Why This Depends Entirely On What The ETF Actually Holds There is no single ETF tax rate. Treatment follows the underlying asset class the fund actually holds, equity, gold or silver, debt, or international, and each category has its own holding period thresholds and rates, several of which changed meaningfully through the July 2024 budget and subsequent amendments taking effect through FY 2025 to 2026. Equity ETFs Equity ETFs, tracking indices like the Nifty 50 or the Sensex

Last Reviewed and Updated: 17 Aug 2026 Tax loss harvesting means selling, or in mutual fund terms redeeming, units that are currently worth less than what you paid for them, specifically to realize that loss for tax purposes. Once realized, the loss can be set off against capital gains elsewhere in your portfolio, reducing the total gain you are taxed on for the year. It is not a strategy for exiting good investments. It is a way of putting a loss that already exists on paper

Last Reviewed and Updated: 17 Aug 2026 Until earlier this year, a Sovereign Gold Bond and a physical gold coin, both ultimately betting on the same gold price, could produce completely different tax bills on an identical gain, purely because of the wrapper the gold happened to sit inside. The Sovereign Gold Bond's fully tax free redemption was, for years, one of the more generous tax breaks available to any retail Indian investor. As of April 1, 2026, that generosity has been

Last Reviewed and Updated: 17 Aug 2026 Inheriting shares or mutual fund units feels, in the moment, like a transfer of ownership. For tax purposes, Indian law treats it as something closer to nothing having happened at all. The cost basis used to calculate capital gains when those shares are eventually sold does not reset to their value on the day of inheritance. It reaches back to whatever the original owner actually paid, sometimes decades earlier, long before the heir who

Last Reviewed and Updated: 17 Aug 2026 A father transfers shares worth Rs 20 lakh to his daughter. No money changes hands, no sale happens on any exchange, and yet that single transfer quietly raises questions governed by several different tax provisions, each with its own answer. Is the gift itself taxed. What happens, tax wise, years later when the daughter eventually sells those shares. And does the income those shares generate in the meantime actually belong to the daught