Bigg Boss Telugu Season 9: winner, top 5 and full season record

Kalyan Padala won Bigg Boss Telugu 9. He was the first champion to come through the Agnipariksha route, and he did it at the end of a 105-day season that ran from 7 September to 21 December 2025, hosted by Nagarjuna Akkineni for a seventh season in a row.

Season 9 at a glance

Bigg Boss Telugu 9 winner and top 5

Why do some lists put those last three in a different order? Demon Pavan left the finale before anyone else, because he accepted a cash briefcase rather than being voted out. The show labelled him second runner-up, which puts him third, and that’s the order above. Other outlets rank him fifth instead, on the grounds that he walked out first. Same events, two ways of counting them.

The finale briefcase that cut the prize

The finale had a task worth understanding, because it explains why the reported winner’s cash looks low. Ravi Teja offered the finalists an escalating amount to quit the race: ₹7.5 lakh, then ₹10 lakh, then ₹15 lakh. Demon Pavan took the ₹15 lakh, and that money came out of the prize pool.

So the winner’s cash dropped from a ₹50 lakh pool to a reported ₹35 lakh. Kalyan Padala also received a reported ₹5 lakh sponsor bonus and a Maruti Suzuki Victoris. If you find a page saying the Season 9 winner got ₹50 lakh, it’s quoting the pool before the briefcase. The winners list has the same arithmetic for the other seasons where a finalist took a suitcase.

The double house

Season 9 opened with two houses. The six commoners started as owners in the main house, and the nine celebrities as tenants next door with fewer comforts. So the usual hierarchy was upside down from day one, and that’s why the early weeks played out as commoners against celebrities rather than the usual free-for-all. It paid off for that side. A commoner won, and two of the five finalists came out of the commoner house.

Bigg Boss Telugu 9 eliminations in order

Twenty-two people entered across the season. Below is every exit up to finale night, counted in days inside the house rather than broadcast dates, because those two don’t always line up in the coverage. Three names need a word of explanation. Bharani Shankar and Sreeja Dammu appear twice, because both left and came back, and Sanjjanaa Galrani’s early eviction sits in the list even though she returned and finished fifth. Sreeja’s second exit carries a dash rather than a day, because no source we trust pins it down. Her row still sits where the coverage places it. The finale itself is the table further up.

Evictions landed on the weekend episode, so most of those days are multiples of seven. Read a shared day as a double eviction.

The re-entries

Three contestants came back after leaving, and they went three different ways. Sanjjanaa Galrani was voted out early, went to the secret room instead of home, then returned and finished fifth. Bharani Shankar was evicted around the six-week mark and re-entered. Sreeja Dammu had the roughest run of it: her first exit came on the wild cards’ decision rather than the public vote, which drew a lot of anger online, and when she and Bharani re-entered to compete for one permanent place, Bharani won it and she left again.

Were Bigg Boss Telugu 9 vote counts published?

No. The show named each evicted contestant without publishing vote totals for Season 9. So any page that shows you week-by-week vote numbers or percentages for that season is giving you a fan poll or an estimate, not the count that decided the evictions. Worth knowing before you go hunting for figures that were never released.

The wild cards

Seven contestants arrived after launch night, and none of them reached the final five. Divya Nikitha came closest, lasting into the closing weeks. Want the names and what each did before the house? That’s on the Season 9 cast page. The one voice in the house nobody can name is Bigg Boss itself, which stayed uncredited through this season like every other one, and who the voice belongs to is still disputed in Telugu media.

Why Season 9 still matters for Season 10

It’s the most recent completed season, so it’s the best guide available to what the next one will look like. Voting ran through the JioHotstar app, with missed-call numbers reported as a second route during finale week. Treat that as the recent reference rather than a promise. Season 10 has a host and a channel, and no announced premiere date, cast or voting rules. The how to vote guide covers the Season 9 method in detail and flags what’s still unannounced.