CMA Coaching Centres in India: ICMAI Centres, Fees and How to Choose

ICMAI's own coaching centres

ICMAI's prospectus says that a student eligible for admission to a course "has to undergo and complete Coaching for the relevant course". You choose postal or oral coaching when you are admitted to Foundation, register for Intermediate or enrol for Final. For oral (classroom) coaching, you join one of these (CMA Prospectus 2025):

The rules are the same at every centre. Oral coaching for Foundation, or for each Intermediate or Final group, lasts 4 months with at least 240 lecture hours of lectures and tutorial classes, each lecture hour being 45 minutes. The centre holds an exam in each subject and gives you ICMAI's study material. At Intermediate and Final you enrol for the coaching of both groups when you register or enrol.

Admission, registration or enrolment for coaching must be completed at least four months before the exam. The cut-off is 31 January for the June term and 31 July for the December term, for Foundation admission, Intermediate registration and Final enrolment alike (CMA Prospectus 2025).

If there is no centre near you, postal coaching sends the study material for each subject to your registered address; students from abroad can take postal coaching only. You can switch from oral to postal, postal to oral, or one centre to another once, within 30 days of admission, registration or enrolment, for ₹500 (Annexure IX). Our guide to ICMAI's coaching scheme and study material covers coaching revalidation and the study notes in more detail.

Coaching fees

ICMAI's tuition fee is the same for postal and oral coaching (CMA Prospectus 2025, Annexure IX):

Fees are subject to GST where it applies, and the instalment option is not open to foreign students. Exam fees are charged separately each term: ₹1,500 for Foundation, ₹1,500 for one Intermediate group or ₹2,800 for both, and ₹1,800 for one Final group or ₹3,200 for both. Our guide to CMA course fees adds the other ICMAI charges and the total cost.

Private coaching fees are set by each institute, and ICMAI publishes no figures for them. Before you pay, get in writing whether the fee is per paper, per group or for the whole level, what it includes (books, mock tests, recordings), how long access lasts and what the refund terms are. Because Intermediate and Final are taken in two groups, also ask whether a course is sold for one group (Group 1 or Group 2) as well as for both.

ICMAI also runs fee concessions, listed in Annexure X of the prospectus: a fee waiver for meritorious Foundation students, a scholarship for economically challenged and meritorious Intermediate students, a refund scheme for differently abled students, and a fee waiver for students from the North-Eastern states, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Check the current scheme documents on icmai.in before you apply.

Classroom, live online or recorded classes

ICMAI's E-Learning page links to its "Online Coaching Classes". You log in on the Event Portal with your registration number and date of birth and choose your course and coaching type, Foundation, Intermediate or Final, oral or postal. The classes run on Microsoft Teams, on a laptop, desktop or the Teams phone app, and each class link opens 60 minutes before it starts. The prospectus also lists an E-Class Library of recorded webinars among its student support services (Annexure XVII).

Private centres teach in one or more of three ways: classroom batches, live online classes on a fixed timetable, and recorded lectures that you stream, download or receive on a pendrive. Whatever the mode, find out:

• which platform or app the classes use, and whether it works on your device;
• whether classes are recorded, and for how long you can rewatch them;
• how you ask questions after a class, and whether one-to-one doubt sessions are offered;
• whether revision classes and timed practice with past papers are included before the exam.

Our guide to CMA online classes compares ICMAI's online classes with private live and recorded courses level by level.

Study material and teaching language

Students under postal or oral coaching receive ICMAI's study material for every paper. The prospectus adds that students "should refer to other text books for a subject for in-depth study", and Annexure IV lists recommended books for each paper. A private centre's own notes should therefore build on ICMAI's material, not replace it.

Languages

Ask which language a course is taught in, and match it to the language you will write the exam in. Intermediate and Final candidates may answer in Hindi, but ICMAI warns that "Answer scripts written by mixing both English and Hindi language will be liable for cancellation" (CMA Prospectus 2025), so choose classes taught in that language.

How to choose a private coaching centre

Where an institute posts sample lectures on YouTube or offers a trial class, use them to judge the teacher before you pay. In our view, these are the points worth checking:

• Syllabus: the course teaches Syllabus 2022, with 20 papers (4 at Foundation, 8 at Intermediate and 8 at Final) and the same paper names and numbers as ICMAI's study material (Curriculum 2022).
• Exam term: tax and law lectures cover the amendments that apply to your exam term, or come with update lectures.
• Teachers: the faculty's qualifications and teaching experience, which you can ask to see.
• Timetable: the batch finishes the syllabus well before your exam, leaving time for revision.
• Distance: for a classroom batch, how long the journey takes; travel time is study time lost.
• Fees: what the fee covers and the refund terms, in writing.

Whichever centre you choose, the results depend on regular study: watch or attend each lecture on time, revise from ICMAI's study material, and use recordings to go back over topics you found hard. For classroom options in the capital, see our guide to CMA classes in Delhi.