TDS Return Filing: 24Q, 26Q, 27Q Are Now 138, 140, 144

If you came here looking for the Form 26Q due date, here it is with the part that changed attached. The quarterly cycle is unchanged: 31 July, 31 October, 31 January, and 31 May of the following financial year. What changed is the form number. From FY 2026-27, Form 24Q is Form 138, Form 26Q is Form 140, Form 27Q is Form 144, and the quarterly TCS statement Form 27EQ is Form 143. So the return for the quarter ending 30 September 2026 is due on 31 October 2026 and is filed as Form 140, not Form 26Q.

The new numbers are prescribed under Section 397(3)(b) of the Income-tax Act, 2025, read with Rule 219 of the Income-tax Rules, 2026. They are not commentary or a proposal. The income tax department publishes Form No. 144 under a title that says in terms "(Earlier Form No. 27Q)", and CBDT's own form mapping guide describes Form 138 as the quarterly statement of deduction of tax under section 397(3)(b) in respect of salary paid to an employee under section 392.

Q4 in that table means the quarter ending 31 March, and its 31 May falls in the following financial year. A business paying employees, a few domestic vendors, and the occasional foreign consultant is still filing three separate statements in the same quarter, exactly as before. Only the labels on them are different.

The Only Question That Decides the Form: Which Year Are You Filing For

This is the part that is easiest to get wrong, and getting it wrong means a rejected statement. The form is decided by the financial year the return covers, not by the date you sit down to file it. Returns for FY 2025-26 and earlier remain governed by the Income-tax Rules, 1962, so they stay on the old numbering. Returns for FY 2026-27 onward use the new forms. The clearest illustration is the Q4 FY 2025-26 statement, due 31 May 2026: it was filed after 1 April 2026, the date the Income-tax Act, 2025 took effect, and it was still filed on the old Form 24Q and Form 26Q, because the year it reported on was a 1962 Rules year.

The same logic governs corrections, which is where most people will meet this rule from now on. A correction statement for any quarter of FY 2025-26 or earlier is a revision to a return that was originally filed under the 1962 Rules, so it goes back on the same form it was filed on. If the original was a Form 26Q, the correction is a Form 26Q. Do not translate an old statement into the new numbering when you revise it, and do not assume that because you are filing in August 2026 everything you touch is now a Form 140.

There is a second trap worth naming, because two separate dates are in circulation and a great deal of published material conflates them. 1 April 2025 is when the Finance Act 2025 threshold changes took effect, and those operated under the old Income-tax Act, 1961: the bank interest deduction threshold for senior citizens moved from 50,000 to 1,00,000, for other bank depositors from 40,000 to 50,000, and for other payers of interest from 5,000 to 10,000. 1 April 2026 is when the Income-tax Act, 2025 itself came into force and brought the renumbering. If a page still quotes 40,000 or 5,000 for interest, it is stale from the earlier date, and has nothing to do with the new forms.

The Quarterly Due Dates Did Not Move

Q1 of FY 2026-27, due 31 July 2026, was the first quarter filed on the new forms. Q2 of FY 2026-27, due 31 October 2026, is the next one. Q4 keeps its longer gap for the same reason it always had one: the salary statement for Q4 carries the full year's salary and TDS figures that the annual salary certificate is generated from, and employers need the extra weeks to close the year properly before certificates go out.

The Return Changed More Than Its Number

The old 194-series is gone as a set of standalone sections. Section 194A, for instance, has no standalone successor: it is a row in the table under section 393(1) of the Income-tax Act, 2025, a single consolidated withholding section that replaces around forty separate TDS provisions of the 1961 Act. Interest other than interest on securities sits at Serial Nos. 5(ii) and 5(iii) of that table, and professional and technical fees and contractor payments sit at Serial No. 6. Payments to non-residents are in a different table in the same section: what was section 195(1) is Serial No. 17 of the table under section 393(2).

Salary TDS is the exception that catches people out, and it matters because it decides which statement a payment belongs in. Salary did not go into section 393 at all. It is section 392, which absorbs both old section 192 and old section 192A, and Form 138 is the statement for it. Anyone who has internalised "the whole 192 to 196D series became 393" is carrying a defect that will put a salary payment in the wrong return.

Practically, the consolidation shows up in the return as a change in how each deduction is identified. Returns and challans now use 4-digit payment codes rather than the old section number, and quoting an old section number on a new return gets it rejected. That is the single most common cause of a bounced first filing under the new forms. This post does not print a code list, deliberately: the code has to match CBDT's current published list exactly, so take it from the return preparation utility or the portal for the specific row you are reporting rather than from any article, including this one. One more caution before you rely on procedural detail: CBDT publishes the Act as amended by the Finance Act, 2026, which touched section 393 itself, so check the amended text rather than the version as originally enacted.

The mapping table above covers the four quarterly statements. Transaction-specific challan-cum-statements, the route a property buyer without a TAN uses, are a separate track and are not part of it. Old section 194-IA now sits at Serial No. 3 of the section 393(1) table, but we are not quoting a new statement number for that route here until it can be cited to CBDT's own published list, so check the portal before filing one. A business filing its regular quarterly statement does not fold a property purchase into it, and never did.

Other Forms in the Same Workflow That Were Renumbered

Two commonly asked-about certificates are less settled, so treat them as unconfirmed rather than as facts. Form 16 becoming Form 130 and Form 12BB becoming Form 124 are widely reported, but CBDT's own form mapping guide does not carry those rows, so confirm the number on the portal before printing it on anything you hand an employee.

One piece of old news to stop repeating: the headlines from February 2025 saying nil TDS certificates were being discontinued are obsolete. Section 395(1) of the Income-tax Act, 2025 uses the words "no deduction", so the enacted provision plainly allows a nil certificate as well as a lower one, and the application for it is Form 128. Section 395 is also a consolidation rather than a straight successor to old section 197: it absorbs the section 195(2) and 195(3) determination application, the section 203 TDS certificate obligation, and the section 206C(9) lower collection certificate.

Why the Return Still Matters More Than the Challan

None of the renumbering changes the underlying mechanic, and it is worth restating because it is the reason the deadline bites. Depositing TDS through a challan tells the government that tax has been paid. It does not tell the system whose PAN that payment belongs to. That link is made only when the quarterly statement is filed and processed: the statement matches each challan to the specific deductees paid that quarter, and only then do the entries appear against each deductee's PAN. Skip the statement, file it late, or get a deductee's PAN wrong in it, and the credit does not show up on their side no matter how promptly the challan was paid. TDS certificates come from the same place, generated from the processed statement rather than from the deposit. A business sitting on an unfiled statement is not just late on a form. It is the reason someone else's tax credit does not exist yet.

The Practical Quarterly Workflow

1. Deduct TDS at the correct rate at the time of payment or credit, whichever comes first, for every salary, vendor, and non-resident payment made during the quarter.
2. Deposit the tax deducted using the applicable challan within the prescribed monthly window, and record which challan each deduction was deposited against.
3. At quarter end, reconcile every deduction against the deductee's correct PAN, the payment code that applies to it under section 392 or section 393, and the challan it was deposited against.
4. Confirm which financial year the statement covers before you pick a form: FY 2026-27 onward means Form 138, 140, 144 or 143, and FY 2025-26 or earlier means the old 24Q, 26Q, 27Q or 27EQ.
5. Prepare and validate the statement using current return-preparation software or a registered intermediary, and file it before the due date. Software that has not been updated for the 2026 forms will produce a statement that is rejected on the old section reference alone.
6. Check the defaults dashboard on a regular cadence for flags like PAN mismatches or short deduction, and file a correction statement promptly, on the form the original was filed on, rather than letting a flagged default sit.

Two things this post deliberately withholds: a list of 4-digit payment codes, and a new section number for the late filing fee and the separate penalty for a defective or long-overdue statement. Both moved with the Act, both are quoted confidently and wrongly all over the internet, and both are the kind of detail where a wrong number costs you a rejected return or a wrong figure in a reply to a notice. The late filing fee itself has not gone away, so keep treating the due date as hard, and take the section number from the current utility or the portal rather than from anything written before April 2026, including the earlier version of this page.