Put your gross income and the deductions you actually claim into both regimes at once, on the current financial year's slabs, and see which one costs you less.
Break-even
An estimate on the current financial year's slabs, not a filing. It does not model age-based exemption limits for senior citizens, capital gains taxed at their own rates, or relief under Section 89. Check your own figures before you choose a regime with your employer.
This old vs new tax regime calculator answers one question, in rupees: which of the two Indian income tax regimes leaves you with more money this year. Enter your gross income and the deductions you genuinely claim, and both regimes are computed side by side on the current financial year's slabs, with the Section 87A rebate, marginal relief, surcharge and cess already applied to each column.
Most comparisons fail because they feed one figure into both regimes, which quietly flatters whichever regime the reader was already leaning towards. Your taxable income is not the same number in each regime, and that difference is the entire decision. This tool keeps the two columns honest by applying each regime's own standard deduction and its own rules about what you may subtract, then tells you the exact rupee value of deductions the Old Regime would need to draw level. If you only want the tax on a single regime, the income tax calculator does the slab-by-slab arithmetic, and the full set of salary calculators covers everything from CTC to gratuity.
The whole comparison rests on one idea: the two regimes do not start from the same taxable income. Give the tool your gross figure and your real deductions, and it handles the rest.
Two figures and about twenty seconds. Nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere.
⚖️ Compare Both RegimesOne salary, two deduction habits, two different winners. This is the clearest way to see why a single rule of thumb cannot answer the question for you.
Take a salaried person on a gross of ₹18,00,000. In the first column they claim the full set most long-tenured employees can reach: ₹1,50,000 under 80C, ₹25,000 of health cover under 80D, ₹2,40,000 of exempt HRA, ₹2,00,000 of home loan interest and ₹50,000 of their own NPS. That is ₹6,65,000 of deductions. In the second column, the same salary, but the only thing claimed is a filled 80C.
| Line | Old Regime, full set | New Regime | Old Regime, 80C only |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gross income | ₹18,00,000 | ₹18,00,000 | ₹18,00,000 |
| Standard deduction | ₹50,000 | ₹75,000 | ₹50,000 |
| Deductions claimed | ₹6,65,000 | nil | ₹1,50,000 |
| Taxable income | ₹10,85,000 | ₹17,25,000 | ₹16,00,000 |
| Tax on slabs | ₹1,38,000 | ₹1,45,000 | ₹2,92,500 |
| Section 87A rebate | nil | nil | nil |
| Health and Education Cess | ₹5,520 | ₹5,800 | ₹11,700 |
| Total tax payable | ₹1,43,520 | ₹1,50,800 | ₹3,04,200 |
Read the three totals together. With the full deduction stack the Old Regime wins, but only by ₹7,280, which is roughly six hundred rupees a month for the trouble of collecting rent receipts, premium certificates and an interest certificate every year. Strip the claims back to 80C alone and the same salary pays ₹1,53,400 more under the Old Regime. The break-even at this income is ₹6,41,667 of total deductions: below it the New Regime wins, above it the Old Regime does, and at ₹6,65,000 this person clears the bar by about twenty-three thousand rupees of claims.
That is the honest shape of the decision. The Old Regime does not reward having deductions, it rewards having a great many of them, reliably, every year. If your HRA disappears because you buy a house, or your home loan interest falls as the principal burns down, the margin can vanish inside one financial year. Re-run the figures each March rather than assuming last year's answer still holds, and check the effect on your monthly cash flow with the in-hand salary calculator.
India runs two parallel sets of income tax rules for individuals, and you pick one each year. The Old Regime has a short, steep ladder of four bands and lets you subtract a long list of deductions before tax is worked out. The New Regime has a longer, gentler ladder of seven bands and a far higher point at which tax starts, but it removes almost every deduction on the way there. Neither is a discount on the other. They are two different bargains, and which one suits you depends entirely on how much you can legitimately subtract.
Since the New Regime became the default, doing nothing is a choice. If you never tell your employer or your return otherwise, you are taxed under the New Regime, and for a large share of salaried filers that is the cheaper outcome anyway. The rates, rebate thresholds and surcharge bands used on this page follow the current financial year's provisions as published by the Income Tax Department's e-filing portal, which is also where you can check your own liability against Form 26AS and the annual information statement before you file.
This page compares the two regimes. If you only need the tax due under one of them, worked out band by band, that computation lives on the income tax calculator instead.
The tool runs the same five steps twice, once per regime, on the current financial year's slabs. It never reuses one taxable figure for both columns, because that is the single most common way a regime comparison goes wrong.
Step one, taxable income. Gross income minus that regime's own standard deduction, minus the employer's NPS contribution under 80CCD(2), which survives in both regimes, minus your listed deductions in the Old Regime column only. The two columns almost always land on different taxable figures, and the gap between them is the Old Regime's real advantage before any rate is applied.
Step two, tax on slabs. Each band is charged only on the income falling inside it. Crossing into a higher band never taxes your whole income at the higher rate, which is the most persistent myth in Indian salary conversations.
Step three, the Section 87A rebate. Below each regime's rebate ceiling the tax is wiped to nil. The two ceilings are far apart, and that distance is why the New Regime wins so decisively in the middle of the salary range.
Step four, marginal relief. Just above the New Regime rebate ceiling, tax is capped at the income earned beyond it, so a rupee of extra salary can never cost more than a rupee of extra tax. Without this step a calculator overstates the bill by tens of thousands in exactly the band where a great many mid-career salaries sit. The same principle is applied again at each surcharge threshold.
Step five, surcharge and cess. Surcharge applies above fifty lakhs and rises in bands, with the New Regime stopping at a lower top rate than the Old Regime. Health and Education Cess of 4 percent then applies to tax plus surcharge in both regimes, with no exemption threshold.
Every figure in the tables on this page was produced by running that engine, not typed from a summary elsewhere.
The bands do not line up, which is why a single shared table misleads. Here is each ladder on its own terms, applied to taxable income after that regime's deductions:
Note where the nil band ends: ₹2,50,000 is the Old Regime's basic exemption, not the country's. Quoting it as the general exemption limit understates the New Regime's starting point by ₹1,50,000 and is one of the most repeated errors in Indian tax coverage. Both regimes then add 4 percent Health and Education Cess on tax plus surcharge.
This is the table most people are looking for. Each row is a salaried person's annual gross income. The New Regime column assumes its standard deduction and nothing else. The Old Regime column assumes its standard deduction and nothing else, which is the fair starting point before you add your own claims. The fourth column is the number that decides it: the total Old Regime deductions needed at that income to draw level.
| Annual gross | New Regime tax | Old Regime tax | Deductions to draw level | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ₹9,00,000 | ₹0 | ₹85,800 | ₹3,50,000 | New. Old can only match. |
| ₹10,00,000 | ₹0 | ₹1,06,600 | ₹4,50,000 | New. Old can only match. |
| ₹12,00,000 | ₹0 | ₹1,63,800 | ₹6,50,000 | New. Old can only match. |
| ₹13,00,000 | ₹26,000 | ₹1,95,000 | ₹6,87,500 | New, heavily. Relief applies. |
| ₹14,00,000 | ₹81,900 | ₹2,26,200 | ₹5,18,750 | New unless HRA is large. |
| ₹15,00,000 | ₹97,500 | ₹2,57,400 | ₹5,43,750 | New unless HRA is large. |
| ₹16,00,000 | ₹1,13,100 | ₹2,88,600 | ₹5,68,750 | New unless HRA is large. |
| ₹18,00,000 | ₹1,50,800 | ₹3,51,000 | ₹6,41,667 | Close for a metro renter. |
| ₹20,00,000 | ₹1,92,400 | ₹4,13,400 | ₹7,08,334 | Old needs the full set. |
| ₹24,00,000 | ₹2,92,500 | ₹5,38,200 | ₹7,87,500 | Old needs the full set. |
| ₹25,00,000 | ₹3,19,800 | ₹5,69,400 | ₹8,00,000 | Old needs the full set. |
| ₹30,00,000 | ₹4,75,800 | ₹7,25,400 | ₹8,00,000 | Old needs the full set. |
| ₹40,00,000 | ₹7,87,800 | ₹10,37,400 | ₹8,00,000 | Old needs the full set. |
| ₹50,00,000 | ₹10,99,800 | ₹13,49,400 | ₹8,00,000 | Old needs the full set. |
Three things are worth pulling out of that table. Up to a gross of about ₹12,75,000 a salaried filer pays nothing at all under the New Regime, so the Old Regime has no way to win, only to match. Between ₹13,00,000 and roughly ₹13,45,000 marginal relief keeps the New Regime bill artificially low, which makes that band the hardest place in the whole range for the Old Regime to compete. And from about ₹25,00,000 upwards the required deduction total flattens at ₹8,00,000, because both regimes are charging 30 percent at the margin and every rupee of deduction is worth the same on either side.
Whether ₹8,00,000 of deductions is reachable is a question about your life, not your salary. Without HRA, a maximal claim comes to roughly ₹4,25,000: ₹1,50,000 of 80C, ₹50,000 of your own NPS, ₹2,00,000 of home loan interest and around ₹25,000 of health cover. Everything above that is essentially HRA, which means the Old Regime today is largely a renter's regime, and a metro renter's at that.
The New Regime's lower rates are paid for by removing deductions. These are the ones that matter to salaried filers, and it is worth being precise about which survive.
That last card is the trap worth repeating. Employees often assume the provident fund deduction on their payslip saves tax automatically. It does not, in the New Regime. If you want to see how much is going into it in the first place, the provident fund calculator splits the employee and employer shares, and the salary breakup calculator shows where each component of your package sits before any tax is applied. Professional tax, incidentally, remains deductible from salary income in both regimes; the professional tax calculator covers the state-level rates.
One more thing worth knowing if you are choosing a regime for a specific pay structure rather than in the abstract: the regime you pick changes your monthly cash flow through TDS, not just your annual bill. Whichever way you go, the in-hand salary calculator and the take-home salary calculator show what actually reaches your account each month once the deduction is applied.
What this calculator does, what it deliberately does not do, and where you should not rely on it. The core explanation is above in plain sight; these are the edges.
The Old Regime raises the basic exemption limit with age, to ₹3,00,000 for senior citizens and ₹5,00,000 for super senior citizens. This tool applies the general ₹2,50,000 limit to every Old Regime calculation, so if you are over sixty it understates the Old Regime's advantage, by up to ₹2,500 of tax for a senior citizen and up to ₹27,500 for a super senior citizen before cess. The New Regime has no age-based exemption at all, so that column is unaffected. Adjust manually or treat the Old Regime figure as a ceiling.
Short-term and long-term capital gains on listed securities are taxed at their own flat rates and do not enter the slab ladder in either regime. Feeding gains into the income box here will produce a number that is wrong in both columns. Compare regimes on your salary and other slab-rate income, then add any capital gains tax separately. The same applies to lottery and similar windfall income taxed at a special rate.
The tool caps 80C at ₹1,50,000, home loan interest at ₹2,00,000 and 80CCD(1B) at ₹50,000, so an over-entry cannot inflate the Old Regime column. It cannot check whether you are actually entitled to what you typed. HRA in particular is not the figure on your payslip: the exempt portion is the lowest of three separate tests involving your basic pay, rent paid and city. Enter the exempt amount, not the allowance.
Results are an annual estimate on the current financial year's provisions. They do not model relief under Section 89 for arrears, foreign tax credits, clubbing of income, set-off of losses, or advance tax and interest under Sections 234A to 234C. Rates change every February with the Finance Act. Before you commit to a regime with your employer or in your return, check the figures against the department's own utility or with someone qualified to sign off on them.
The regime question lands on almost everyone who earns in India, and it lands hardest in April, when employers ask for a declaration, and again in July, when the return is due. A metro renter with a home loan has a genuine calculation to do and may well find the Old Regime still pays. Someone renting nothing, investing nothing beyond their provident fund and paying no loan interest almost certainly does not, and can stop worrying about it. Anyone whose salary has just crossed twelve lakhs has the most interesting case on this page, because that is exactly where the rebate ceiling and marginal relief make the New Regime unusually hard to beat. Freelancers and consultants should read the switching rules carefully before opting out, since their door only swings one way. And if you are here because a raise changed the picture, work out the new gross first with the salary increment calculator, then come back and run both regimes on the real number.
It comes down to one number: the total deductions you can genuinely claim. Run your income through the calculator and it will name the exact rupee figure the Old Regime needs at your salary to draw level. If your real claims clear that bar, the Old Regime is cheaper. If they fall short, the New Regime is. For most salaried people without a large HRA exemption, the shortfall is wide enough that the answer is the New Regime.
Gross salary, which is your annual income before any deduction. Not CTC, because CTC includes your employer's provident fund contribution and gratuity provision, which never reach your hands and are not taxed as salary. Entering CTC inflates both columns and overstates your tax. If your offer letter only shows CTC, strip it down first with the CTC to in-hand calculator, then bring the gross figure back here.
Rarely on their own. A filled 80C of one and a half lakhs plus the full two lakhs of home loan interest comes to three and a half lakhs. At a gross of fifteen lakhs the Old Regime needs about five and a half lakhs to draw level, so that pairing alone still loses. Add your own NPS and health cover and you reach roughly four and a quarter lakhs. The gap after that is almost always closed by HRA, which is why the Old Regime tends to suit renters rather than owners.
The New Regime, decisively, and it is not close. A salaried person on twelve lakhs pays nothing at all under the New Regime, because the standard deduction brings taxable income under the rebate ceiling. The Old Regime on the same salary charges one lakh sixty-three thousand eight hundred with nothing claimed. The Old Regime would need six and a half lakhs of deductions just to reach nil as well, and it can never do better than nil.
Yes, and this calculator does not model it. The Old Regime lifts the basic exemption to three lakhs at sixty and five lakhs at eighty, while the New Regime has no age-based limit at all. So the Old Regime column here is slightly pessimistic if you are over sixty, by up to two thousand five hundred rupees of tax for a senior citizen and up to twenty-seven thousand five hundred for a super senior citizen, before cess. Treat the Old Regime figure as a ceiling.
Yes. If you have no business or professional income, the choice is made afresh every financial year when you file your return, and there is no limit on how often you move between the two. That matters more than it sounds. A year when you are renting and paying loan interest can favour the Old Regime, and the year after you buy a house outright can flip it back. Re-run the comparison annually rather than treating it as settled.
Yes, if you are salaried. What you tell your employer in April only decides how much tax is deducted from your monthly pay through the year. The regime that counts is the one you choose in your return. Pick the other one at filing and the difference settles itself, either as a refund or as tax still payable. The only real cost of getting the April declaration wrong is cash flow across the year, not the final bill.
Once, in effect, and the door then locks. A filer with business or professional income who opts out to the Old Regime may return to the New Regime one time. Having done that, the Old Regime is closed permanently. This is the single biggest difference between a salaried filer and a self-employed one on this page, and it is worth modelling a few years ahead rather than optimising a single year and losing the option for good.
Yes. Health and Education Cess of 4 percent is charged on tax plus surcharge in both regimes, with no exemption threshold, and both totals shown already include it. It is listed as its own line in each column so you can see the effect. Where a rebate has wiped the tax to nil, the cess is nil too, because there is no tax for it to sit on.
Not at the moment. There is real demand for one and we would rather say so plainly than link you to a spreadsheet we did not build and cannot vouch for. The calculator on this page shows every intermediate line, taxable income, slab tax, rebate, relief, surcharge and cess, so the working can be copied into a sheet of your own if you need it in that shape. If a template ships later it will appear on this page.
Yes. Both ladders, both standard deductions, both rebate ceilings, marginal relief and the surcharge bands are the provisions in force for FY 2026-27, the assessment year 2027-28. The Finance Act 2025 set these rates and Budget 2026 carried them forward without change. The figures are re-read against the Act after every Budget, and the engine is corrected before any label on this page moves.
One salary figure, your real deductions, and both regimes worked out to the rupee. Nothing is stored and nothing leaves your browser.
⚖️ Compare Both RegimesOnce you know your regime, work out what actually reaches your account: the take-home salary calculator and the post-tax salary calculator both start from an annual figure, while the monthly salary calculator and the annual salary calculator move between the two periods. Paid by the hour or the project instead? Try the salary to hourly converter, the hourly to salary converter, the freelance income calculator or the overtime pay calculator. For the one-off amounts that land during the year, there is a bonus calculator, a leave encashment calculator and an internship stipend calculator. Counting the days for a notice period or a tenure claim is a job for the date difference calculator, and if you are rewriting a CV to go with the new package, the word counter will keep it honest. Everything lives together on the salary calculators hub.