Old vs New Section Numbers: A Practical Concordance for the Income Tax Act 2025

Everyone who has practised tax for more than a couple of years has a private shorthand for the Act — "80C," "44AB," "194J" — that functions almost like a second vocabulary. That shorthand is about to go stale for a large chunk of the provisions people reference daily, and rebuilding the muscle memory takes time. Below is a working reference table for the mappings we've been able to verify, meant to be bookmarked rather than read once and forgotten. We've deliberately left out mappings we couldn't confirm rather than guess at a number that might be wrong on a client's return.

This concordance covers Tax Year 2026-27 onward, once the Income Tax Act, 2025 takes over from the 1961 Act.

Core reference table

A few notes worth reading before you use this table

80C to 123 is a structural move, not a policy change. The ₹1,50,000 aggregate limit is confirmed unchanged. What's changed is that the list of eligible instruments — PPF, ELSS, life insurance premium, home loan principal repayment, children's tuition fees, five-year tax-saving fixed deposits, NSC, Sukanya Samriddhi, and the rest — now sits in Schedule XV rather than being written directly into the deduction section. We've covered this one in more depth separately because the schedule-versus-section distinction actually matters for how future amendments get made.

44AB to 63 carries a real compliance nuance, not just a new number. The turnover and receipt thresholds that trigger a tax audit haven't moved. But early commentary on Section 63 suggests it removes a prior exemption that existed for businesses not opting into presumptive taxation, and links audit applicability more directly to the level of profit declared — meaning some low-margin businesses that weren't previously required to get audited could find themselves inside the audit net under the new section's logic. This is worth a direct conversation with your accountant rather than assuming your audit status carries over unchanged.

115BAC to 202: the new regime keeps its shape. The concessional regime — lower slab rates in exchange for giving up most deductions — continues under Section 202. Deductions like the old 80C (now Section 123) remain unavailable if you're filing under this regime, same as before.

TDS is the big one. Nearly the entire non-salary TDS universe — over a dozen distinct old sections — collapses into Section 393. We've published a separate, longer piece walking through what this means for payroll software, vendor master data and return filing, because it's the change most likely to require an actual system update rather than just a mental relabeling.

How to use this table without getting burned

Treat the right-hand column as a starting point for locating the relevant provision in the new Act, not as a substitute for reading the actual text once you get there. Section renumbering is rarely a perfect one-to-one swap — in several cases, what used to be a single old section has been split across a main section and one or more schedules, or folded together with a related old provision that used to sit separately. The 80C-to-123 mapping in this table is a good example: the number "123" alone doesn't tell you the eligible investment list, because that list now lives in Schedule XV. Anyone quoting just a bare section number without checking whether a schedule is doing the substantive work is giving you half the picture.

It's also worth keeping a copy of whichever old-Act provision governed a matter that predates 1 April 2026, because assessments, notices and appeals relating to income earned before that date will continue to be handled under the old section numbers for years to come, even after the new Act is fully in force for current filings. The concordance runs in both directions in that sense — useful for translating old citations into new ones going forward, and equally useful for the reverse when you're looking at an old notice.

What we deliberately haven't included

Plenty of section-mapping tables circulating online right now go further than this one — mapping every conceivable old section, down to niche provisions most businesses never touch, with a confidence that isn't always warranted this early in the transition. We've stuck to provisions we could verify are confirmed, and left out granular sub-clause-level mappings (particularly within Section 393's TDS table) where the public record isn't yet settled enough to state as fact. If a mapping you need isn't in this table, that's usually because we couldn't verify it to a standard we're comfortable putting in front of a client, not because it doesn't exist.

A practical example of why this matters

Consider a salaried employee in Raipur claiming HRA and an 80C investment in ELSS mutual funds while filing under the old regime for income earned in Tax Year 2026-27. Their Form 16 for that year, issued by their employer, will reference Section 19 for the standard deduction, Schedule III for the HRA computation, and Section 123 read with Schedule XV for the ELSS deduction — none of which existed as citations on a Form 16 the year before. The amounts they're entitled to claim haven't changed; the paperwork they're looking at has.

Keep this table handy through the transition, but treat it as a living reference rather than a final word — we'll update it as more of the Act's granular numbering settles into confirmed practice.

Related Advisory Services & Practice Guides

• Income Tax Advisory & Compliance
• Tax Audit in Raipur