UPSC IES/ISS
UPSC Indian Economic Service - Indian Statistical Service Examination
Eligibility
Age 21–30 years. IES — postgraduate degree in Economics, Applied Economics, Business Economics or Econometrics. ISS — a bachelor's or master's degree with Statistics/Mathematical Statistics/Applied Statistics as a subject. .
Selection Process
Written Examination
Descriptive, held over three days. General Studies and General English are common; the remainder is service-specific — General Economics I-III plus Indian Economics for IES, Statistics I-IV for ISS. There is no objective screening stage: unlike CSE, candidates go straight to the written exam.
Viva Voce
Personality test at UPSC Bhavan for candidates who clear the written stage.
About UPSC IES/ISS
Recruits Group A officers for the Indian Economic Service and the Indian Statistical Service — the cadres that staff economic advisory and statistical posts across NITI Aayog, the Ministry of Finance, MoSPI and the Reserve Bank's policy-adjacent bodies. A specialist exam: candidates apply to one service and sit only that service's papers, with a postgraduate degree in the subject as a hard eligibility gate.
Not to be confused with UPSC IES (Indian Engineering Services), a separate exam for engineering graduates — the two share an abbreviation and nothing else.