CAT Case Status on eCourtsIndia: Search Every Central Administrative Tribunal Bench

Last updated: 23 September 2026.

To check a CAT case status, open eCourtsIndia search, pick the Central Administrative Tribunal bench that hears the matter, and type the employee or department name or paste the 16-character CNR. Every CAT bench, from the Principal Bench in New Delhi to Srinagar, Ernakulam and Cuttack, sits in the same free index as the Supreme Court, the High Courts and the district courts. The platform holds 2.4 lakh+ CAT matters across 19 benches, and each record carries the case history and, where uploaded, the order or judgment text. This guide shows how to open any bench with one link, what the case-type codes mean, and how to follow a service matter once you have found it.

Key takeaways

• The Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) is searchable on ecourtsindia.com/search across all 19 benches, with 2.4 lakh+ matters indexed.
• CAT is the specialist forum for the service disputes of central government employees, set up under the Administrative Tribunals Act, 1985. In the live enum it is coded as CGAT, which is why bench court codes start with CGA.
• Every bench opens with a single cc= link, from the Principal Bench in New Delhi, the largest with about 39,000 matters, to the benches at Allahabad, Chandigarh, Jammu, Mumbai and beyond.
• The core record is the Original Application (OA), the service petition an employee files, at more than 1 lakh matters, alongside about 95,000 miscellaneous applications and 26,000+ contempt petitions.
• Have only the CAT case number? The CAT CNR generator builds the CNR. Searching is free, with no login and no paid ranking.

Where CAT fits on eCourtsIndia

CAT decides the service life of the central government workforce: promotions, pensions, transfers, seniority and disciplinary action. On eCourtsIndia it sits alongside the courts and tribunals you already search, and it is one of the largest tribunal datasets on the platform. Its natural companions are the other service and claims forums: the Armed Forces Tribunal, which handles the service matters of defence personnel, and the Railway Claims Tribunal.

If you have ever tried to follow a service matter across the separate CAT bench portals, you know the records are hard to read together. eCourtsIndia stitches all 19 benches into one searchable index. Ministries and departments are the respondents in most CAT matters, and our Ministry Litigation Index shows which of them spend the most time in court. For every other court and tribunal, start from our India courts and eCourts access directory.

What the Central Administrative Tribunal is

The Central Administrative Tribunal is the specialist forum that hears service disputes of people employed by the central government, and it takes the place of the High Court for most of those matters. It was set up under the Administrative Tribunals Act, 1985, which was passed to give central government employees a dedicated, faster forum for their service grievances and to ease the writ burden on the High Courts. A central government servant who is aggrieved by a decision on recruitment, promotion, seniority, transfer, pay, pension or discipline files an Original Application before the CAT bench that has territorial jurisdiction over the posting.

CAT is arranged as a Principal Bench in New Delhi and a set of benches across the country, each covering a region. An order of CAT is not appealed to a higher tribunal in the ordinary way. Instead it is challenged before a Division Bench of the High Court that has jurisdiction over that bench, following the Supreme Court’s decision in L. Chandra Kumar. In plain terms, if you work for the central government or a body that CAT covers and you have a service grievance, CAT is usually your first court, and the data on eCourtsIndia lets you follow that matter from filing to order.

Open your CAT bench

The fastest way into the data is by bench. Each bench has its own set of court codes, and the table below maps every bench to a one click link that opens its records on eCourtsIndia. To open every bench together, use the full CAT search.

Bench	State or UT	Indexed matters	Open on eCourtsIndia
Principal Bench, New Delhi	Delhi	39,168	Open Delhi Principal Bench
Ahmedabad	Gujarat	9,488	Open Ahmedabad Bench
Allahabad	Uttar Pradesh	18,772	Open Allahabad Bench
Bangalore	Karnataka	9,595	Open Bangalore Bench
Chandigarh	Chandigarh	15,396	Open Chandigarh Bench
Chennai	Tamil Nadu	9,674	Open Chennai Bench
Cuttack	Odisha	9,733	Open Cuttack Bench
Ernakulam	Kerala	10,778	Open Ernakulam Bench
Guwahati	Assam	6,727	Open Guwahati Bench
Hyderabad	Telangana	11,352	Open Hyderabad Bench
Jabalpur	Madhya Pradesh	12,558	Open Jabalpur Bench
Jaipur	Rajasthan	10,037	Open Jaipur Bench
Jammu	Jammu and Kashmir	13,186	Open Jammu Bench
Jodhpur	Rajasthan	8,666	Open Jodhpur Bench
Kolkata	West Bengal	11,779	Open Kolkata Bench
Lucknow	Uttar Pradesh	10,116	Open Lucknow Bench
Mumbai	Maharashtra	12,783	Open Mumbai Bench
Patna	Bihar	12,109	Open Patna Bench
Srinagar	Jammu and Kashmir	10,020	Open Srinagar Bench

How to check a CAT case status

To check a CAT case status, open eCourtsIndia search, filter to the right bench, then search by the employee or department name or the CNR. There are three reliable routes, depending on what you already know.

1. By party name. If you know the applicant or the department, type the name into the free text box and add the bench filter. The index matches names on both sides, so it works whether your name is the applicant or the respondent, and the respondent is usually the Union of India through a ministry, department or public body. To trace one name across every court and tribunal at once, drop the filter and search the name alone, or use the dedicated litigant search.

2. By CNR. Every CAT matter carries a 16 character CNR that never changes, even if the case is transferred or renumbered. The CNR begins with the bench and register code, so a Delhi Original Application starts with CGADLOA and a Mumbai one with CGAMUOA, followed by the running number and year. Paste the CNR into the search and you land on that exact case. If you are not sure how to read the code, our guide on the CNR number decoded walks through each character.

If you only have the CAT filing or registration number, the tribunal CNR generator for CAT turns the bench, case type, number and year into the 16-character CNR that eCourtsIndia uses, so you can open the case directly. Our explainer on how eCourtsIndia mints a tribunal CNR walks through the format for all 14 supported tribunals.

3. By bench, then filter. If you want to browse rather than look up one matter, open a bench with its cc= link and use the sidebar to narrow by case type, status and filing year. This is the route a service law advocate or a department’s establishment section takes when scanning every pending Original Application at a bench. For the full set of filters, parameters and query operators behind all of this, our eCourtsIndia search guide is the reference to keep open in another tab.

The CAT case types you will see

CAT uses a small, consistent vocabulary of case types, and knowing the main ones makes a search far quicker. The table below shows the verified counts across all 19 benches.

Case type	What it is	Indexed matters
Original Application (OA)	The core service petition an employee files against a government decision	1,04,994
Miscellaneous Application (MA)	Applications filed inside a matter, such as a stay, early hearing or condonation of delay	95,648
Contempt Petition (CP)	Action for disobedience of a CAT order that a department has not implemented	26,873
Review Application (RA)	A request to review a CAT order	7,569
Transfer Application (TA)	A matter transferred to CAT or moved between benches	3,530

The shape of this caseload tells a real story. The Original Application and the Miscellaneous Application run almost neck and neck, because every service petition tends to draw a cluster of interim applications around it. The 26,000+ contempt petitions are the number worth pausing on, because they show how often a government employee, having won a promotion or a pension order, has to come back to court to make the department actually comply. To make sense of where any of these stand, the case status dictionary explains every status code in plain English, and the case type encyclopedia covers the vocabulary across every court.

Reading orders and judgments

Search is only the first step. Once you are on a case, eCourtsIndia gives you the case history and, where it has been uploaded, the full text of the order or judgment. For a service matter, where the ratio on a seniority rule or a pension entitlement can decide thousands of similar cases, that full text access is the difference between knowing a matter was decided and knowing how it was decided. The free text box searches inside that order text, so you can find every matter where a particular rule, office memorandum or line of reasoning appears, which is exactly how a service law practitioner or an establishment officer builds a position. The same portfolio style view, following a department or an issue across many cases at once, is the workflow we cover for legal teams in our piece on legal due diligence on the eCourtsIndia API.

Who this helps

The people who get the most out of this are the ones who live in service law. A central government employee tracking their own promotion or pension matter, and the service law advocate acting for them, can follow it from one screen instead of a bench portal. Establishment and vigilance sections inside ministries and public bodies can watch every matter filed against their department, and see how similar grievances have been decided elsewhere. Recognised service associations and unions can track the litigation that shapes the careers of their members.

Beyond the direct participants, researchers studying how the tribunal system has performed since 1985, and journalists tracing high profile service and transfer disputes, have a clean, national dataset to work from. Anyone advising on a service rule can read how CAT has actually treated it across benches, rather than guessing from a single reported case. This is what we mean by putting the public record in a form a normal person can actually use.

Once you have found a CAT matter, you do not need to keep checking it by hand. eCourtsIndia can track the case for Rs 5 a month and send a WhatsApp or email alert when a new order, listing or status change lands, at Rs 0.50 per alert, with an AI summary of any order for Rs 2 (see pricing). The same case opens on the Android app, the iOS app and through the eCourtsIndia Chrome extension, and if you need someone to appear for you, the verified advocate directory lists practitioners by court. Teams that follow hundreds of matters can pull the same records through the eCourtsIndia API (23 endpoints, Rs 200 of free credits on signup) or plug an AI assistant into the eCourtsIndia MCP server.

Following a CAT matter through to compliance

A service matter rarely ends with the order. The department may take months to implement it, the employee may file a contempt petition, and either side may carry the matter to a Division Bench of the High Court. Tracking the case means the alert reaches you at each of those steps, wherever the matter goes next.

Order coverage on the CAT benches keeps deepening. Bookmark CAT search or your own bench link from the table above.

Frequently Asked Questions