Census 2027 Gives Households an Online Option From 10 January, Ahead of a House-to-House Count Running 25 January to 28 February 2027 in Most of India

The Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, Mritunjay Kumar Narayan, notified the dates for the population count of Census 2027 in the Gazette of India on Friday, 30 October 2026. In most of the country, households can fill in the census form online from 10 to 24 January 2027, enumerators visit homes from 25 January to 28 February, and a revisional round runs from 1 to 5 March. The reference date, the moment at which everyone is counted, is 00:00 hours on 1 March 2027.

It is the 16th census in India’s series, the 8th since Independence and the first since 2011, according to the Press Information Bureau (PIB). The government describes it as the country’s first census conducted by digital means, and PIB calls it the largest census exercise in the world.

What the notification says

The notification (S.O. 5913(E)) is issued under section 3 of the Census Act, 1948, read with rules 6A and 6D of the Census Rules, 1990. Census is a Union subject, entry 69 of the Union List in the Seventh Schedule, as the PIB backgrounder of 25 April 2026 points out. The 30 October order applies to every State and Union territory except Manipur (until further declaration), Goa, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Ladakh and the snow-bound areas of Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir.

For everywhere else, it sets three windows and a reference date: online self-enumeration from 10 to 24 January 2027, house-to-house enumeration from 25 January to 28 February 2027, and a revisional round from 1 to 5 March 2027, when records can be corrected. The Daily Pioneer and ANI reported the same dates on the day.

Three timetables for one census

Census 2027 does not run on a single calendar. Three gazette notifications set three sets of dates, and a reader looking for a particular state needs to know which one applies.

Some news reports of 30 October described Goa, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Uttarakhand as left out for later. The gazette of 5 September shows they have an earlier timetable of their own, and the Press Trust of India (PTI) reported it on 5 September as advancing the count in those states. Manipur sits outside all three schedules, with the 30 October notification saying “till further declaration”.

The snow-bound areas are already counted

The first group on the calendar has finished. Amit Sharma, the Director of Census Operations for Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, told reporters in Jammu on 6 October 2026 that population enumeration in the snow-bound areas of the two Union territories was completed 100 per cent between 1 and 30 September, and that the five-day revisional round ended on 5 October. The count covered 5,292 enumeration blocks, 4,597 in Jammu and Kashmir and 695 in Ladakh, according to Greater Kashmir and Kashmir Observer.

PTI reported at the launch on 1 September that Ladakh, enumerated entirely during September, would be the first Union territory counted in full in this phase. The same report said 10,199 households in the two territories used self-enumeration before the field visits began: 9,672 in Jammu and Kashmir and 527 in Ladakh. The plains of Jammu and Kashmir, including Srinagar and Jammu, come under the February 2027 schedule, Sharma said.

How self-enumeration works

Self-enumeration is optional, and it is an addition: PIB’s note of 30 March 2026 says enumerators still make house-to-house visits in their blocks, as in earlier censuses. A respondent logs in to the portal at se.census.gov.in with a mobile number, marks the home’s location on a map, fills in the household details and submits. The portal then issues a Self-Enumeration ID, which the household gives the enumerator at the door so the details can be confirmed and included.

The portal runs in 16 languages, according to the PIB backgrounder: Assamese, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Enumerators record answers on a mobile app, also in 16 languages.

The 40 questions

A separate notification of 14 August 2026 (S.O. 4505(E)) lists 40 items for the Household Schedule. They run from name, relationship to the head of the household, sex, date of birth and age, marital status and age at marriage, through religion, disability, mother tongue and other languages known, literacy and digital literacy, and the highest level of education. Items 18 to 25 cover work, occupation and travel to the workplace, and items 26 to 29 cover birthplace, last residence, reason for migration and length of stay. Three items on children go to married, widowed, divorced and separated women, the last of them to currently married women only.

Item 10 reads “Scheduled Caste (SC)/ Scheduled Tribe (ST)/Caste”. PIB says that until the 2011 census only Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes were systematically enumerated, and that the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs decided on 30 April 2025 to include caste enumeration in this census. ThePrint reported that the caste question is open-ended: the enumerator records what the person says, with no drop-down list. For how colonial censuses sorted people by caste, see our piece on divide and rule.

The last items ask for the place of Covid-19 vaccination, the total number of bank accounts, mobile number, Aadhaar number and Voter ID number (each “if available”), passport number for Indian passport holders, and whether the person has a driving licence. Under section 15 of the Census Act, PIB says, the personal information people give is strictly confidential. It cannot be disclosed under the RTI Act, used as evidence in a court or shared with any institution.

The size of the exercise

PIB’s press note of 30 March 2026 gives the scale: 36 States and Union territories, 7,092 sub-districts, 5,128 statutory towns, 4,580 census towns and 6,39,902 villages as on 1 January 2026, with administrative boundaries frozen from 1 January 2026 to 31 March 2027. About 31 lakh enumerators and supervisors are being trained in around 80,000 batches. The Union government has approved an outlay of Rs 11,718.24 crore (about Rs 117 billion).

The first phase, the Houselisting and Housing Census, ran state by state between April and September 2026, each in a 30-day window with a 15-day self-enumeration period before it. ANI reported on 17 July that it had been completed in 29 States and Union territories, with its 33 questions covering housing conditions, amenities and assets. PIB says the phase also builds the frame of house blocks that the population count uses.

PIB’s backgrounder traces the earliest references to counting people in India to Kautilya’s Arthashastra and to Abul Fazl’s Ain-e-Akbari under Akbar. It dates the first modern population count to 1865 to 1872 and the first synchronous census, with the whole country counted together, to 1881.

The next date on the calendar is 16 November 2026, when self-enumeration opens in Goa, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and the non-snow-bound areas of Uttarakhand.