The short answer, from the lists themselves: Yadav appears on the Central List of Other Backward Classes in fourteen of the fifteen state and union-territory schedules we retrieved and read on 14 October 2026, and it appears under whatever name the state uses. Uttar Pradesh opens its schedule at entry 1 with "Ahir, Yadav"; Bihar files the community at entry 104 as "Yadav (Gwala, Ahir, Gope, Sadgope)"; Tamil Nadu carries it at entry 168 as "Yadava", bundling Idaiyar and Ayar names; Andhra Pradesh at entry 93 as "Yadava (Golla)". So the honest answer to "which category in which state" is OBC wherever a row exists, recorded under a local name, with the state's own list deciding state-government posts.
Two things we will not smooth over. The central list is one thing and each state's own backward-class list is another: labels like BC-I, BC-II, BC-A, BC-B, MBC and EBC belong to state systems, and we did not verify a state tier for any state here. And population is a separate question again: Bihar is the only state with an official counted figure, Uttar Pradesh has estimates only, and India has published no all-India caste count since 1931. Where we could not retrieve a government-hosted schedule, the row says not verified instead of guessing.
This page is the state-wise spoke of our Yadav caste cluster. The cluster hub, the Yadav caste guide, carries the verbatim central-list rows, the central-versus-state list explanation, the category-label dictionary and the step-by-step way to check your own state's schedule. The narrower questions have their own verified pages: Yadav OBC or General, the Bihar category and caste-count page, and the gotra and varna guide.
Yadav caste category by state: entry, local name and what is unverified
The entry numbers and quoted wording below are from the state schedules of the Central List of Other Backward Classes as hosted by the National Commission for Backward Classes and the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, read on 14 October 2026. The last column is deliberately about what the central list does not tell you, because that is where most state-wise Yadav answers go wrong.
| State / Union Territory | Central List entry (verified 14 Oct 2026) | Community names the row carries | What the central list does not decide |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uttar Pradesh | Entry 1 — "Ahir, Yadav" (10/09/1993; amended 06/12/1999) | Yadav, Ahir | UP runs no caste census, so the community's share of the state is an estimate, not a count. State-list tiers: not verified by us. |
| Bihar | Entry 104 — "Yadav (Gwala, Ahir, Gope, Sadgope)" (10/09/1993; amended 13/01/2004) | Yadav, Ahir, Gwala, Gope, Sadgope | Bihar divides its own list into BC and EBC, not BC-I/BC-II. Bihar is the only state with an official count: the 2022 Caste-Based Survey bundled Yadav with Ahir, Gowala, Gora, Ghasi, Mehar and Sadgop at 1,86,50,119 people, about 14.26% — the largest OBC group. Full page: Yadav caste category in Bihar. |
| Delhi | Entry 3 — "Ahir, Yadav, Gwala" (24/05/1995) | Yadav, Ahir, Gwala | For union-government posts the central list is what a recruiter reads; Delhi's own list treatment is not verified by us. |
| Haryana | Entry 26 — "Gawala, Gowala, Ahir/Yadav" (10/09/1993; 06/12/1996) | Ahir, Yadav, Gawala/Gowala | Gotra and clan names such as Dagar, Dahiya and Rathi identify lineages inside the community, not a separate category. |
| Rajasthan | Entry 1 — "Ahir (Yadav)" (19/10/1994) | Ahir, Yadav | Ahir landholders and soldiers are documented through the Sultanate, Mughal and colonial periods; that history says nothing about tier. |
| Madhya Pradesh | Entry 1 — a sixteen-name bundle including Jadav, Yadav, Raut and Gop/Gopal (10/09/1993; 15/05/1995; 16/06/2011) | Yadav, Ahir, Jadav, Raut, Gawali and others | "Jadav" on this row is a listed synonym, not evidence that a particular family with that surname sits under it. |
| Gujarat | Entry 2 — "Ahir", the same row carrying Ayar Bericha (10/09/1993) | Ahir | Gujarat's own backward-class handling is not verified by us. |
| Maharashtra | Entry 172 — "Yadav, Ahir" (10/09/1993) | Yadav, Ahir | Kunbi/Rao are regional names inside the wider pastoral family; Maharashtra's state-list combination for Maratha and Kunbi claims is a separate question we did not verify. |
| Jharkhand | Entry 118 — "Yadav (Gwala, Ahir, Gope), Mehar, Sadgop" (18/08/2010; 08/12/2011) | Yadav, Ahir, Gwala, Gope, Mehar, Sadgop | Jharkhand is the state whose list uses BC-I and BC-II. Which tier Yadav sits in there is not verified by us, and we do not read the string "B.C.II" inside a 2011 amendment's file number as a statement about tier. |
| West Bengal | Entry 3 — Goala/Gope bundle naming Ballav Gope, Pallav Gope, Yadav Gope, Gope, Ahir and Yadav (19/10/1994; 27/10/1999) | Gope, Goala, Ahir, Yadav | Bengal files the community under Gope/Goala spellings rather than a bare "Yadav" row, which is why name-matching fails here. |
| Karnataka | Entry 22 — the Golla/Gowli bundle closing with Yadav and Yadava (10/09/1993; 06/12/1999; 18/08/2010) | Golla, Gouli, Gowli, Gavali, Konar, Gopal, Yadav, Yadava and others | Karnataka's own OBC/DB categorisation is not verified by us, and the 2015 social and educational survey is still not published. |
| Andhra Pradesh | Entry 93 — "Yadava (Golla)" (10/09/1993) | Yadava, Golla | Andhra Pradesh divides its state list into BC-A, BC-B, BC-C and BC-D. Which block a Yadava or Golla family sits in is decided by that state list, and we did not verify it. |
| Tamil Nadu | Entry 168 — "Yadava", including Idaiyar, the Telugu-speaking Vaduga Ayar or Vaduga Idaiyar or Golla, Mond Golla and Asthanthra Golla (10/09/1993; 15/05/1995) | Yadava, Idaiyar, Ayar, Golla | Tamil Nadu has no "Yadav OBC" row in the northern sense: the state administers backward classes through its own BC and Most Backward Class tiers, and which tier a sub-group occupies is not verified by us. |
| Kerala | Sl. 82 on the state schedule, mapped to central list entry 67 — "Yadava" with Kolaya, Ayar, Mayar, Maniyani and Iruman | Yadava, Ayar, Mayar, Maniyani | Kerala's own EBC/BC handling of these communities is not verified by us. |
| Telangana, Odisha, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh | Not verified by us. We could not retrieve a government-hosted schedule we were willing to quote. | Golla and Yadava in the Deccan states; Ahir/Yadav in the north | Two cautions. The Punjab schedule we did read lists Aheria/Aheri, a different community, and we publish that as "no row to quote", never as proof that no entry exists. Telangana and Andhra Pradesh share the inherited list, but the post-2014 state schedule we would need to cite was not retrievable. |
| Nepal (Terai) | Outside India's reservation system | Abir | The Terai branch uses the Abir form of the name; Indian OBC categories do not apply to it. |
Read this table for the entry and the name, not as a substitute for the list. A reservation claim is decided by the notified entry in the list that governs the specific post or institution, plus an OBC certificate from the competent authority, never by a surname or a website table, including this one. The single most common error in state-wise Yadav answers is comparing a percentage from one document (Bihar's caste survey) with an entry from another (the central list) as though the two bundled the same six or seven castes.
Note also that "which list" depends on who is recruiting. The Central List governs union-government posts, the all-India services and centrally-administered institutions; every entry number above is from it. Each state maintains its own backward-class list, with its own tiers and its own rules, for state-government posts and state institutions. A Yadav applicant in Uttar Pradesh is therefore read against entry 1 of UP's central schedule for a central vacancy and against UP's own notified list for a state vacancy, and the two documents are not copies of each other.
Why "in which state is Yadav general category?" has no positive answer
Searches asking for a state where Yadavs are General are looking for an exception. On the evidence available, there isn't a notified one. In the fourteen schedules where we could read the row, the community is entered as a backward class under Yadav, Ahir, Yadava, Golla, Gope, Idaiyar or Ayar, and the General-category recognition some Yadav organisations have demanded remains a contested political claim rather than a gazette entry. What genuinely varies between states is the name the row carries, whether the entry is split into sub-groups, and which tier vocabulary the state's own list uses. Those differences change the paperwork; they do not convert the category to General anywhere we can verify. For the vocabulary itself — OBC, EBC, BC-I, BC-II, BC-A, BC-B, MBC — the hub page keeps the single dictionary, in the Yadav caste guide.
Population: one official number, one unfinished all-India exercise, and a lot of estimates
A search for "Yadav population" expects one figure for one community across India. That figure has never been published by anyone. What actually exists is one state's official enumeration, an all-India exercise whose caste entries were never merged into a countable list, and several state surveys whose reports stayed in drawers. Each answers a different question. Putting their numbers in the same sentence is how one percentage ends up cited for Uttar Pradesh, for Bihar and for India by three different articles.
Bihar: the one official count, with its method attached
The 2022 Bihar Caste-Based Survey was notified by the Government of Bihar on 6 June 2022 by gazette notification, after a Supreme Court ruling. Collection began on 7 January 2023 and the report was released on 2 October 2023. The General Administration Department ran it, the state spent close to ₹5 billion from its contingency fund, and enumerators filed the data on a mobile application called Bijaga. It counted the 214 castes on the state's own list.
| What the survey reported | People | Share of those counted |
|---|---|---|
| Total counted | 13,07,25,310 | 100% |
| Backward Classes (BC) | 3,54,63,936 | 27.12% |
| Extremely Backward Classes (EBC) | 4,70,80,514 | 36.01% |
| BC and EBC together | 8,25,44,450 | 63.14% |
| Scheduled Castes | 2,56,89,820 | 19.65% |
| Scheduled Tribes | 21,99,361 | 1.68% |
| Unreserved / General | 2,02,91,679 | 15.52% |
The Yadav row comes down to this: counted together with its constituent castes, Yadav came out at 14.26% of the state's population, 1,86,50,119 people, the largest share any single group holds in the report and the state's largest OBC bloc. Around 190 of the 214 surveyed castes sit below 1%, which is the context that makes a 14% group politically legible: the survey report's own tally of legislators put Yadavs at 52 of the 243 MLAs in the state assembly.
Three limits belong next to that number, and most pages quoting it drop all three.
- It is a survey, not the census. Officials of the General Administration Department said during collection that some people would be missed, because the exercise was a sub-set of the census and could not be expected to reach 100% coverage. The percentages are shares of who was counted.
- The group is bundled. The entry lists Yadav with six castes counted alongside it: Ahir, Gowala, Gora, Ghasi, Mehar, Sadgop. A reader matching this 14.26% against a "Yadav" percentage from another country's or state's data is usually matching a bundled community against a bare surname.
- It was disputed. On 5 October 2023 the BJP MP for Patna Sahib, Ravi Shankar Prasad, said nobody had met him or his family to collect caste information and implied the survey had been manipulated to suit the RJD. Bihar's Information and Public Relations Department replied that his family's data was collected as per norm. Tejashwi Yadav's counter was that Nitish Kumar would have inflated the numbers of his own Kurmi caste if the point had been to cheat. Both the allegation and the rebuttal are on the record; the count itself is the state's published figure.
The enumeration moved policy in the same session it was produced, and then the courts moved it back. On 9 November 2023 the Bihar Assembly passed a bill raising reservation to 65%, excluding the 10% EWS quota, apportioned at 20% for SC, 2% for ST, 18% for BC, 25% for EBC and 10% for economically weaker sections among the upper castes. A division bench of the Patna High Court struck those laws down on 20 June 2024 for breaching the 50% ceiling set by the Supreme Court in 1992; the state appealed on 2 July 2024, and on 6 September 2024 the Supreme Court sought the Centre's response. So "65% in Bihar" is not a settled figure to quote, and neither is 50% while the appeal is sub judice. The dated timeline, the sources and the certificate route are on the state page, Yadav caste category in Bihar.
Uttar Pradesh: a large community with no count behind the number
Uttar Pradesh very likely holds the largest Yadav population in absolute numbers, described as running into the tens of millions. The shares commonly quoted for it, roughly 9-15%, are researcher and election-study estimates. Uttar Pradesh has never run a caste census and its Backward Classes work has been quota-focused, so no enumeration exists to check those estimates against. That is a statement about what is missing, not a claim that the estimates are wrong.
Why there is no India-wide Yadav number to find
Caste was last tabulated for the whole country in the colonial census of 1931. The 2011 exercise was a different thing. The Socio Economic and Caste Census was conducted for the Census of India by the Ministry of Rural Development between 2011 and 2015, and not under the 1948 Census of India Act, which made disclosure of caste voluntary instead of mandatory. It came back with 46,73,034 separate entries across caste, sub-caste, synonym, surname, gotra; every state received them in November 2014 and was asked to club them into something countable. On 28 July 2015 the government reported 8,19,58,314 errors in caste particulars, of which 6,73,81,119 had been rectified; a parliamentary committee said in August 2016 that 98.87% of the individual caste and religion data was error-free. In 2021 the central government described the data as outdated and inaccurate. No consolidated all-India caste table was ever published from it, so there is no all-India Yadav figure for anyone to cite, only re-derivations of Bihar's or nobody's.
Other states: surveys that ran and reports that stayed shut
| Exercise | Status | What is on the record |
|---|---|---|
| Kerala Socio-Economic Survey 1968 | Published | Until the 2011 exercise it was the only caste-based count in post-independence India. It put forward castes at 33% of the state, almost half of them Syrian Christians, and merged unrelated groups, which is why it is cited as a precedent so rarely. |
| Telangana Samagra Kutumba Survey 2014 | Report surfaced in 2022, findings not made public | Backward Classes at about 51% of a population near 3.69 crore, SC 18.48% and ST 11.74%. Detailed findings have not been released because of court cases against the survey. |
| Karnataka Social and Educational Survey 2015 | Unpublished as of 2023 | Ordered in 2014 to inform OBC reservations and run by the state Backward Classes Commission at a cost of ₹169 crore. It stayed unreleased through eight years and more than one government; in June 2023 the state said it would accept the report. |
| Uttarakhand OBC survey | Delayed, ongoing | Districts were found relying on outdated data instead of fresh door-to-door collection. The single-member commission cancelled flawed rounds, ordered redos and transferred officers, and had received no completed data even from Dehradun when the deadline slipped to June 2023. |
| Odisha Backward Classes survey 2023 | Started 1 May 2023, running at the point of reporting | Targeted the state's 211 notified Socially and Educationally Backward Classes across all 314 blocks and 114 urban local bodies. |
No state in that table, and no source we checked, publishes a Yadav percentage for Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Maharashtra or Delhi. Their absence is the finding.
How to judge any Yadav population figure you meet elsewhere
- A Bihar share is official data with a stated method and an acknowledged undercount: 14.26%, 1,86,50,119 people, bundled with Ahir and five associated castes.
- An Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, MP, Haryana, Rajasthan, Maharashtra or Delhi share is an estimate. Say so in the sentence where you use it.
- An all-India Yadav number has no source at all. Anything precise enough to carry a decimal point is extrapolated from Bihar's survey or is a guess wearing a percentage sign.
Two questions settle out of this. The highest share is Bihar's, at 14.26%, from an official count. The most people live in Uttar Pradesh, on an estimate that no enumeration confirms.
Yadavs in public life, state by state
The community's political and cultural weight is most visible in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and our verified profiles show that distribution better than abstract percentages do.
- Bihar: Tejashwi Yadav and Lalu Prasad Yadav, the family at the centre of RJD politics and of the state's Yadav-vote debates.
- Uttar Pradesh: Akhilesh Yadav, Samajwadi Party leader and former chief minister; Kuldeep Yadav, the India left-arm wrist spinner; and Dinesh Lal Yadav "Nirahua", the Bhojpuri film and music figure from Ghazipur district.
- Maharashtra: Suryakumar Yadav, the India international batter from Mumbai, and Umesh Yadav, the fast bowler from Nagpur. Cricket profiles are where most "which caste" surname searches originate, because the surname is the only community signal visible in a scorecard.
- Haryana: Santosh Yadav, the mountaineer who climbed Everest twice.
- For the full index, see the Yadav personalities guide and our note on why surnames appear in Indian news coverage, Yadav names in the news.
For the deeper historical background (the Yaduvanshi claim, the Deccan Yadava dynasty of Devagiri and the Allahabad Pillar reference) read the origins of the Yadav community.
What would change this table
Fourteen of the fifteen schedules we retrieved and read carry a quotable row, and those entries are cited to the government-hosted PDFs in the sources below, with the resolution dates printed on the rows themselves. We retrieved fifteen schedules: fourteen gave us a Yadav, Ahir, Yadava, Golla or Idaiyar row to quote, and Punjab's carried none. For Telangana, Odisha, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh no government-hosted schedule was retrievable at all. Both cases are marked not verified on the table, and neither is published as proof that no entry exists. State-list tiers are a separate layer again and are unverified everywhere on this page except the BC/EBC structure visible in Bihar's own published survey. This page is re-reviewed whenever a state publishes or revises its backward-class list, whenever the commission notifies a change to the central list, and whenever a state runs a caste enumeration. The step-by-step check, including where to search when your own state's spelling is not "Yadav", is on the Yadav caste guide.