You run payroll on the 28th. Someone is on leave, two invoices are awaiting approval, and a client escalation eats up Wednesday. By the time anyone looks up, it is the 16th of the following month, and the provident fund challan has not gone out. Nothing dramatic happens that day. The notice arrives four months later, with interest already running from the 16th.
Payroll compliance in India rarely fails because a team did not know the rules. It fails because the calendar lives in one person’s head, the deadlines cluster in the same three days of every month, and the upstream work that feeds those deadlines — timesheets, approvals, reimbursements — sits with people who have no idea a statutory clock is ticking.
This payroll compliance calendar covers the financial year that runs from 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2027. It sets out the monthly, quarterly and annual obligations, what changed this year, what each miss costs, and how to build the calendar into how your firm operates instead of taping it to a wall.
One caveat worth stating early: FY 2026-27 is not a repeat of last year. If your payroll calendar was rolled forward from FY 2025-26 without a review, several of the entries on it are now wrong.
What Changed For FY 2026-27
Three shifts landed between November 2025 and May 2026, and all three touch payroll.
The Income-tax Act, 2025 replaced the Income-tax Act, 1961 from 1 April 2026: The Central Board of Direct Taxes notified the Income-tax Rules, 2026 on 20 March 2026 to operationalise it. For payroll teams, the practical consequences are the form numbers and the section references, not the arithmetic. Salary tax deduction now sits under section 392. The quarterly salary statement that everyone called Form 24Q is now Form No. 138, filed under Rule 219. The salary certificate that everyone called Form 16 is now Form No. 130. The Rules also expanded the list of cities eligible for higher house rent allowance exemption, raised exemption limits on specified allowances, and revised how food benefits, gifts, and motor car perquisites are valued, all effective 1 April 2026, as summarised in EY’s alert on the new Rules.
The transition also created a split that still catches people. The governing law follows the pay period, not the filing date. Anything paid or credited up to 31 March 2026 stays under the old Act and the old forms, even when you file a correction in October 2026. Anything from 1 April 2026 onward uses the new forms.
The four labour codes moved from law to rules: The Code on Wages, the Industrial Relations Code, the Code on Social Security and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code came into force on 21 November 2025. On 8 May 2026, the Ministry of Labour and Employment notified the final Central Rules under all four, a step KPMG describes as operationalising wage calculation, social security coverage, working conditions and industrial relations. The nuance most calendars skip: the Central Rules apply where the central government is the appropriate government, which covers banking, insurance, telecom, mines, air transport, railways, major ports and central public sector undertakings. A 60-person consulting firm registered under a state Shops and Establishments Act is not in that list. For those firms, the codes apply, but the operational detail arrives with the state rules, and most states are still at draft stage.
Maharashtra moved its professional tax deadlines forward: A notification dated 28 February 2026 amended Rule 11(3) of the state’s professional tax rules, replacing the old month-end deadline with the 15th and moving the annual return from 31 March to 15 March. The change is reflected in the Maharashtra GST department’s own professional tax notifications. If your Pune or Mumbai payroll still files on the last working day, you are filing late.
The Monthly Rhythm
Three dates repeat every month without exception. Everything else in the payroll compliance calendar is seasonal.
| Date | Obligation | Covers | Governing law |
| 7th | Deposit tax deducted at source on salary | Previous month’s deduction | Income-tax Act, 2025, Rule 218 |
| 15th | Deposit provident fund contribution and file the electronic challan cum return | Previous month’s wages | EPF and MP Act, 1952 |
| 15th | Deposit employees’ state insurance contribution | Previous month’s wages | ESI (General) Regulations, 1950, Regulation 31 |
Two exceptions matter. Tax deducted in March is not due on 7 April. It is due on 30 April, and the Income Tax Department confirms this on its own tax deducted at source compliance pages. Second, provident fund has no grace period. Interest under section 7Q starts on the 16th, and the EPFO’s employer FAQs confirm that both penal interest under section 7Q and damages under section 14B apply to delayed dues.
Professional tax adds a fourth monthly line in most states that levy it, on a state-specific date. Labour welfare fund does not run monthly in most states, which is exactly why it gets missed.
Payroll Compliance Calendar For India: April 2026 To March 2027
The table below covers the full financial year. Dates shown are statutory limits. Treat them as the outer boundary and set your internal targets three to five working days earlier.
| Month | Date | What Is Due |
| April 2026 | 15 April | PF and ESI contributions on March 2026 wages |
| 15 April | Professional tax for March, Maharashtra, under the amended Rule 11(3) | |
| 30 April | Deposit of tax deducted in March 2026 | |
| May 2026 | 7 May | Deposit of tax deducted in April 2026 |
| 12 May | ESI return of contribution for October 2025 to March 2026, being 42 days from the period end | |
| 15 May | PF and ESI contributions on April 2026 wages | |
| 31 May | Q4 salary statement for FY 2025-26, filed on the old Form 24Q under the 1961 Act | |
| June 2026 | 7 June | Deposit of tax deducted in May 2026 |
| 15 June | PF and ESI contributions on May 2026 wages | |
| 15 June | Issue Form 16 to employees for FY 2025-26 | |
| Before 1 April and 1 October | Variable dearness allowance recomputation for minimum wage purposes, where the Code on Wages Central Rules apply | |
| July 2026 | 7 July | Deposit of tax deducted in June 2026 |
| 15 July | PF and ESI contributions on June 2026 wages | |
| 15 July | Labour welfare fund remittance in half-yearly states, following the June deduction | |
| 31 July | Q1 salary statement for Tax Year 2026-27 on Form 138 | |
| August 2026 | 7 August | Deposit of tax deducted in July 2026 |
| 15 August | PF and ESI contributions on July 2026 wages | |
| 15 August | Issue Q1 non-salary deduction certificates on Form 131 | |
| September 2026 | 7 September | Deposit of tax deducted in August 2026 |
| 15 September | PF and ESI contributions on August 2026 wages | |
| 30 September | End of the first ESI contribution period | |
| October 2026 | 7 October | Deposit of tax deducted in September 2026 |
| 15 October | PF and ESI contributions on September 2026 wages | |
| 31 October | Q2 salary statement for Tax Year 2026-27 on Form 138 | |
| November 2026 | 7 November | Deposit of tax deducted in October 2026 |
| 11 November | ESI return of contribution for April to September 2026 | |
| 15 November | PF and ESI contributions on October 2026 wages | |
| 15 November | Issue Q2 non-salary deduction certificates on Form 131 | |
| 30 November | Statutory bonus for the accounting year ended 31 March 2026, payable within eight months of the year end | |
| December 2026 | 7 December | Deposit of tax deducted in November 2026 |
| 15 December | PF and ESI contributions on November 2026 wages | |
| December payroll | Labour welfare fund deduction month in most half-yearly and annual states | |
| January 2027 | 7 January | Deposit of tax deducted in December 2026 |
| 15 January | PF and ESI contributions on December 2026 wages | |
| 15 January | Labour welfare fund remittance in several states, following the December deduction | |
| 31 January | Q3 salary statement for Tax Year 2026-27 on Form 138 | |
| February 2027 | 7 February | Deposit of tax deducted in January 2027 |
| 15 February | PF and ESI contributions on January 2027 wages | |
| 15 February | Issue Q3 non-salary deduction certificates on Form 131 | |
| March 2027 | 7 March | Deposit of tax deducted in February 2027 |
| 15 March | PF and ESI contributions on February 2027 wages | |
| 15 March | Professional tax annual return, Maharashtra | |
| 31 March | Close of the tax year, final investment proof reconciliation and last salary deduction for the year |
Two items fall just outside the window but belong on the same plan. Tax deducted in March 2027 is due by 30 April 2027. The Q4 statement for Tax Year 2026-27 is due by 31 May 2027, and Form 130, the new salary certificate, must reach employees by 15 June 2027. That sequence is not optional: the certificate is generated from the processed Q4 statement, so a late or defective 31 May filing pushes the 15 June certificate out with it, straight into the personal tax filing season when employees need it.
Quarterly Filings Under The New Forms
The quarterly cadence did not change. The forms did.
| Quarter | Period | Statement Due | Certificate To Employee |
| Q1 | April to June 2026 | 31 July 2026 | Annexure I only |
| Q2 | July to September 2026 | 31 October 2026 | Annexure I only |
| Q3 | October to December 2026 | 31 January 2027 | Annexure I only |
| Q4 | January to March 2027 | 31 May 2027 | Form 130 by 15 June 2027 |
The Income Tax Department’s guidance on Form 138 sets out the structure plainly: Annexure I goes with all four quarters, while Annexure II and Annexure III are required only in the Q4 filing. Filing is electronic; a submitted statement cannot be edited, and corrections run through a correction statement once the original has been processed. The correction window is two years from the end of the tax year in which the statement was due.
If your payroll system, your consultant’s templates, or your internal checklist still reference Form 24Q for a post-April 2026 period, that is worth fixing before the next quarter rather than after a rejection.
State-Level Obligations
This is where multi-location firms lose money, and where a national calendar stops being enough. Professional tax and labour welfare fund are state subjects. Applicability follows where the employee physically works, not where the company is registered. A firm headquartered in Gurugram with a delivery team in Bengaluru and a site office in Pune has three different state regimes to satisfy, even though its own head office state levies neither tax.
- Professional tax: Levied in roughly twenty states and Puducherry. Not levied in Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, among others. Frequency varies: monthly in states such as Maharashtra, Karnataka, West Bengal, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, half-yearly in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, annual in some others. Maharashtra’s move to the 15th is a significant change for FY 2026-27.
- Labour welfare fund: Around sixteen states and union territories have an active Act. Almost none of them collect monthly. Maharashtra, Gujarat, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh deduct in June and December. Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Kerala run annual cycles, generally deducted in December. Haryana, Punjab and Chandigarh collect monthly. Because the deduction happens twice a year or once a year, no habit forms around it, and it is the single most commonly missed line on an Indian payroll calendar.
Given how often state governments revise rates, thresholds, and dates by notification, confirm the current position on the relevant state commercial tax or labour department portal before you lock your own dates. This calendar names the pattern; the state notification names the date.
What The Labour Codes Change Downstream
The codes do not add many new dates. They change the numbers that flow into the dates you already have.
The Code on Wages defines wages as basic pay plus dearness allowance and retaining allowance, and where excluded allowances exceed half of total remuneration, the excess is added back into wages for statutory calculations. That single definition moves the base for provident fund, gratuity, and bonus. If your compensation structures were designed when a low basic was normal, your monthly PF liability and your gratuity provision are both higher than the ones in last year’s budget.
Two other changes carry operational weight for services firms. Fixed-term employees become eligible for gratuity on a pro rata basis rather than after five years, which matters for firms that staff projects on fixed-term contracts. And the codes tighten the timeline for settling dues on exit, which turns full and final settlement from a month-end batch job into something closer to a real-time process.
The Ministry of Labour and Employment maintains FAQs on the labour codes that answer several of the questions employers keep raising, including how the wage definition interacts with existing thresholds. For a broader view of how the codes reshape leave and attendance policy alongside pay, our earlier piece on leave policy changes in India covers the ground.
What Each Miss Costs
Penalties are rarely the whole cost. The bigger drain is the time spent responding to a notice and rebuilding a finance team’s confidence. Still, the numbers are worth knowing, because they are what turn a small process gap into a budget line.
| Default | Consequence |
| Late deposit of tax deducted at source | Interest at 1.5% per month, calculated from the date of deduction rather than from the due date |
| Late filing of the quarterly salary statement | Late fee under section 427 of the Income-tax Act, 2025, plus exposure to penalty proceedings |
| Late provident fund deposit | Interest at 12% per annum under section 7Q, plus damages under section 14B graded by the length of delay |
| Late ESI deposit | Interest at 12% per annum from the day after the due date, plus damages, with prosecution exposure under section 85 for deducted amounts not deposited |
| Late professional tax | State-specific interest and penalty, typically monthly interest plus a per-return late fee |
The tax interest rule deserves a second read. Interest runs from the date of deduction, not from the 7th. A deposit made three days late on a deduction dated the 3rd of the previous month can attract two months of interest, because part-months count as whole months.
Building The Calendar Into How You Operate
A calendar that only lists dates solves the smaller half of the problem. Most misses trace back to something upstream that did not finish in time.
Work backwards from each deadline to its dependency
The 15th PF deposit depends on a finalised payroll run. That run depends on attendance and leave being locked. In a services firm, it also depends on timesheets being submitted and approved, because unapproved time distorts overtime, leave encashment, and any variable pay tied to billable hours. If timesheet approval routinely closes on the 5th, your PF deadline is effectively a 5th deadline wearing a disguise.
Set internal dates, not statutory ones
Put the ESI and PF challans on the 11th or 12th. Bank transfers fail, portals go down, and the person who owns the filing takes leave. A three-day buffer costs nothing and absorbs all three.
Give every line an owner by name
Not “finance”. A named person, with a named backup. State-level items in particular need this, because the half-yearly and annual rhythm means nobody builds a habit around them.
Reconcile monthly, not annually
Match what payroll deducted against what was deposited, every month, in the same week. A mismatch found in month two is a correction. The same mismatch found in month eleven is a year-end reconstruction that no one has time for.
Keep one register of applicability
For every state where an employee works, record whether professional tax applies, whether labour welfare fund applies, the frequency, the portal and the date. Review it whenever you open a location or a remote hire changes state. Our guide to running an HR audit sets out how to review this alongside the rest of the people function.
This is where the tooling question becomes real rather than theoretical. Statutory deadlines are downstream of operational data: attendance, leave, timesheets, approvals, exits. When those sit in separate systems, the payroll owner spends the first week of every month reassembling them, and the buffer disappears. Juntrax was built around that dependency, with attendance, leave, timesheets, and payroll on one platform, so the inputs to a statutory filing are closed before the filing window opens rather than during it. Our complete guide to HRMS payroll walks through what that integration looks like in practice, and the payroll tax guide for India covers the calculation layer beneath these deadlines.
A Note For Project-Driven Firms
If you run an IT consultancy, an engineering or MEP practice, a staffing firm, a legal practice or a design studio, your payroll calendar has a second set of dependencies that a generic compliance calendar will not mention.
Your salary cost is also your delivery cost. The same hours that determine whether a project made money determine what goes into the payroll run. When timesheet approval slips, three things break at once: the client invoice goes out late, the revenue recognition for the month is wrong, and the payroll inputs are unreliable. The statutory deadline is fixed on the 15th regardless.
Firms in the 25 to 150 employee range feel this most sharply, because they are large enough to have real compliance exposure across several states and small enough that payroll, billing, and project reporting often sit with the same two or three people. The realistic fix is not more discipline. It is shortening the chain between where hours are recorded and where money moves, so that closing timesheets closes the payroll inputs and the receivables position in the same step. Juntrax keeps that chain in one place, working alongside whatever you use for statutory books rather than replacing it.
For the underlying concepts, our glossary entries on statutory deductions and PF, ESI and gratuity are a useful reference to share with a new payroll hire.
Closing The Loop
The dates in this payroll compliance calendar are fixed. What varies between firms is how much room they leave themselves before each one.
The teams that never miss a deadline are not the ones with the best memory. They are the ones whose payroll inputs close early, whose state-level obligations sit in a register rather than in someone’s recollection, and whose reconciliation happens monthly instead of in a panic each March. Build the buffer into the process, and the calendar mostly takes care of itself.
For FY 2026-27 specifically, three things deserve a review before your next payroll run: the new form numbers under the Income-tax Rules, 2026, the wage base under the Code on Wages, and any state professional tax notification that moved a date you had memorised.
This article is a general reference for employers in India and is not tax or legal advice. Statutory due dates and rates change by notification. Verify the current position with the relevant authority or your professional adviser before relying on any date shown here.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is A Payroll Compliance Calendar?
A payroll compliance calendar is a dated schedule of every statutory payment, filing and certificate an employer owes across a financial year. In India, it typically covers provident fund, employees’ state insurance, tax deducted at source on salary, professional tax, labour welfare fund, bonus and gratuity, mapped to the April to March financial year rather than the calendar year.
What Are The Monthly Payroll Compliance Due Dates In India For FY 2026-27?
Tax deducted at source on salary must be deposited by the 7th of the following month. Provident fund contributions and the electronic challan cum return are due by the 15th. Employees’ state insurance contributions are also due by the 15th. Professional tax follows a state-specific date where it applies. Tax deducted in March is the exception, due by 30 April rather than 7 April.
Has Form 24Q Been Replaced For FY 2026-27?
Yes. For periods from 1 April 2026, the quarterly salary statement is Form No. 138, filed under Rule 219 of the Income-tax Rules, 2026 and covering deductions under section 392 of the Income-tax Act, 2025. Form 24Q remains correct only for statements relating to periods up to 31 March 2026, including corrections filed later.
When Is Form 16 Due For FY 2026-27?
The salary certificate for Tax Year 2026-27 is now Form No. 130 and is due by 15 June 2027, being 15 June of the financial year immediately following the tax year in which the income was paid and tax deducted. It is generated from the processed Q4 statement, so the 31 May 2027 filing is the real constraint.
When Are ESI Half-Yearly Returns Due?
The return of contribution is due within 42 days of the end of each contribution period under Regulation 26 of the ESI (General) Regulations, 1950. The April to September 2026 period falls due on 11 November 2026, and the October 2026 to March 2027 period on 12 May 2027. Many published calendars print 11 May for the second period, which does not match the 42-day calculation. Confirm the certification window on the ESIC employer portal.
Do The Labour Codes Change Payroll Due Dates?
Not directly. The due dates for provident fund, ESI, and tax deducted at source are unchanged. What the codes change is the wage base those contributions are calculated on, through the definition that requires wages to be at least half of total remuneration, along with gratuity eligibility for fixed-term employees and the timeline for settling dues on exit.
Which States Require Professional Tax And Labour Welfare Fund?
Professional tax applies in roughly twenty states and Puducherry, and not in Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand or Himachal Pradesh, among others. Labour welfare fund applies in around sixteen states and union territories. Both follow the employee’s place of work rather than the employer’s registered office, so a single firm can face different obligations across its locations. Verify current rates and dates on the relevant state portal, as these change by notification.
What Happens If A Provident Fund Deposit Is One Day Late?
There is no grace period. Interest under section 7Q accrues at 12% per annum from the day after the due date, and damages under section 14B can be levied on top, graded by the length of the delay. A single day’s interest is small, but repeated short delays across a year attract attention through EPFO’s monitoring.