This page lists IBPS PO previous year question papers for 10 years, 2015 to 2024, with labelled mock papers for 10 years with no official question paper. IBPS PO (IBPS Probationary Officer) is conducted by the Institute of Banking Personnel Selection (IBPS) and covers English, Quant, Reasoning, GA/Banking and Descriptive. Pick a year below for the paper, answer key and a timed practice plan; confirm dates and pattern on ibps.in.
Explore: Question papers by year · Syllabus & pattern · Pattern changes · FAQ
Year-wise question papers
IBPS does not release its PO question papers. Each year page below has an original mock paper set in the pattern and difficulty candidates reported for that cycle, marked clearly as a mock, along with notes on what that year tested.
IBPS PO 2024
The last cycle before IBPS reworked the Mains. Use it as your benchmark for Prelims puzzle and DI load.
IBPS PO 2023
Prelims in autumn, Mains before the year ended. A good second paper for long reasoning sets.
IBPS PO 2022
Same structure as 2023 and 2024, so it works as a fresh full-length paper under current timers.
IBPS PO 2021
Prelims held in December 2021, Mains in January 2022. Practise its DI caselets for calculation speed.
IBPS PO 2020
The COVID cycle, which ran on into 2021. The paper format did not change.
IBPS PO 2019
The year Prelims got a 20-minute timer for each section. Start your full-length practice here.
IBPS PO 2018
Prelims still on one 60-minute clock. Sit it with 20-minute section limits to match today.
IBPS PO 2017
Mains already in the four-section format with a descriptive paper. Good for Mains English practice.
IBPS PO 2016
An early paper in the combined Reasoning and Computer Aptitude format. Use it for topic drills.
IBPS PO 2015
The first IBPS PO cycle with separate Prelims and Mains. Mostly useful for arithmetic and grammar drills.
Want to practise one topic at a time? IBPS PO topic-wise practice sorts the 280 questions from our labelled mock papers by section and topic.
About IBPS PO
IBPS PO is the common recruitment exam for Probationary Officers and Management Trainees in the public sector banks that take part in it, such as Bank of Baroda, Punjab National Bank, Canara Bank and Bank of India. SBI is not one of them. It runs its own PO exam. The Institute of Banking Personnel Selection conducts the exam once a year under a Common Recruitment Process, and the final list is used to allot selected candidates to banks according to their preferences and rank.
The process has three stages. Prelims is a one-hour screening test. Mains is a longer objective test plus a short descriptive English paper. Candidates who clear Mains are called for an interview, which IBPS coordinates with the participating banks. The final merit list gives Mains 80% of the weight and the interview 20%, so Prelims marks only decide whether you move on.
Old papers matter more in bank exams than most students expect, because the topics barely move from year to year. Puzzles, data interpretation and reading comprehension show up in every cycle. What changes is how hard and how long they are. A past paper tells you what “hard” meant in a real IBPS exam, which mock tests from different coaching sites often get wrong in both directions. The full syllabus, marking scheme and eligibility notes are on the IBPS PO syllabus and pattern page.
About the papers on this site
IBPS does not publish its question papers or a public answer key. You get your own scorecard, and that is all. The papers you see on coaching websites are “memory-based”: candidates recall questions after the exam and someone reconstructs a paper from those memories. They are useful, but they are incomplete and sometimes wrong, especially in the numbers inside DI sets.
So each year page here gives you an original mock paper written to match the pattern and difficulty reported for that year, labelled as a mock. It is not the actual IBPS paper. The guide on memory-based and official papers explains how to judge the reconstructions you find elsewhere.
How the paper has changed since 2015
The broad shape of IBPS PO has stayed the same for ten years: three sections in Prelims, four plus a descriptive paper in Mains, then an interview. The timing rules underneath have changed, and those changes affect how you should sit an older paper.
| Cycle | Prelims | Mains | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 100 questions, 60 minutes, English, Quant and Reasoning on one clock | Separate sections for Reasoning, English, Quant, General Awareness and Computer Knowledge | First year with a two-stage written exam |
| 2016–2018 | 100 questions, 60 minutes, one clock | Four sections with their own timers: Reasoning and Computer Aptitude, English, Data Analysis and Interpretation, General/Economy/Banking Awareness. Total 200 marks in 3 hours | Computer folded into Reasoning; descriptive English (letter and essay) added to Mains |
| 2019–2024 | English 30, Quant 35, Reasoning 35, with 20 minutes per section | Same four timed sections, 155 questions, 200 marks, 3 hours, plus a 30-minute descriptive paper | Sectional timing in Prelims from 2019 |
| 2025 onward | Check the current notification | Revised by IBPS; section sizes and total time changed | Read the notification before using any older Mains timing |
Marking has stayed at one mark per Prelims question with a quarter-mark penalty for a wrong answer. Mains also carries a quarter of the question’s marks as a penalty. Every section in both stages has its own cut-off, so a strong Quant score cannot carry a weak English section.
The 2019 change is the one that matters most for practice. Before it, you could spend 30 minutes on Reasoning and rush English. After it, each section gets exactly 20 minutes and the screen moves on. If you sit a paper from 2015 to 2018, set three separate 20-minute timers anyway. Otherwise you are training a habit the real exam no longer allows.
What the papers show, section by section
Reasoning Ability
Prelims Reasoning is mostly puzzles and seating arrangements. Expect three to five sets of five questions each, often a floor-and-flat puzzle, a linear or circular arrangement, a box or month-based schedule, and an order-ranking set. The rest is inequalities, syllogisms, blood relations, direction sense and coding.
The mistake almost everyone makes is starting the first puzzle on the screen and refusing to leave it. In a 20-minute section, one stubborn puzzle can cost you ten questions elsewhere. When you review a past paper, write down how long you spent on each set and how many you got right. You will find that the slowest set is rarely the one you should have attempted first.
In Mains, the puzzles get longer, with more variables and fewer direct clues, and you get data sufficiency, logical reasoning (assumptions, arguments, courses of action) and input-output. Computer Aptitude questions sit inside this section in the 2016 to 2024 papers.
Quantitative Aptitude and Data Interpretation
Prelims Quant is built around speed: simplification or approximation, number series, quadratic equations, two DI sets, and arithmetic word problems on profit and loss, time and work, mixtures, ages and interest. The DI is usually tables, bar graphs, pie charts or a caselet.
In Mains, the section is called Data Analysis and Interpretation and it is heavier. Caselets, mixed graphs, data sufficiency and arithmetic with long statements take most of the 45 minutes. Many students lose marks here because they misread the base of a percentage or round too early.
When you check a Quant section, separate three kinds of errors. Calculation slips need drill. A misread question needs a slower first read. A concept gap (say, you cannot set up a partnership problem) needs a chapter revision. Students who lump these together end up solving more papers without improving.
English Language
English is the section that knocks out the most well-prepared candidates. It has a sectional cut-off like the others, and many engineering and commerce graduates treat it as the section they can “manage”. Past papers show it is not that simple.
Reading comprehension appears every year, usually one or two passages on economy, banking, environment or technology. Around it you get cloze tests, error spotting, sentence improvement, para jumbles, word usage and fillers. Mains adds longer passages and trickier inference questions.
Track your RC accuracy separately from your grammar accuracy. If RC is the problem, the fix is reading editorials every day for a few months. If error spotting is the problem, the fix is a short list of grammar rules (subject-verb agreement, tenses, prepositions, parallelism) and many sentences checked against it.
General/Economy/Banking Awareness (Mains)
This section is only in Mains, and it is the one past papers prepare you for least, because current affairs change every year. What the papers do show is the balance. Banking and financial awareness (RBI policy, monetary tools, banking terms, government schemes, financial institutions) carries a large share. The rest is current affairs from roughly the last six months before the exam, plus some static facts.
Use old papers here to learn the type of question, not the answers. If you see that IBPS asked about repo rate changes and the names of committee heads, you know what to note down from the news in your own cycle.
Descriptive English (Mains)
The descriptive paper asks for a letter and an essay, typed on the computer, in 30 minutes for 25 marks. Topics tend to be about banking, the economy, technology or social issues. You will not get the same topic twice, but past topics tell you the range. Write at least six to eight practice pieces under time. Students who have never typed a 250-word essay against a timer lose marks just from running out of time.
Notes on recent years
2024 was the last cycle before IBPS revised the Mains in 2025. Its Prelims was in the usual three-section, 60-minute format with sectional timers, which makes it your main Prelims benchmark. Sit its Mains with the timings in your own notification.
2022 and 2023 followed the same structure. Both are good as fresh full-length papers once you have done 2024. Their Mains Reasoning and DI sections have more sets than most people can finish, which makes them good for practising which sets to leave.
2020 and 2021 were the COVID cycles. The 2020 cycle ran on into 2021, and the 2021 Prelims was held in December 2021 with Mains in January 2022. The format stayed the same, so the papers are as useful as any other year.
2019 was the first year with sectional timing in Prelims. It is a good starting point for the current Prelims format.
2015 to 2018 used the older Prelims timing and, in 2015, a different Mains layout. They are still worth solving for arithmetic, grammar and basic puzzles. Sit them with today’s timers, and skip Mains questions whose section no longer exists in the same form.
Using old papers at different stages of preparation
When you are starting out
Do not sit a full paper on day one. Learn each topic first, then solve the questions on that topic from three or four years of papers. For Quant, that means building your arithmetic speed and learning the standard DI types. For Reasoning, it means doing ten to fifteen puzzles of each common type until you can draw the diagram without thinking. Once a section feels familiar, try a 20-minute sectional from an older year.
Two to three months before Prelims
This is when full Prelims papers should become routine. Sit two or three a week, always with 20-minute timers per section. After each one, spend at least as long reviewing as you did attempting. Keep a simple log: which set you attempted, how long it took, how many you got right. Your aim at this stage is to know your attempt target for each section and how to reach it, not to chase a big total.
Between Prelims and Mains
The gap is usually a few weeks. Switch to Mains papers at once. Mains rewards stamina and selection over three hours, and its DI and Reasoning sets are far longer than anything in Prelims. Start General Awareness revision well before this point, since a few weeks is not enough to cover six months of banking news from scratch. Write at least two descriptive pieces a week in this phase.
After Mains
Interview preparation is a different kind of work. Past papers will not help much here. Read about your allotted banks, recent banking news and your own graduation subjects.
Mistakes students make with past papers
The biggest mistake is sitting old papers on a single 60-minute clock. Sectional timing changes how the paper feels, and if you practise without it you will freeze when the English section ends while you are halfway through a passage.
The second is believing memory-based papers too much. A reconstructed DI set with one wrong number can make a whole set unsolvable, and students blame themselves. If an answer looks impossible in a coaching PDF, it may well be a copying error.
Students also over-practise Quant and Reasoning and leave English to the last month. Since English has its own cut-off, it is the section most likely to end your attempt even if you are strong elsewhere. And many leave General Awareness until after Prelims, when there is not enough time for it.
FAQ
Does IBPS release official PO question papers?
No. IBPS gives each candidate a scorecard but does not publish the question paper or a public answer key. The papers you find online are memory-based reconstructions. The year pages here have original mock papers set in each year’s reported pattern, clearly marked as mocks.
What is the IBPS PO Prelims pattern?
Prelims has 100 questions in 60 minutes: 30 English, 35 Quantitative Aptitude and 35 Reasoning, with 20 minutes for each section. Each question carries one mark and a wrong answer costs a quarter mark. Each section has its own cut-off. Check the current notification for any change.
How should I sit papers from before 2019?
Use three separate 20-minute timers, one per section, even though those years had a single 60-minute clock. That matches the exam you will actually take and stops you building the habit of borrowing time from one section for another.
How many years of IBPS PO papers should I solve?
Aim for every year from 2019 to 2024 as full papers, since they match the current Prelims format. Use 2015 to 2018 for topic practice and extra sectionals. Add SBI PO papers if you want more Prelims practice at a slightly higher level.
Is the descriptive paper important in IBPS PO?
Yes. It is a letter and an essay, typed in 30 minutes for 25 marks, and it is evaluated only for candidates who do well enough in the objective Mains. Students who have never practised typing a timed essay often run out of time, so write several practice pieces before Mains.
How is the final IBPS PO merit list made?
Mains marks carry 80% of the weight and interview marks 20%. Prelims is only a screening stage, so its score does not count in the final list. You also need to clear every sectional cut-off and the minimum interview score.
Can I use IBPS PO papers to prepare for SBI PO?
Yes, for the most part. The Prelims structure is very close and the topics overlap. SBI PO Mains is usually tougher, especially in Reasoning and DI, and its descriptive paper carries more marks, so add SBI papers in your final weeks if you are taking both.
Which section causes most failures in IBPS PO?
For many candidates it is English, because of the sectional cut-off. Reasoning is the other common problem, usually from spending too long on one puzzle. Past papers help with both, as long as you review your time on each set as well as your score.
Where to get the official papers
IBPS publishes notifications, exam calendars, scorecards and cut-offs on ibps.in. It does not publish the question papers. Use the notification for the current pattern, dates and eligibility. We add notes and mock papers for each year, but the official notification is the final word.