Bigg Boss Telugu 10 contestants: the rumoured names, and what’s actually confirmed

Nobody has been confirmed for Bigg Boss Telugu 10. Not a single name. So what is actually known?

The season itself. Nagarjuna Akkineni is back as host, the theme is Dasavatharam, and it runs on Star Maa with streaming on JioHotstar. You meet the cast at the launch, and every season since 2020 has started in September.

Twelve names have been circulating since April. We’ve traced each one back to the list it came from, and below we say which ones we’d take seriously and which ones we wouldn’t.

Has the Bigg Boss Telugu 10 contestants list been announced?

No. Nothing has been confirmed by anyone, and there’s no quiet official list somewhere that the rumour pieces are working from. We looked.

What is settled:

• Host. Nagarjuna Akkineni, in a promo that’s already out. It’s his eighth season in a row. He’s hosted since Season 3.
• Channel. Star Maa, streaming on JioHotstar.
• Theme. Dasavatharam, the ten avatars, chosen for the tenth season. The tagline that came with it: “not a challenge in the game, the game itself is the challenge.”
• Commoners. A second season of the Agnipariksha pre-show is picking the non-celebrity contestants, the same route that produced Season 9’s winner. No shortlist has been published. Its rounds, its separate audience vote and what JioStar’s terms say about timing are on the Agnipariksha 2 page.
• Premiere. Not announced. If you’re planning around it, September is the reasonable expectation, going by where earlier seasons started. The premiere and timing page goes into that.

Bigg Boss Telugu 10 rumoured contestants

Rumored Twelve names, and our read on each one. Strong means the name has turned up in genuinely different lists, weeks apart. Thin means it traces back to one list that then got copied around. Neither is a confirmation. Nobody has a casting source on this season, ourselves included.

That difference matters more than it sounds. A name printed on ten websites in one week is usually one list being copied ten times. A name that survives from April to July, in lists that share nothing else with each other, has something behind it. Express Hari is the clearest case here: three separate lists across three months.

Spellings wobble. Tejaswini shows up as “Tejaswi Gaud” in April, “Tejaswini Gowda” in June and plain “Tejaswini” in July. We’ve kept the bare first name rather than pick a surname nobody agrees on.

Names doing the rounds that we haven’t listed

More names are circulating than the twelve above. Here’s why the rest didn’t make the table.

Just a first name. Jyothi, Nikhil, Nandu, Raman, Pawan and Shiva Kumar all arrive with no surname and nothing to identify them by. “Nikhil” is an anchor in one list and YouTuber Nikhil Vijayendrasimha in another. Two different people, possibly. There’s no way to tell.

One list only. Nirupam Paritala, Premi Vishwanath, Mahesh Achanta, Vasuki Anand, Indraneel, Kasturi, Bam Chick Babloo, Raksha Gaud, Deepika Pilli, Aashika Padukone, Kavia, Pallavi Ramishetty and Prabhakar have each surfaced once and not since. Any of them could walk in come September. Right now there’s a single mention behind each.

A name that isn’t a name. Some lists carry a contestant called simply “Kalyan”, with no profession attached. Follow it back and it comes from an entry reading Pawan Kalyan, serial actor, so the name has been clipped somewhere in the retelling. On its own it also reads as Kalyan Padala, who won Season 9 and isn’t going back in. We dropped it.

Where these lists actually come from

Four lists have gone around since April and they barely overlap. Which one a name came from tells you far more than how many websites republished it.

Late April brought the first, fourteen names with no origin attached to them. Then, on 8 June, Sanjjanaa Galrani posted a list of eight celebrities on Instagram. She was in the Season 9 house, not the Season 10 one, but the post travelled because of who wrote it, and it’s where Deepika Rangaraju, Uppal Balu, Haritha and Varsha come from. See those four together anywhere and you’re reading her Instagram at second hand. A different set of seven surfaced on 9 June. Mid-July brought a fourth, which held on to three names from the June lists and swapped out the rest.

Not one of the four has a casting source behind it. No producer, no channel, no contestant confirming their own participation. And a few of the same first names, Shiva Kumar, Nikhil, Jyothi and Deepika, also turned up in the fake Season 9 list a year ago. They’re common names and we can’t say the people behind them are the same. The lists do rhyme from season to season, though.

How accurate were last season’s rumoured lists?

Bad enough that you should factor it into everything above. A list presented as the “full contestant list” for Season 9 got 13 of its 15 names wrong, because it was a prediction piece that got passed around as fact. A separate piece naming five incoming wild cards had three people in it who never entered the house.

One name on this page has already been through the cycle. Rocking Rakesh was named as a confirmed Season 8 contestant back in 2024. He isn’t among Season 8’s twenty-two housemates. That doesn’t mean he won’t enter this time. It means the word confirmed carries no weight until the channel says it, and this is the second season running that his name has come up.

So read any pre-season list the way you’d read a weather forecast. A good share of it will be wrong, and at least one housemate will be someone nobody named.

When the real line-up will be known

On launch night. Bigg Boss Telugu reveals its cast during the premiere episode, contestants walking in one at a time, which is how Season 9’s fifteen were introduced on 7 September 2025. Individual names do get confirmed earlier, in the final-week promos, but the complete line-up waits for the episode. Wild cards come later still. Season 9 added seven of them after launch.

This page changes as that happens. Names move out of the rumoured table and into a confirmed cast list, and the ones that turn out to be wrong stay visible instead of quietly disappearing, so you can see how our read held up.

Where to go next

Want to see what a full cast looks like once it exists? The Season 9 contestants page has all 22 entrants and how far each of them got, and the Season 9 archive walks through the season week by week. The winners list runs across all nine seasons and what each winner took home. And when Season 10 starts and the first nominations go up, our guide covers the official voting steps on JioHotstar.