Mutual fund capital gains tax from your CAS statement

Why estimate tax from the statement?

A capital-gains statement from a registrar tells you what you already realized. It does not tell you what selling today would cost, how much of this year's ₹1.25 lakh equity exemption is still unused, or which units are long-term yet. Those answers need the same FIFO lots the registrar uses, every fund's tax treatment, and today's NAV.

The Tax & actions tab on the Portfolio page puts those together for an imported CAS. It needs a free account and a detailed statement.

Where to find it

Import a CAS on the Portfolio page and open the third tab, Tax & actions. It stacks these cards:

1. Your action plan, when there are at least two steps to order.
2. LTCG harvesting — FY 2026-27, for equity holdings.
3. What you can redeem today, splitting value into "Free to redeem", "Inside exit-load window" and "Locked in".
4. What your portfolio costs to hold, with "Fees this year" and "Average expense ratio".
5. What your Regular plans cost, shown only when you hold Regular plans.
6. Estimated capital gains tax, the per-fund table.

How the estimate works

Each folio's transactions are matched into lots oldest first. Every lot is then bucketed short-term or long-term by how long it has been held, under the fund's own treatment:

The card has a slab menu labelled "Your income-tax slab (debt & non-equity short-term)". Until you pick one it assumes 30% and says so in a chip. Your choice is saved to your account, and the same setting appears under Preferences in Settings.

Two rules make the totals portfolio-wide rather than a sum of per-fund figures. The ₹1.25 lakh exemption is pooled across equity funds, once per financial year. And a short-term loss in one fund is set against the most expensive gain elsewhere in the same year, which the law allows; a long-term loss is set only against long-term gains.

A worked example

The investor is hypothetical; funds and NAVs are real, as of 15 October 2026. From January 2021 they ran a ₹5,000 monthly SIP in each of four Direct Growth equity funds, redeemed ₹1.5 lakh from HDFC Mid Cap Fund on 10 March 2025, and invested ₹2 lakh in HDFC Corporate Bond Fund on 15 June 2023. Leaving out the realized short-term column, which is zero throughout, the table would read:

The debt row's gain is all short-term, because the units were bought after 1 April 2023 and so are taxed at the slab rate however long they are held. The small short-term losses come from the last twelve months of SIP instalments, which together are worth less today than they cost.

Realized · est. tax reads ₹0. The ₹76,486 realized in FY 2024-25 sat inside that year's exemption.

Unrealized · est. tax reads ₹47.60K at the assumed 30% slab. The working: equity LTCG of ₹4,10,392 less the ₹1.25 lakh exemption leaves ₹2,85,392, taxed at 12.5% to about ₹35,674. The ₹8,681 of equity short-term losses goes against the dearest gain, the debt fund's slab-rate gain, leaving ₹39,764 taxed at 30%, about ₹11,929. At a 20% slab the total falls to ₹43.63K. The unrealized figure is what selling everything today would add to this year's bill.

The harvest card

LTCG harvesting — FY 2026-27 works out how much of this year's exemption is unused. Here none was used, so ₹1.25 lakh is free. It then picks the units to sell and rebuy, choosing holdings with the most gain per rupee sold. It only uses units held over a year, outside any exit-load window and outside any lock-in.

For this portfolio it suggests 1,496.634 units of HDFC Mid Cap Fund (sale value ₹3,31,615, gain ₹1,15,130) and 225.266 units of Kotak Flexi Cap Fund (₹20,810, gain ₹9,870). That lands exactly on ₹1,25,000. The headline, "Future tax saved by harvesting now", reads ₹15.63K: 12.5% of the gain that would otherwise be taxed on a later sale. Gain harvesting across several years shows how the saving compounds.

The redeem card explains the timing limit. The last year of HDFC Mid Cap SIP units, ₹59,562 of value, is still inside its 1% one-year exit load. The next slice comes free on 11 November 2026.

What the tab does not do

• No surcharge, cess or STT. The figures are estimates of the base tax only.
• No indexation, surcharge or cess. Debt units bought before 1 April 2023 and held over 24 months are counted as long-term at 12.5%, the rate for sales since 23 July 2024; the older indexed 20% rate is not modelled.
• No carry-forward. A loss from an earlier year is not set against this year's gains, and gains on equity bought before February 2018 are not grandfathered.
• No filing. Use your registrar's capital-gains statement for the return. Export CSV on the card gives the same figures as a spreadsheet.

The rules themselves are set out in how mutual funds are taxed, with the LTCG and STCG definitions in the glossary. For how FIFO decides which units a sale uses, see how SIP redemptions are taxed. None of this is tax advice.