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The notification was issued around the time when the BPSC opened applications for its 32,388 teacher posts through the Teachers Recruitment Examination (TRE)-4. The notification comes as the policy passed in August 2025 comes into effect this year for the first time.

For applicants, it adds another layer of filtering. Said a BPSC official: “Since Bihar had not introduced its domicile policy in our past three examinations, women candidates were free to use their husbands’ address. We had to ensure foolproof implementation of our domicile policy, and needed to clarify rules on married women, applicable for women married into Bihar”.

In TRE-I, held in August 2023, around 1.20 lakh teachers were appointed against 1.70 lakh advertised vacancies. In TRE-II, held in December 2023, around 96,000 teachers were selected against 1.22 lakh advertised posts across primary, middle, secondary and higher secondary cadres. TRE-III, originally held in March 2024, was cancelled after a paper leak and re-conducted in July 2024 for 87,774 vacancies. The BPSC subsequently selected around 70,000 candidates across the four school cadres

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According to officials, about 50,000 out-of-state teachers have been appointed across TRE-I to TRE-III since 2023– nearly one-fifth of BPSC’s 2.68 lakh teacher appointments.

“Of the 5.68 lakh teachers hired since 2006, a good number of candidates came from other states. This upset Bihar candidates. When the Bihar Teacher Recruitment Rules were first notified in March 2023, a mandatory Bihar domicile policy implementation clause was added. But the Bihar cabinet scrapped it in July 2023, which effectively means that the Bihar domicile policy was never enforced for any examinations,” said an education department official.

Notified in August last year, the BPSC TRE Domicile Rules introduced a 40% quota for candidates who passed matriculation or intermediate from institutions in Bihar. Under the new policy, no direct quota exists for candidates from outside Bihar, and they must compete exclusively for 15% open seats.

Non-domicile candidates also don’t receive state reservation benefits such as women’s quota and other relaxations, and, like other general candidates, require 60% in central and state teacher eligibility tests to qualify – the highest qualifying mark among the categories.

Bihar reserves 85% of state teacher recruitment posts directly for permanent residents of Bihar through various reservation quotas.

The BPSC, which has invited applications for the TRE-4 examination, has not yet announced its examination schedule. Of the total 32,388 vacancies, 3,847 positions are for Class 1 to Class 5, 8,563 posts for Class 6 to Class 8, 3,878 posts for Class 9 to Class 10, and 16,101 posts for Class 11 to Class 12 teachers.

According to the UDISE+ 2024-25 report, Bihar has a total of approximately 94,339 schools, both government and private. About 80.84% to 80.90% of these, roughly 76,000 to 76,300 government-managed schools, operate in the state. These government schools are served by a total of approximately 7.07 lakh (707,000) teachers.