Two things to get straight, because they cause most of the confusion.
You choose cities, not centres. The application takes three test city preferences, in order. Which specific centre within that city you sit at is decided later and by the Consortium.
The centre arrives on the admit card, expected late November 2026 — a date that has not been notified. So there is a period, usually several weeks, in which you know the city and not the building.
Everything practical follows from those two facts.
The list
The CLAT 2027 list lives inside the application form: the "Preferences for Test Centre Cities" section has three dropdowns, Preference 1, 2 and 3, and all three are required. You see the cities once you are logged in. The Consortium has not published the list as a separate page or notification.
It is also not final. The form says, directly under the dropdowns: "Depending on the total number of applications in each centre, there may be changes to the list of test centres. Candidates will be notified if there are changes to the preferences they submit."
This page does not reproduce a list from a previous year or from another site. A stale list is worse than no list here, because a candidate who plans around a city that has been dropped, or who does not consider one that has been added, makes a decision on bad information. Read it in your own form.
Choosing preferences
Order them honestly. You are asked for an order, so give the real one.
Put a realistic city first. A candidate whose first preference is a distant city because it is a bigger one has made travel harder for no gain.
Treat the second and third as real choices. All three are mandatory, and any of them may be where you sit. Do not fill the last two with cities you could not reach.
Think about the journey on a Sunday afternoon. The paper runs 14:00 to 16:00 and reporting is earlier. Transport on a Sunday is not the same as on a weekday, in either direction.
Prefer a city you have been to where the choice is close. Knowing the geography is worth something on the morning.
If you are allotted a city you did not choose
It can happen, and the Consortium has reserved the right to do it. The instructions say that if a test city or centre is cancelled through unforeseen incidents, or if too few or too many candidates opt for a centre, the Executive Committee may cancel that city or centre and shift the applicant to another. No rule is published for how the three preferences are weighed against each other.
No correction window has been announced either. The instructions say that updates to the application form will not be entertained after the closing date, so the time to settle your preferences is before 31 October 2026. If something is wrong after that, the only published route is the Help Desk: clat@consortiumofnlus.ac.in, or 080-47162020 between 10 am and 5 pm on working days.
If the allotment stands, plan the journey properly rather than hoping. A city you do not know, reached the night before, is manageable. Reached on the morning, it is not.
The gap between city and centre
This is the part that costs people money.
The city is known once allotment is published. The centre — the actual building, which may be forty minutes from the station or five — is on the admit card.
So:
Book travel to the city if you must book early, and book it refundable.
Do not book accommodation tied to a part of the city before the admit card. A hotel near the station is a reasonable hedge; a hotel near a centre you are guessing at is not.
When the admit card arrives, plan the last leg immediately. Route, time, and a fallback. Then, if you can, go and look at the building the day before.
Exam-day practicalities
Arrive an hour before reporting time. That hour is not for revision; it is the margin that absorbs a traffic jam, a wrong gate or a queue.
The reporting time, the document list and the prohibited-items list come with the admit card, and the admit card is the version that binds. The Consortium has not yet published them for CLAT 2027: its instructions say only that the date the admit card becomes available will be announced on the website. What is confirmed is the timing of the paper, 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm, and 2:00 pm to 4:40 pm for eligible PwD candidates.
What decides the paper is not the journey but how you pace 120 questions across 120 minutes, and that is worth rehearsing under timed conditions well before the day.
Dates that are confirmed
Registration closes 31 October 2026. The paper is on Sunday 6 December 2026, 14:00 to 16:00 IST.
The admit card is expected late November 2026, which is an estimate from the previous cycle's gap to exam day and is labelled as one everywhere on this site. The CLAT 2027 hub has the whole cycle with the confirmed dates separated from the estimated ones.
If the registration itself is what is going wrong, the payment troubleshooting page covers the failures that actually happen.
And the part you control: the free Diagnostic Test is a full-length timed paper with a section-wise and timing breakdown at the end.