Form 16A Is Now Form 131, and 26AS Is Form 168

A certificate arrives from a client and the header says Form 131. Or you go looking for Form 26AS and the portal offers you Form 168. Or a deduction that used to say 194J now cites Section 393(1) [Table Sl. No. 6(iii).D(b)], which does not appear in any rate chart you have ever read.

Nothing has gone wrong. The Income-tax Act 2025 renumbered the sections and renamed the forms, and the rates and thresholds underneath them did not move at all. This page is the mapping — which old thing became which new thing, when it starts applying to you, and one widely-repeated claim about it that is simply not true.

The forms that were renamed

The provisions behind them moved too. The consolidated statement was issued under Section 285BB read with Rule 114-I; it is now Section 510 read with Rule 245. The certificate obligation sat in Section 203 with Rules 31 and 37D; it is now Section 395(4) with Rule 215.

Where the 194-series went

Every non-salary TDS section collapsed into a single section — Section 393 — with the old sections becoming rows in a table. A deduction is now identified by a Serial No. reference into that table rather than by a section number of its own. Section 393(1) covers residents; 393(2) covers non-residents.

For most Indian freelancers only two rows matter. Professional fees — the 194J(b) deduction that most consulting, design and development invoices attract — becomes 393(1) Sl. 6(iii).D(b). Contract work under 194C becomes 393(1) Sl. 6(i).

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Rates and thresholds are unchanged. This is a renumbering, not a rate revision — nothing you owe, and nothing your clients withhold, changes because of it.

The 4-digit payment codes that do not exist

Here is the part worth having read this page for. Search for the new-Act reference for professional fees and you will find several well-trafficked sites telling you it is payment code 1027 — with 1026 for technical services, and 1023 or 1024 for contractor payments, out of a range running 1001 to 1092.

We have checked this twice against the primary source, in July and again in August 2026, and rejected the blog-sourced codes both times. They are not in the statute and they are not in the official help material. They appear to have propagated from one secondary write-up into several others, which is how most of the confusion in this area gets made.

The practical consequence: if a client’s accounts team asks you which payment code to quote, the honest answer is that there isn’t one to quote — they cite Section 393(1) and the Table Serial No. If CBDT notifies codes later, they will appear in the table above, because that table is generated from the same data our TDS parser uses rather than typed into this page.

What you should actually do about it

Very little, and that is the point. Three things are worth doing once:

• Check the year before you panic. A certificate for FY 2025-26 that says Form 16A and 194J is correct. A certificate for income earned from 1 April 2026 that says Form 131 and Section 393(1) is also correct. Both will be in circulation at the same time for at least a year.
• Do not re-key your old records. Deductions that happened under the old Act stay described the way they happened. There is no retrospective renaming to apply to your own books.
• Expect your reconciliation to see both formats. Any tool or spreadsheet you use to match deductions against invoices needs to recognise a 194-series sectionand a Section 393 Serial No. reference as the same underlying thing.

If a deduction is missing rather than merely relabelled, that is a different problem with a different remedy — start with why TDS goes missing from 26AS. And if you are new to any of this, what it means when a client deducts TDS is the place to begin, in either vocabulary.