it should be compared only with other programme-level Global MBA rankings for the same edition. It does not replace NIRF’s institution-level Management assessment. The available institute announcement gives the global rank and year-on-year movement, but not the full FT indicator table or a Noida-campus-only score breakdown. Do not infer that an individual graduate or applicant would receive the same international recognition or career result.
How to use these rankings in a shortlist
For a broad India-level comparison, read the official NIRF 2025 rank together with its year, category and score components. For an IPMX-specific international comparison, use the FT 2026 Global MBA rank and check the publisher’s own ranking methodology and programme list before comparing it with another school. These positions measure different things and use different comparison groups, so placing “5” beside “58” does not mean one programme is better or worse than the other. A practical comparison record should preserve the publisher, exact category, edition and reporting unit for each result. Here, the NIRF figure is an institute-level Management result for 2025, whereas the FT figure is IPMX in the global MBA category for 2026. The live NIRF entry lacks an edition label, so it does not belong in the same trend line yet. A shortlist should use rankings as one context signal alongside programme-specific admission, cost, curriculum and outcome evidence; these sources do not measure those choices for an individual applicant.
The evidence here does not establish separate published ranks for PGPWE, MBA in Family Business, the Executive Fellow Programme in Management or the Post Graduate Programme in Sustainable Management at the Noida campus. It also does not establish an edition for the live NIRF row captured at rank 4. Applicants should ask the programme office which rankings, if any, are relevant to their specific programme and check the publisher’s dated page before quoting a newer result. Until the NIRF live-table edition is clear, preserve the confirmed 2025 institute result and the 2026 IPMX result as separate records.