Notification 61/2026 issues a corrigendum to Form ITR-6 — the income-tax return that every company files except those claiming the charitable/religious exemption, who use ITR-7. A corrigendum is a correction to the notified form, and while it is administratively small, it is a useful moment to look at ITR-6 properly: it is the most demanding return in the system, requiring a full balance sheet, profit and loss account, depreciation schedule, related-party and shareholding disclosures, a mandatory tax audit under Section 63 (old 44AB), and e-filing under digital signature. This guide covers who files ITR-6, the ordinary and concessional company tax rates, the minimum-tax concept, the key schedules, dividend taxation, loss carry-forward and the shareholding-continuity restriction, transfer-pricing flags, and the 31 October (and later, for transfer-pricing cases) deadlines.
Notification 61/2026 is a corrigendum to the notified Form ITR-6 — the annual income-tax return prescribed for companies. A corrigendum is not a new form and not a change of policy; it is a correction issued after the original notification, typically to fix a numbering error, a mis-stated cross-reference, a wrongly labelled column, or a schedule that did not carry through correctly from the drafting stage into the notified version. For most companies the practical effect is nil: you file the same return, on the same portal, by the same deadline. Its significance is procedural. The version of the form that the e-filing utility validates against must match the notified form as corrected, so a corrigendum matters most to software vendors, to the department's own schema, and to anyone who downloaded and began populating an offline utility before the correction was issued. If your finance team pulled the JSON utility early in the season, the honest advice is to re-download it after a corrigendum rather than assume your part-filled file will still validate. Beyond that housekeeping point, the corrigendum is chiefly an occasion to revisit what ITR-6 actually demands — and it demands more than any other return in the Indian system. The remainder of this guide is that substantive treatment.
It is worth pausing on why corrigenda to company forms appear almost every year. ITR-6 is enormous. It carries the entire financial statement of the company, dozens of computational schedules, the tax-audit linkage, transfer-pricing flags, shareholding tables and the reconciliation between book profit and taxable profit. When the return is re-notified each year to reflect Finance Act changes, the sheer surface area makes small drafting slips near-inevitable — a schedule renumbered but its cross-reference left pointing to the old number, a rate column carried forward from the prior year, a validation rule that contradicts the instructions. The department issues a corrigendum, the schema is refreshed, and the season proceeds. For a company secretary or CFO, the sensible operating rule is simply this: treat the notified form as a moving target until the utility stabilises a few weeks into the filing window, and do not lock down your tax computation against an early-season schema.
ITR-6 is the income-tax return for companies. The rule is stated in the negative and is easy to remember: every company files ITR-6 except a company claiming the exemption available to income from property held for charitable or religious purposes — such a company files ITR-7 instead. Everything else is in scope. A private limited company, a public limited company, a listed company, a one-person company, a Section 8 (not-for-profit) company that is not claiming the charitable-income exemption, a dormant company with no operations, a company in liquidation, and a foreign company with a taxable presence in India all file ITR-6. There is no turnover threshold and no smallness relief. A company incorporated in March that did nothing at all before the year ended still files ITR-6, showing nil income, because the obligation attaches to the status of being a company rather than to the existence of income. This trips up founders constantly: the shelf company created for a venture that never launched still owes a return every single year until it is formally struck off, and the penalties for not filing accrue regardless of the fact that there was nothing to report.
ITR-6 also cannot be filed on paper. It is mandatorily e-filed, and mandatorily verified with a digital signature certificate of an authorised signatory — typically a director. Unlike individuals, a company cannot verify its return with an Aadhaar OTP or a bank EVC. This makes the DSC a genuine operational dependency: a company whose sole director's DSC expired in September will discover in late October that it cannot file at all, and a DSC takes days to procure and register on the portal. Any competent compliance calendar therefore tracks DSC expiry dates alongside the filing deadline itself. The same DSC discipline applies to the tax-audit report, which the auditor uploads and the company then accepts on the portal — an acceptance step that is missed with surprising regularity and leaves the audit report technically unfiled even though the auditor did the work on time.
Company taxation in India is not one rate but a menu, and the choice a company makes is one of the most consequential tax decisions in its life. Under the ordinary regime, a domestic company pays tax at the rate applicable to its class — historically a lower rate for smaller companies below a turnover threshold and a higher rate above it — plus surcharge and cess, and it retains the full architecture of deductions, incentives and additional allowances that the Act provides. Against this sits the concessional corporate-tax regime (introduced by the old Sections 115BAA and 115BAB and carried into the Act, 2025 framework), which offers a domestic company a flat 22% base rate, and a 15% base rate for a new manufacturing company, in each case plus surcharge and cess — but only if the company gives up a long list of incentives.
What you surrender to take the concessional rate is the heart of the decision. A company opting in generally forgoes accelerated and additional depreciation, deductions for units in special economic zones, the various area-based and investment-linked incentives, weighted deductions for scientific research, and the ability to set off brought-forward losses and unabsorbed depreciation that are attributable to those very incentives. The option, once exercised, is also effectively irrevocable — you cannot flip back to the ordinary regime in a later year merely because a new incentive would have suited you better. The 15% new-manufacturing rate carries further conditions still: the company must be genuinely newly incorporated, must actually be engaged in manufacture or production, must commence manufacturing within the prescribed window, and must not have been formed by splitting up or reconstructing an existing business or by transferring in used plant and machinery beyond a small permitted proportion. Because we describe the concessional regime in detail on our dedicated page, this guide treats it at the level of the decision rather than the mechanics — see the concessional company rate guide for the conditions in full.
The arithmetic of that choice is best seen with numbers. Take a services company with a book profit of ₹5 crore, no accelerated depreciation to speak of, no SEZ unit, and no research incentives — a consultancy, in other words, whose taxable income and book profit are close together. Under the ordinary regime at, say, a 30% base rate plus surcharge and cess, the effective burden lands near 33–34%, or roughly ₹1.68 crore. Under the concessional 22% regime with a lower surcharge, the effective rate lands near 25.17%, or about ₹1.26 crore. The company saves roughly ₹42 lakh a year and gives up incentives it was never going to use. For that profile the decision is obvious. Now change the facts: a manufacturer with the same ₹5 crore book profit, but ₹2 crore of additional and accelerated depreciation available and a brought-forward loss tied to those allowances. Under the ordinary regime its taxable income might fall to ₹3 crore, producing tax near ₹1.01 crore; under the concessional regime it pays 25.17% on the full ₹5 crore — about ₹1.26 crore — because the very allowances that reduced its income are the ones it just surrendered. Here the concessional rate is worse, at least while the allowances last. The correct analysis is therefore never a single-year rate comparison; it is a multi-year projection of when the incentive pipeline runs dry, because the option is irrevocable and the incentives are finite.
A third example makes the new-manufacturing rate concrete. Suppose a group incorporates a fresh subsidiary in the current year to build a new plant, and that subsidiary earns ₹10 crore of manufacturing profit in its first full year of production. At the 15% base rate plus surcharge and cess the effective rate is roughly 17.16%, giving tax of about ₹1.72 crore, against roughly ₹3.36 crore at an ordinary 30%-plus-loading rate — a saving in the region of ₹1.6 crore in a single year. That gap is why groups planning a genuinely new manufacturing line think hard about housing it in a new company rather than as a division of an existing one. But the anti-abuse conditions are real and are examined: transfer significant used machinery into the new entity, or route what is really the existing business through the new shell, and the concession is lost — with interest and penalty attaching to a position taken years earlier. The structuring must be documented from incorporation onward, not reconstructed at assessment.
The minimum-tax concept exists to answer a problem that predates it by decades: a company can report a healthy profit to its shareholders under the Companies Act while reporting little or no taxable income to the tax department, because the deductions, exemptions and accelerated allowances the Act permits legitimately erode the tax base. The response has historically been Minimum Alternate Tax (MAT) — a parallel computation in which the company's book profit, taken from the audited profit and loss account and adjusted by a prescribed list of add-backs and deductions, is taxed at a specified percentage. The company then pays the higher of its normal tax and the minimum tax on book profit. Where the minimum tax exceeds the normal tax, the excess is not lost: it becomes a credit carried forward and set off in a later year in which normal tax exceeds the minimum, subject to a carry-forward limit.
Two practical points matter more than the mechanics. First, a company that has opted into the concessional regime is generally outside the minimum-tax net — that exemption is part of the bargain, and it materially improves the concessional regime's arithmetic for companies whose taxable income sits well below their book profit. It also means the concessional decision cannot be modelled without modelling the minimum tax alongside it: a company staring at a large minimum-tax charge under the ordinary regime may find the concessional rate attractive even where it is giving up real allowances, precisely because it escapes the parallel computation. Second, the minimum-tax computation runs off the audited book profit, which is why the ITR-6 schedules that reproduce the profit and loss account are not a formality. A misclassification in the accounts — a capital receipt parked in other income, a provision that should have been an actual write-off — flows straight into the minimum-tax base. In a company with heavy tax incentives, the accounts effectively become a tax computation, and the finance team should treat them accordingly.
Every company that files ITR-6 must first maintain proper books of account, and most will additionally require a tax audit under Section 63 (old Section 44AB) once turnover crosses the prescribed threshold. This is separate from, and additional to, the statutory audit under the Companies Act — the same or a different chartered accountant examines the accounts specifically from a tax standpoint and reports in the prescribed audit form, covering matters such as disallowable expenditure, payments to related parties, cash transactions, statutory dues paid late, depreciation as computed for tax rather than for accounts, and the reconciliation between the two. The tax-audit report must be filed before the return, and the return then references it. A company that files ITR-6 without the audit report on record has effectively filed a defective return.
Two misconceptions deserve correction. The first is that the presumptive-taxation scheme in Section 58 (old Sections 44AD and 44ADA), which lets small businesses and professionals declare a deemed percentage of turnover as income and skip detailed books, is available to companies. It is not — presumptive taxation is designed for individuals, Hindu undivided families and partnership firms of modest size, and a company cannot use it to escape books, audit or ITR-6. Founders who ran a proprietorship under the presumptive scheme and then incorporated are frequently caught out by this: the compliance burden jumps sharply on the day of incorporation, and the cost of an accountant, an auditor and a tax auditor is part of the true cost of the corporate form. The second misconception is that a company with no turnover escapes the audit and the books. It escapes the turnover-linked tax audit, certainly, but it does not escape the statutory audit, it does not escape maintaining books, and it does not escape ITR-6. A dormant company still produces a balance sheet, still has it audited, and still files.
What distinguishes ITR-6 from every other return is that it does not merely report income; it reproduces the company's financial statements and then reconciles them to the tax computation. The balance sheet schedule requires share capital, reserves, secured and unsecured borrowings, and the full asset side down to the level of trade receivables, inventories, loans and advances and investments. The profit and loss schedule requires revenue and expenditure in the department's own line-item taxonomy, which does not always map cleanly onto the company's chart of accounts — a real source of friction, because the mapping decisions made in year one tend to be repeated for years afterward and become very visible in any year-on-year comparison the department's analytics run.
The depreciation schedules are a second pressure point. Tax depreciation is computed on the block-of-assets basis at the rates prescribed under the Act, and this almost never equals the depreciation charged in the accounts under the Companies Act's useful-life approach. ITR-6 requires both, and requires the difference to be reconciled in the computation. Companies that maintain only one fixed-asset register — the accounting one — spend every October reconstructing the tax blocks, and a company that has been doing this loosely for years will typically find that its written-down values have drifted from what a clean computation would produce. A properly maintained parallel tax-depreciation register is one of the highest-return pieces of housekeeping a finance team can do.
The related-party and specified-persons schedules ask the company to disclose payments to directors, to relatives of directors, and to entities in which directors or substantial shareholders have an interest — the disclosures that support the disallowance of excessive or unreasonable related-party payments. The shareholding schedules require the company to report its shareholders and, importantly, changes in shareholding during the year, which feeds directly into the loss carry-forward restriction discussed below. There are further schedules for the minimum-tax computation and its credit, for tax deducted and collected, for advance tax and self-assessment payments, for foreign assets and foreign income, for the details of any transfer-pricing report, and for the deductions claimed under each provision. In a mid-sized company, populating these accurately is a multi-week exercise, not a weekend one — which is precisely why the corrigendum-driven advice to re-download the utility matters: nobody wants to discover a schema mismatch after three weeks of data entry.
The taxation of dividends changed fundamentally when the old Dividend Distribution Tax was abolished. Under DDT, the company paid a distribution tax on the dividend and the shareholder received it tax-free, which meant every shareholder — the pensioner with 100 shares and the promoter with 40% — bore the same effective rate regardless of their own slab. Under the current position, the company pays no distribution tax; the dividend is taxable in the hands of the shareholder at the shareholder's applicable rate, and the company deducts TDS on the dividend when it pays. The company's ITR-6 therefore reports the dividend as an appropriation and reports the TDS deducted, but does not bear tax on the distribution itself.
The consequences are worth spelling out because they change how closely held companies plan distributions. For a promoter in the top bracket, a dividend is now taxed at that top rate, so extracting profit as a dividend is materially more expensive than it was under DDT — and this has pushed many owner-managers toward salary, which is deductible in the company's hands, or toward simply retaining profits in the company. A worked comparison makes it vivid: a company with ₹1 crore of profit available for distribution, having paid company tax at roughly 25%, has about ₹75 lakh to distribute; a promoter in the top bracket paying around 30% plus surcharge and cess on the dividend keeps roughly ₹50 lakh, an effective combined burden approaching 50%. Pay the same ₹1 crore out as remuneration instead and it is deductible to the company, so the whole amount is taxed once in the individual's hands at their rate — a materially better outcome, provided the remuneration is genuinely for services rendered and is reasonable, because excessive or non-genuine director payments are exactly what the related-party disallowance provisions target. There is no free lunch here; there is a real planning decision that has to be defensible.
For a non-resident shareholder the dividend also carries TDS under Section 393 (old Section 195) at the rate in force, subject to any lower rate available under the relevant double-taxation treaty where the shareholder furnishes a tax residency certificate and the prescribed declaration. Companies with foreign shareholders should build the treaty documentation into their dividend process rather than deducting at the full domestic rate and leaving the shareholder to chase a refund through an Indian return they may not otherwise have to file.
A company that makes a loss does not lose the benefit of it, but the rules on preserving that benefit are strict and are where a great deal of value is quietly destroyed. Ordinary business losses may be carried forward and set off against business profits of subsequent years, for a limited number of years. Unabsorbed depreciation is treated more generously — it can be carried forward indefinitely and has broader set-off scope. But carrying forward a business loss is conditional on the return having been filed by the due date. Miss the 31 October deadline and file a belated return, and the brought-forward business loss for that year is gone. For a start-up burning capital through several loss years, this is the single most expensive filing mistake available: a company with ₹3 crore of accumulated losses that would have sheltered its first three profitable years can lose an entire year's slice — say ₹1 crore, worth roughly ₹25 lakh of future tax — because a return went in a week late. Unabsorbed depreciation survives a late filing; the business loss does not. That asymmetry alone justifies treating the company's due date as immovable.
The second restriction is specific to companies and catches founders during fundraising. For a company in which the public is not substantially interested — that is, a closely held private company — a brought-forward loss may only be set off if at least 51% of the beneficial shareholding on the last day of the year in which the set-off is claimed was also held by the same persons on the last day of the year in which the loss was incurred. In plain terms: if more than 49% of the company changes hands between the loss year and the profit year, the loss dies. A start-up that accumulated ₹5 crore of losses while founder-owned, and then dilutes founders below 51% in a large funding round, can find those losses extinguished — a real reduction in value that neither side may have priced into the term sheet. There are relaxations, notably for eligible start-ups where the original shareholders continue to hold their shares, and for certain amalgamations and restructurings, and a well-advised company will structure a round with the continuity test in mind rather than discover the problem at the following year's assessment. This is precisely the sort of item that the ITR-6 shareholding schedules exist to make visible to the department, so the position taken in the return must match the cap table.
If the company has entered into an international transaction with an associated enterprise — a foreign parent, a foreign subsidiary, or any entity under common control — it enters the transfer-pricing regime. The transactions must be at arm's length, the company must maintain prescribed documentation supporting the pricing method chosen, and it must obtain and file an accountant's report on the international transactions. There is a parallel regime for specified domestic transactions between related Indian entities above a threshold. ITR-6 carries flags and schedules for all of this, and ticking the transfer-pricing flag has a direct consequence: it extends the filing deadline, as described below.
Transfer pricing is the area where Indian assessments are most contested, and the exposure is asymmetric. If the transfer-pricing officer determines that an Indian subsidiary under-charged its foreign parent for services, the adjustment increases Indian taxable income, and there is no corresponding automatic relief in the other country unless a treaty mechanism is invoked. A worked illustration: an Indian development centre bills its US parent cost plus 10% on a ₹40 crore cost base, so ₹44 crore of revenue and ₹4 crore of profit. If the officer benchmarks comparable captive service providers at cost plus 20%, the arm's-length revenue becomes ₹48 crore, the adjustment is ₹4 crore, and at roughly 25% the additional tax is about ₹1 crore before interest and the penalties that attach to a transfer-pricing adjustment. Contemporaneous documentation prepared at the time of the transaction — a defensible benchmarking study, not a retrospective justification — is what usually determines whether that adjustment survives. Companies with cross-border related-party dealings should budget for this work annually rather than treat it as an assessment-time expense.
The due date for a company filing ITR-6 is 31 October of the assessment year, reflecting the fact that a company is subject to audit. Where the company has international or specified domestic transactions requiring the transfer-pricing accountant's report, the due date is later — 30 November — to allow time for that report. The tax-audit report itself is due earlier still, typically a month before the return, and must be filed and accepted on the portal before the return goes in. Advance tax runs on the ordinary quarterly instalments through the year, and shortfalls attract interest under Sections 424 and 425 (old Sections 234B and 234C) — interest that a company with lumpy fourth-quarter profits will incur almost mechanically unless its instalments are estimated with some care.
Late filing costs more than interest. A late-filing fee applies, and its quantum is trivial next to the real cost, which is the loss of the business-loss carry-forward described above. A return filed after the due date is also a weaker platform in any subsequent dispute, and the return remains open to scrutiny assessment under Section 270 (old Section 143), under which the department can call for the books, the audit report and the transfer-pricing documentation and test the positions taken. Non-filing altogether escalates beyond fees into penalty and, in serious cases, prosecution of the officers in default — which is why even a dormant company should file its nil return rather than let years accumulate. And because ITR-6 must be verified by digital signature, the whole chain depends on a valid, registered DSC held by an authorised director; a company that leaves this to the last week is one expired certificate away from missing a deadline it cannot recover.
Two further reporting obligations round out the company's year and are easy to overlook because they sit outside the return itself. Where the company holds foreign assets or has foreign income, the foreign-asset schedules must be completed accurately — the reporting obligation is independent of whether the asset produced income, and the penalty regime for undisclosed foreign assets is among the harshest in the statute. And where the company has received exempt receipts, the position under the exempt-income provisions in Section 11 should be documented rather than assumed, because the correspondence between exempt receipts and disallowed related expenditure is a standard scrutiny theme. Alongside these, the ordinary capital-gains provisions apply to a company just as to any other taxpayer — Section 196 (old 111A) for short-term gains on listed equity and Section 198 (old 112A) for long-term gains — and a company that sells listed investments out of its treasury reports them in the same capital-gains schedules an individual would use.
The companies that file cleanly do the same things in the same order, and the order matters more than any single step. Close the books and finalise the financial statements first, because everything downstream is built on them. Reconcile the tax-depreciation blocks in parallel with the accounting fixed-asset register rather than afterwards. Reconcile tax deducted and collected against the annual statements on the portal so that credits claimed in the return actually match what the department can see, since a mismatch here is the most common trigger for an automated adjustment. Complete the transfer-pricing documentation and the accountant's report if the company has related-party cross-border dealings, and complete it early enough that the pricing conclusion can still influence the accounts if it needs to. Get the tax-audit report finalised, uploaded by the auditor and accepted by the company on the portal. Confirm the concessional-regime position for the year and that any option once exercised is being consistently applied. Verify that the authorised signatory's DSC is valid and registered. Only then populate ITR-6 — against a freshly downloaded utility, which is where this guide began. A company that follows this sequence rarely files late; a company that starts with the return and works backwards almost always does.
Every company, other than a company claiming the exemption for income from property held for charitable or religious purposes (which files ITR-7). This includes private limited companies, public and listed companies, one-person companies, and dormant companies with no income at all. There is no turnover threshold and no exemption for a company that did not trade.
Yes. The obligation attaches to the status of being a company, not to having income. A dormant or newly incorporated company that did nothing during the year still files a nil ITR-6, still maintains books, and still has its accounts audited under the Companies Act. Non-filing accrues fees and penalty exposure for the officers in default until the company is formally struck off.
No. Presumptive taxation under Section 58 (old Sections 44AD and 44ADA) is available to individuals, Hindu undivided families and certain partnership firms — not to companies. A company must maintain full books, obtain a tax audit under Section 63 (old 44AB) where the turnover threshold is crossed, and file ITR-6 with complete financial statements.
31 October of the assessment year for a company subject to audit. Where the company has international or specified domestic transactions requiring the transfer-pricing accountant's report, the deadline extends to 30 November. The tax-audit report must be filed and accepted on the portal before the return itself.
A late-filing fee and interest under Sections 424 and 425 (old 234B and 234C) apply, but the serious cost is that brought-forward business losses for that year cannot be carried forward at all. Unabsorbed depreciation survives a late filing; business losses do not. For a loss-making company this can be the most expensive compliance mistake available.
It depends entirely on the incentives you would surrender. A company with few tax incentives — most services businesses — usually saves substantially. A company with large accelerated or additional depreciation, SEZ benefits, research deductions or losses tied to those allowances may pay more under the concessional rate while those allowances last. Because the option is effectively irrevocable, the decision needs a multi-year projection, not a single-year comparison.
The company pays no distribution tax. The dividend is taxable in the shareholder's hands at the shareholder's own rate, and the company deducts TDS when paying — including under Section 393 (old 195) for non-resident shareholders, subject to any lower treaty rate where a residency certificate is furnished. For a promoter in the top bracket this makes dividends an expensive extraction route compared with genuine, reasonable remuneration.
Yes. For a closely held company, brought-forward losses can only be set off if at least 51% of the beneficial shareholding is common between the loss year and the set-off year. A funding round that dilutes the original shareholders below that level can extinguish the losses, subject to relaxations for eligible start-ups where the original shareholders continue to hold their shares. The continuity test should be checked before the round closes, not after.
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