Advance tax: four dates a year, and the reminder that stops the interest
Advance tax is the quietest of the dates India forgets. Nothing bounces, nothing lapses, no one calls. The cost arrives months later as interest on the return, by which time the dates are long gone. Four dates, written down once, are the whole fix.
Who it applies to
Anyone whose tax for the year, after tax already deducted at source, comes to more than ten thousand rupees. For a salaried person whose employer deducts correctly that is usually nobody; for anyone with freelance income, rent, interest, capital gains or a side business, it is usually everybody. Resident senior citizens with no income from a business or profession are exempt.
The four dates
- 15 June: at least 15 percent of the year's estimated tax.
- 15 September: at least 45 percent, cumulatively.
- 15 December: at least 75 percent, cumulatively.
- 15 March: the full 100 percent.
Each share is cumulative, so a payment that catches up in September covers June. Anyone on the presumptive schemes for small businesses and professionals pays the whole amount in one instalment by 15 March instead. These are the dates in the Income-tax Act; they do not move year to year the way the return deadline sometimes does, but check the current year's notices before you rely on any of them.
What a missed date costs
Interest, charged month by month, in two separate ways: one for paying an instalment short, one for finishing the year short. Neither is large on its own and both are paid at filing time, which is exactly why the dates get forgotten: the bill for missing them arrives with the return, not with the miss.
The estimate problem
The reason people put it off is that each instalment is a share of a number you do not know yet, the year's total tax. The practical answer is to estimate from last year in June, pay that share, and correct at each later date as the year becomes clearer. A rough instalment on time costs less than an exact one in March.
Setting it up once
In EasyDooo, Bills and dues on the Budget page has an advance tax template. It creates the four dues with their dates and a reminder ahead of each, so the daily reminder names it a few days before, in your own time zone. Mark one Paid and the payment is recorded in Budget against its category and what you paid from. Each year the dues roll forward on their own.