The Income-tax Act, 2025 is finally live. Here is what salaried taxpayers should actually do this June.

The Income-tax Act, 1961 served us — and frustrated us — for 65 years. From 1 April 2026, it is gone. The Income-tax Act, 2025 replaced it on schedule, and the first round of returns under the new framework opens this June.

For most salaried taxpayers the bottom-line number will not change. What changes is the language around it, a handful of section numbers your CA will start quoting, and how the department now talks to you.

The headline change is the “tax year”

The old Act ran on two parallel clocks — the previous year (when you earned) and the assessment year (when you filed). The 2025 Act collapses both into a single concept: the tax year. Income earned between 1 April 2026 and 31 March 2027 is the tax year 2026–27, and you file for it the same year, the way most other countries already do.

This is not a cosmetic change. It will affect:

• How you read your Form 26AS, AIS and the new Annual Tax Statement — the period header now matches your salary slip year.
• How challans for self-assessment tax are tagged. If your accountant is still writing “AY 2026-27” on a June challan, that is a CY mismatch and the credit will not reflect cleanly.
• How long the department has to reopen your case. The reassessment window in the 2025 Act is shorter and ties to the tax year, not the assessment year.

Form 16, Part B has a new layout

If you have already received your Form 16 for FY 2025–26 (the last year under the old Act), ignore the rest of this section — you file that one the old way. For salaries paid from 1 April 2026, Part B has been re-arranged to match the new sections:

• Standard deduction sits under Section 19 of the new Act (was Section 16(ia)).
• HRA exemption is now under Section 14 — the wording is tighter and removes two of the older provisos that nobody could ever parse.
• Professional tax stays where it always was, conceptually, but the line item is renamed.

If you are a payroll head, your TDS software vendor should have pushed the updated mapping by now. If your June payslip still shows the old section labels, that is a flag to raise — not an end-of-the-world flag, but worth a quick email.

Section 80C is dead. Long live Schedule VI.

The hated “80C, 80CCC, 80CCD(1), 80CCD(1B), 80D, 80G, 80TTA” alphabet soup has been re-organised into a clean Schedule VI attached to the new Act. Total deduction limits do not change. What changes is that the schedule is referred to by line number, not section number, in the new ITR forms.

The first time I filed a draft return under the new format, I genuinely missed the muscle memory of typing “80C 1,50,000”. After three returns I stopped noticing. Your mileage will be the same.

The new vs old regime question still exists

This is the part the headlines got wrong in February. The new Act did not abolish the two-regime choice. The default is still the simplified slabs (what we have been calling the “new regime” since FY 2023–24), and the old regime survives as an opt-in. The mechanics of opting in have moved to Section 115BAC's successor — the marginal rate maths is unchanged.

If your house-loan interest plus 80C plus a few smaller deductions add up to more than ₹4 lakh in a year, the opt-in regime is probably still better for you. If they do not, default is fine. There is no clever new trick hiding in the 2025 Act.

What I would actually do this June

1. Wait for your employer's final Form 16 for FY 2025–26. That return is filed under the old Act — do not let anyone rush you into a “new Act” ITR for last year's income.
2. Reconcile your AIS line-by-line. The first year of any new tax regime always throws a few system mismatches.
3. Update your salary-software section references if you run payroll. Do this in June, not September, when half the staff is on leave.
4. Re-read your home-loan interest certificate — the section reference for self-occupied property interest has changed and a couple of banks I have seen are still printing the 1961 section.

The 2025 Act is not the end of complexity. It is, mostly, the end of provisos. That alone makes it worth the effort to relearn the section numbers.