The Income-tax Act, 2025 formally replaced the six-decade-old Income-tax Act, 1961 from 1 April 2026. It's important to be clear about what this is and isn't: this is a structural rewrite and simplification of the law's language and numbering, not a change in tax rates or slabs. If you were expecting different tax brackets this year, that's not what happened here — the rates you already know still apply.
What has changed is the framework around how the law refers to things. The familiar 'Previous Year' and 'Assessment Year' split has been replaced with a single 'Tax Year' concept, which is simpler in principle but means every reference to the old terminology in your internal documentation, contracts, or accounting workflows needs updating.
Return filing deadlines are now staggered by taxpayer category rather than a single date for everyone: salaried taxpayers file by 31 July, while non-audit business taxpayers file by 31 August. If your business has both salaried employees and business income streams, this staggering is worth building into your compliance calendar now rather than assuming the old single deadline still applies.
The deadline to file a revised return — for correcting an error or omission in an already-filed return — has been extended from 31 December to 31 March of the relevant year, giving taxpayers meaningfully more room to correct mistakes without needing to go through a more formal rectification or reassessment process.
A new Foreign Assets of Small Taxpayers – Disclosure Scheme, 2026 also came in alongside the Act, offering relief for taxpayers with modest overseas holdings who may have missed disclosure requirements without intent to evade tax. We've covered this separately in more detail — see our piece on the Foreign Assets Disclosure Scheme.
Practically, the biggest near-term task for most businesses is making sure any internal documentation, standard templates, or accounting software configuration that references old section numbers gets updated — which is also the subject of our companion piece on the new TDS section codes.