CBDT publishes the official 1961-to-2025 section mapping utility
A machine-readable correspondence table between the old and new Income-tax Acts is released, three months into the first assessment year under the new law.
CBDT has released an official correspondence table mapping provisions of the Income-tax Act, 1961 to the Income-tax Act, 2025, available as a downloadable machine-readable file alongside the existing web utility.
Why a mapping table is a significant release
The 2025 Act largely preserves substance while restructuring presentation. That sounds benign and has one substantial consequence: every internal artefact citing a 1961 Act section now cites a section that no longer exists.
That includes:
- Standard operating procedures and tax manuals
- Contract clauses referencing withholding provisions
- ERP tax configuration and withholding master data
- Board and audit committee reporting templates
- Employee communications on salary structure and deductions
- Every legal opinion obtained in the last sixty years
None of these stopped being correct in substance. All of them stopped being correct in citation.
The disciplined response
The temptation is to update references as they are encountered. That produces a long tail of documents citing a repealed Act, discovered at inconvenient moments — typically during an assessment or an audit.
The better approach is a systematic sweep:
- Inventory the artefacts that cite Income-tax Act sections, which is a larger list than expected
- Apply the mapping mechanically where the correspondence is one-to-one
- Flag for manual review where the correspondence is one-to-many or many-to-one, which is where substance may have shifted
- Record the review decision, because someone will ask why a particular mapping was chosen
Step three is the one that matters. The mapping is not uniformly one-to-one, and the provisions where it is not are disproportionately the ones that generate disputes.
Timing
The first full-year return under the 2025 Act is due 31 October 2027. Tax audit reports under the revised Form 3CD clause numbering are due 30 September 2026, which is the nearer deadline and the one where citation errors will first become visible.
What Regulens customers see
The correspondence table is maintained as a mapping layer in the obligations library. Obligations previously cited to 1961 Act sections carry both citations, and customer artefacts linked to those obligations were flagged for review automatically when the new Act was notified.
How Regulens customers received this
This item was scoped against every customer footprint within 15 minutes of publication. Customers to whom it applies received it routed to the named owner for the relevant theme, with the obligations decomposed, the affected entities identified and any prior assessment carried forward with the delta highlighted. Customers to whom it does not apply saw nothing — with the suppression reason recorded and auditable.
This analysis is provided for information only and does not constitute legal advice. Read it alongside the primary source it cites. Where a source reference is given (CBDT Circular 14/2026), that is the authoritative text.