12,792 candidates appeared for the CSS 2025 compulsory papers out of 18,139 who applied, and they are the same cohort that went on to sit every optional subject. These papers are no formality, and the passing rules are stricter than on the optional side: each compulsory paper must clear 40% rather than the 33% that applies to optionals, and the three General Knowledge papers are judged together, requiring a combined 120 out of 300 to pass. Measured against that 40% bar, only one of the six papers has an average candidate above the line, which is why compulsory performance, far more than optional subject choice, is what keeps most candidates out of the final allocation.
Orange = above 40% pass threshold · Red = below threshold
Read against the 40% compulsory threshold, the picture is sobering. GK-III is the only paper where the average candidate clears the bar comfortably, with a mean of 47.9%. Every other paper falls short: GK-II sits just below at 38.9%, GK-I at 32.2%, English at 32.1%, Islamiat at 30.3%, and Essay lowest of all at 26.1%. The three General Knowledge papers matter most here because they are aggregated. Their combined mean works out to roughly 118.9 out of 300, which lands just under the 120-mark combined pass requirement, so the average candidate fails the GK component by a single mark even though GK-III alone looks healthy. Essay remains the single most damaging paper, with a mean almost 14 points beneath the threshold on a paper that carries a full 100 marks.
Error bars show ±1 standard deviation
Standard deviation adds the nuance that the means alone hide. GK-III pairs the highest mean (47.9%) with the widest spread (14.1 percentage points), so the field is genuinely open: strong candidates pull well past 60% while weaker ones drop below 40%. That spread is also what rescues many candidates on the combined GK total, since a high GK-III score can pull a thin GK-I and GK-II up toward the 120 line. Essay tells the opposite story. A std dev of 10.2 points on a 26.1% mean means that even a candidate scoring a full standard deviation above average reaches only about 36%, still short of the 40% pass mark. English is the most predictable paper, its tight 7.2-point spread reflecting a stable scoring floor and ceiling that leaves little room to either gain or lose ground.
↓ 29% lost from applied
↓ 97% lost from appeared
↓ 52% lost from written pass
The funnel from application to allocation is brutally narrow. Of the 18,139 who applied, 12,792 actually sat the exam, so roughly 29% never appeared at all. From that field of nearly thirteen thousand, only 355 cleared the written stage, a written pass rate of about 2.8%, and just 170 of those were finally allocated a seat. That last step matters more than aspirants expect: even among the small group who pass the written exam, fewer than half go on to an allocation. The headline figure is stark, with only 1.33% of candidates who sat the papers ending up with a service, which reframes the compulsory papers as the first and steepest of several cliffs rather than a routine hurdle.
The gender story runs against the usual assumptions. The field starts male-tilted, with men making up about 57% of applicants, and that edge persists into the appeared stage at 55%. From there it closes steadily. Among the 355 who cleared the written exam the split was almost exactly even, 178 men to 177 women, and at the final allocation stage women actually moved ahead, taking 86 of the 170 seats to the men's 84. In other words, although fewer women enter the process, those who do convert through each stage at a higher rate, ending in a slight female majority among the allocated. The compulsory papers, whatever else they filter, do not filter by gender.
Provincial origin shapes outcomes through the regional allocation quota, and the data shows the tension plainly. Punjab dominates the raw numbers, with 6,977 candidates appearing, well over half the national field, yet it converts written-pass candidates into seats at just 38%, the lowest rate of any domicile. The smaller provinces sit at the opposite end: Azad Kashmir and Ex-FATA converted every one of their written passes into a seat, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, Sindh Rural, and Sindh Urban all cleared 80% or more. The pattern is a direct consequence of the quota system, which reserves a fixed share of seats for each region, so a qualifier from a low-volume province faces far less internal competition for those seats than an equally capable candidate from Punjab.
The compulsory papers decide whether a candidate's optional performance is ever weighed at all, and the 40% individual bar plus the 120-of-300 combined GK rule makes that gate narrower than most aspirants assume. A candidate sitting at 36% on Essay is short by roughly 4 marks that no optional subject can recover, and a GK aggregate near 119 fails the whole component by a hair. The funnel beyond it is just as unforgiving, with barely 1.33% of those who sat the papers reaching allocation, and where a candidate is domiciled materially changes the odds at the final step. Any serious preparation plan should therefore secure Essay, English, and the GK papers against these thresholds first, understand the quota maths for one's own province, and only then optimise optional subject selection.