If you searched for “SARAS 4.0” and landed here, the first thing worth knowing is that the version number has moved on twice. The CBSE affiliation portal at saras.cbse.gov.in now presents itself as SARAS 7.0. SARAS 6.0 governed the previous cycle under a CBSE notification dated 11 March 2025. Any checklist still written against 4.0 is describing a portal that no longer exists in that form.
The acronym has not changed — School Affiliation Re-Engineered Automation System — and neither has the underlying legal instrument, the Affiliation Bye-Laws, 2018. What changes, and changes often, is the circular layer sitting on top of them.
SARAS is now on version 7.0, not 4.0
Version numbers in SARAS track affiliation cycles rather than software releases in any meaningful sense. SARAS 7.0 opened on 26 February 2026 for the affiliation session 2027-28, under Circular 07/2026. CBSE subsequently issued Circular 10/2026 on 24 July 2026, extending the submission timelines across categories.
That extension is the practical lesson. The deadlines published in February were not the deadlines in July. Before your school treats any date as final, open the circulars index on the SARAS portal and read from the top. It is the most useful page CBSE publishes for affiliation work.
The four gates before the portal will accept you
A common and expensive misunderstanding is that affiliation begins when you open the application form. It does not. Four things must already be in order:
- A UDISE+ code. This sits under everything else. Without it the school does not exist as far as the central education data system is concerned.
- OASIS data updated. The Online Affiliated School Information System holds your staff, enrolment and infrastructure figures, and applications are checked against them.
- Mandatory Public Disclosure completed on your own website. Documents in the Appendix-IX format, plus the list of teachers with their qualifications. Covered in detail in our mandatory public disclosure guide.
- SQAAF self-assessment completed. The School Quality Assessment and Assurance Framework, developed by CBSE with NCERT and aligned to NEP 2020, is a standards-based self-evaluation carried out annually on the SQAA portal, in a window running from 1 April to 31 December. It became a mandatory pre-condition for SARAS applications from the 2024-25 session onward.
Three of those four are annual obligations that exist whether or not you are applying for anything. Schools that treat them as application paperwork discover, late in the cycle, that a year’s worth of evidence was never collected.
Which application categories the 2027-28 window covers
The categories opened under SARAS 7.0 are broader than “new school”. They include approval for the middle-class syllabus, fresh affiliation up to secondary and senior secondary level including switchover from another board, upgradation to secondary and senior secondary, branch schools, extension of affiliation, and restoration.
Extension is the category most schools deal with most often, and the one most often left late. An extension application draws on exactly the same four gates as a fresh one.
Bye-Laws 2018 and the amendments that moved the goalposts
The 2018 bye-laws are amended by circular, and the early-2026 amendments were not cosmetic:
- Circular 04/2026 (19 January 2026) — amendment in the land requirement clauses 3.3 to 3.7 of Chapter 3.
- Circular 06/2026 (25 February 2026) — amendment in Appendix-V under Chapter 3.
- Circular 02/2026 (19 January 2026) — amendment regarding appointment of a Counsellor and Wellness Teacher in CBSE schools.
- Circulars 05, 08 and 09 of 2026 — the six-month bridge course for in-service primary teachers, following the Supreme Court order dated 11 August 2023.
The counsellor and wellness teacher amendment has a direct downstream effect: those details are a named row in the public disclosure format. A staffing decision becomes a website obligation.
What the physical inspection actually examines
After online document scrutiny and the SQAAF self-assessment, CBSE conducts a physical inspection. The team looks at land and building, classrooms, laboratories, library, the athletics ground and staff records, and files its report with the Board.
Note the order. Scrutiny and self-assessment come first; the visit tests whether what you declared is true. An inspection is not a chance to make your case — it is a reconciliation against documents you have already submitted. Our guide to preparing records for a CBSE inspection covers what that reconciliation touches.
Where a school ERP genuinely helps, and where it does not
Affiliation work is mostly evidence retrieval under time pressure, which is where an operational system earns its keep.
EdunodeX holds the records the affiliation file is built from: enrolment by class and section, staff records with qualifications, attendance registers, the fee structure, the academic calendar, and a document vault storing uploaded certificates along with their extracted metadata. Its compliance module carries rules as data across ten categories — including staff qualification, infrastructure, attendance and registration path — with school tiers that distinguish CBSE and ICSE schools from state-board and unregistered ones, deterministic evaluators for checks such as pupil-teacher ratio, and a per-category report with CSV export. A separate UDISE report and CSV export covers enrolment reporting.
What it does not do is file your application. There is no integration that pushes data into SARAS, OASIS or the SQAA portal, and you should be sceptical of any vendor claiming otherwise. What you get is current, internally consistent numbers in a form you can transcribe or upload, instead of weeks spent reconciling registers.
Read the circular list before you read anything else
The most reliable affiliation habit a school office can build costs nothing: check the SARAS circulars index monthly and read every new entry. Ten circulars landed in the first seven months of 2026, and four of them changed a requirement rather than merely restating one.
For a broader view of what a CBSE school’s software needs to cover beyond affiliation, see our CBSE school ERP features guide.