Bigg Boss Telugu 9 contestants: all 22, and how each finished

Twenty-two people lived in the Bigg Boss Telugu 9 house across the season. Fifteen walked in on launch night, 7 September 2025, and seven more arrived later as wild cards. Kalyan Padala won it at the finale on 21 December 2025, with Thanuja Puttaswamy runner-up.

Bigg Boss 9 Telugu contestants: full cast and finishing order

Furthest first. Three of them left the house and came back at some point, which is noted in their row.

Only the top seven have confirmed finishing places, so those are the only rows carrying a number. Everything below is still in order of how long each contestant lasted, but walkouts and re-entries don’t slot into a clean numbered rank, and we’d rather show a dash than invent one.

Bigg Boss Telugu 9 launch-night contestants

The season opened with a 9-6 split, and the two groups started in separate houses. The celebrity side was mostly television and film: Thanuja Puttaswamy, Flora Saini, Sanjjanaa Galrani, Rithu Chowdary and Bharani Shankar from serials and movies, Emmanuel and Suman Setty from comedy, Shrasti Verma from choreography, and folk singer Ramu Rathod.

The six commoners came through Agnipariksha, the pre-show that picks non-celebrity contestants. Kalyan Padala, Demon Pavan, Harita Harish, Sreeja Dammu, Priya Shetty and Maryada Manish all entered that way. It mattered more than usual this time, because a commoner won. How the double-house format worked, and what it did to the early weeks, is covered on the Season 9 archive.

Bigg Boss Telugu 9 wild-card contestants

Seven contestants joined after launch night. Divya Nikitha came in first, on day 18, another Agnipariksha face who is better known online as VegFriedMomo. The other six arrived together on 12 October in a batch the show called Firestorm: Ramya Moksha, Sreenivasa Sayee, Madhuri Duvvada, Nikhil Nair, Aysha Zeenath and Gaurav Gupta.

None of the seven made the final five. Divya Nikitha lasted longest of them and went out in the closing weeks. If you’re checking a list that names Prabhas Sreenu, Akhil Raj or Mouneesha Chowdary as wild cards, that’s a pre-entry prediction piece rather than the actual line-up.

What Kalyan Padala did before the house

Here the reporting genuinely disagrees, so it’s worth being straight about it. Most of the coverage puts him in the Army, joining after he finished his studies. One outlet went the other way: LatestLY called him “a 23-year-old constable in the Central Reserve Police Force”, which is a different force altogether.

Our read: the Army version is much the better sourced of the two, and the CRPF line traces back to a single report that itself says there’s no official confirmation. That isn’t the same as settled. Nobody has confirmed either version on the record, so we’d rather show you the split than pick whichever reads better.

Where to go next

Three of the outcomes in the table need more room than a cell allows: Demon Pavan’s third place came from taking a cash briefcase rather than a vote, Sanjjanaa Galrani reached fifth after an early eviction, and Sreeja Dammu was evicted twice. The full Season 9 rundown covers all of that, along with every exit in order. If you want the prize side of it, the Bigg Boss Telugu winners list has what every winner took home across the nine seasons. And for the next season, the Season 10 contestants page tracks names as they get confirmed. And once the season opens, the Season 10 voting hub is where the weekly vote and our fan poll live.