Kano State has recorded the highest number of candidates who obtained at least five credits, including English Language and Mathematics, in the 2026 Senior School Certificate Examination, according to state-by-state figures announced by the National Examinations Council.
NECO’s registrar, Professor Dantani Wushishi, said Kano returned 74,413 candidates who met the benchmark, ahead of Lagos with 72,496 and Oyo with 55,543. He announced the results in Minna, Niger State, 63 days after the last paper was written. It is the second year running that Kano has led the chart, having also topped the 2025 examination.
The state ranking sits within a weaker national picture. NECO said 804,948 candidates, or 58.67 per cent of those who sat the examination, obtained five credits including English and Mathematics. That is down from 818,492 candidates, or 60.26 per cent, in 2025, a fall of 2.64 percentage points.
According to the council, 1,378,048 candidates registered for the examination and 1,371,992 sat it between 15 June and 23 July. A wider measure, five credits in any subjects irrespective of English and Mathematics, stood at 84.70 per cent, or 1,162,118 candidates. Wushishi also reported 1,406 malpractice cases, down from 3,878 in 2025, which the council put at a 64.74 per cent reduction.
Governor Abba Yusuf welcomed the result in a statement issued on Saturday through his spokesperson, Sunusi Bature Dawakin Tofa. He described the back-to-back showing as proof that the state’s spending on education was producing measurable results, and congratulated students, teachers, parents and other stakeholders.
“Kano has maintained the first position in NECO twice in a row, making the state the leading SSCE performer for the two consecutive years, 2025 and 2026,” the governor said. He added that his administration would sustain funding, school renovation, teacher recruitment and training, learning materials and scholarships for students from low-income homes.
The state government said it spent more than N4.4 billion in 2026 sponsoring candidates for the examination, with particular attention to indigent students, a measure it said was designed to remove financial barriers to sitting the papers.
On the budget, the government said education received N168.35 billion, about 31 per cent, of the 2025 estimate, and N405.35 billion, about 30 per cent, of the N1.48 trillion budgeted for 2026. It put the 2024 education share at 29.95 per cent. The state also said it had recorded more than five million schoolchildren in its most recent annual school census.
Some context helps weigh the ranking. NECO’s chart counts the raw number of candidates who cleared the five-credit mark, not the proportion of a state’s entrants who did so. A state with a large candidate pool can therefore top the table without necessarily recording the highest success rate per candidate, and the council’s own summary noted that the South West zone recorded the strongest overall performance in the 2026 examination.
Kano is Nigeria’s most populous state and consistently registers one of the largest cohorts for national examinations, so its position at the head of the absolute count is partly a function of scale. That does not diminish the two-year consistency, but it is the reason the figure is better read alongside enrolment than on its own.
The examination is one strand of Kano’s wider education record under Yusuf, who was returned to office after a protracted legal contest over the 2023 governorship poll. The government has pointed to teacher recruitment, including the recent employment of thousands of teachers, and to school census figures as evidence of expanding access. Independent verification of the census total and the sponsorship spending was not available in the material released.
For students, the five-credit threshold in English and Mathematics is the standard gateway to tertiary admission and to many entry-level jobs, which is why state performance in NECO draws close political attention each year. The 2026 national decline, modest but real, suggests the improvement seen in recent cycles has not held across the board, even as individual states report gains.
What the figures confirm is that Kano led the absolute count for a second year and that the national pass rate slipped. What they do not settle is how the states compare on a per-candidate basis, which NECO did not publish in the same breakdown. That comparison, together with the West African Examinations Council results for the year, would give a fuller measure of where performance is actually strengthening.