Form 138, Quarterly TDS Return for Salary, formerly Form 24Q

Form 138 is the quarterly statement of tax deducted from salary. It is prescribed under section 397(3)(b) of the Income-tax Act, 2025 read with rule 219 of the Income-tax Rules, 2026, and it replaced Form 24Q, which did the same job under the Income-tax Rules, 1962. If you arrived here searching for 24Q, this is the form that took its place: same quarterly rhythm, same due dates, new number.

Salary sits on its own section under the new Act, and this is the part a deductor has to get right before the first filing. The Income-tax Act, 2025 folded the whole of the old 194-series into one table-driven provision, Section 393, but salary was deliberately kept outside it. Deduction from salary, and from an accumulated balance due to an employee, is Section 392, which runs as prose sub-sections with no table and no serial numbers anywhere in it. So a Form 138 filing quotes section 392, or a sub-section such as 392(7) where an accumulated balance is paid out, and never a Section 393 serial number. Any chart that hands salary a 393 serial number is wrong, and the exclusion is visible inside Section 393 itself: the entry covering director remuneration expressly carves out amounts on which tax is deductible under section 392.

The form follows the year the return covers, not the date you file it. A statement for FY 2025-26 or any earlier year stays on Form 24Q under the 1962 Rules, including a correction statement filed today, which is why the Q4 FY 2025-26 statement due on 31 May 2026 went in on Form 24Q even though that date fell after the new Act had commenced. The first statement on Form 138 was Q1 of FY 2026-27, due 31 July 2026. Two dates are easy to conflate here and it is worth separating them: 1 April 2025 brought the Finance Act 2025 threshold changes, which happened under the old Income-tax Act, 1961, while 1 April 2026 brought the Income-tax Act, 2025 itself and with it this form change.

The quarterly deadlines did not move with the renumbering. They remain 31 July, 31 October, 31 January and 31 May. What did move is the number on the form and the section quoted inside it, and that combination is what a return preparation template usually gets wrong: quoting an old section number on a new-form statement gets it rejected at TRACES, so a template still carrying 192 in the section column needs fixing before a filing, not after a rejection.

Form 138 is the return, not the certificate an employee receives. The two remain separate documents, and it is the processed return that populates what the employee can see and claim against, so a late or inaccurate quarterly filing shows up as a missing credit on the employee's side rather than only as a problem for the employer.