80C Deductions
Mutual funds, stocks, NPS, PPF, gold, and complete tax planning — data-driven guides to build long-term wealth and minimise your tax outgo.
Best ELSS Funds for FY 2025-26: Tax Saving with Equity Returns — ELSS gives 80C benefit with 3-year lock-in — shorter than PPF, NPS, or NSC. Here are the top 5 ELSS funds ranked by consistent 5 and 10-year performance.
Section 80E Deduction 2026: Full Interest Deduction on Education Loans, No Upper Limit — Section 80E lets you deduct the entire interest paid on an education loan — no cap, unlike 80C's ₹1.5 lakh ceiling. But it's old-regime only, runs for a maximum of 8 years, and only covers loans from banks or notified institutions.
Section 80G Deduction 2026: How Much You Can Actually Claim on Donations — Section 80G donations get 100% or 50% deduction depending on the fund, and most are capped at 10% of your adjusted income. But the deduction is old-regime only, cash above ₹2,000 gets zero benefit, and a missing Form 10BE can void your claim even with a valid receipt.
Section 80TTA vs 80TTB 2026: Savings & FD Interest Deduction Explained — Section 80TTA gives non-seniors ₹10,000 off savings account interest alone — FD interest gets nothing. Section 80TTB gives seniors ₹50,000 covering FD and RD interest too. Both vanish completely under the new tax regime.
Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana 2026: Tax Benefits, 80C Deductions, and Whether It Beats PPF for Your Daughter — Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana pays 8.2% a year — the highest among government-backed small savings schemes — and every rupee of interest and maturity value is tax-free. But the account can only be opened for a girl child under 10, the money is locked longer than PPF, and the Section 80C deduction it offers isn't automatically extra if you're already maxing out the ₹1.5 lakh limit elsewhere.
Section 80GG Deduction 2026: How to Claim Rent Paid Even Without HRA — Every guide to house rent tax breaks assumes you get HRA in your salary slip. Freelancers, consultants, and salaried employees whose CTC has no HRA component don't — and most never claim the deduction they're actually entitled to. Section 80GG fills that gap, but only under the old regime, only with a form most people have never heard of, and only up to a cap that surprises most first-time claimants.
Section 80DDB Deduction 2026: Tax Relief on Medical Treatment for Specified Critical Illnesses — Cancer, Parkinson's, chronic renal failure, and a short list of other specified diseases qualify for a deduction of up to ₹1,00,000 on treatment costs — but only if you're filing under the old tax regime, and only with a specialist's certificate in the right format. Here's exactly which diseases qualify under Rule 11DD, how the deduction amount is capped, and the certification step that trips up most people who try to claim it.
Section 10(10D) in 2026: The ₹5 Lakh Premium Rule That Decides If Your Life Insurance Payout Is Tax-Free — Ask most people whether their life insurance payout is tax-free and the answer is an automatic yes — but Budget 2023 quietly ended that for high-premium traditional policies bought after April 1, 2023. The death benefit is untouched. The maturity benefit isn't, and the ₹5 lakh threshold that decides it applies across every policy you hold, not just one.
HUF Tax Benefits 2026: How a Hindu Undivided Family Can Legally Cut Your Tax Bill — A Hindu Undivided Family isn't just a legal fiction from a law textbook — it's a separate taxable entity with its own PAN, its own basic exemption limit, and its own Section 80C bucket. Ancestral property or a family business can make it a genuine second layer of tax planning, but getting the corpus wrong invites a clubbing-of-income notice instead of a deduction.- Section 80DD and 80U Deduction 2026: ₹75,000 to ₹1.25 Lakh for Disability — and the New Rule That Can Get Your Claim Rejected — Sections 80DD and 80U hand out one of the few flat, no-bills-required deductions left in the old tax regime — up to ₹1.25 lakh whether you actually spent that much or not. But from this filing season, skipping one new step on your disability certificate can get a genuinely valid claim disallowed anyway.
- Section 80CCH Explained: The Agniveer Tax Deduction That Survives Even the New Tax Regime — Almost every deduction disappears the moment you pick the new tax regime — 80CCH is one of the rare exceptions. Agniveers under the Agnipath scheme can claim it either way, though what exactly gets deducted changes depending on which regime you're in, and most explainers gloss over that split.
Section 80CCC Pension Fund Deduction 2026: The ₹1.5 Lakh Cap You Already Share With 80C — Section 80CCC lets you deduct premiums paid toward an LIC or private-insurer pension plan — but it isn't an extra ₹1.5 lakh on top of 80C. It shares the same combined ceiling, applies only under the old regime, and the pension you eventually receive is fully taxable.
ULIP Maturity Tax Rules 2026: How the ₹2.5 Lakh Premium Proviso Taxes Your Policy as Capital Gains — Most ULIP buyers assume Section 10(10D) makes the maturity payout fully tax-free, the way it always has. Since February 2021, a separate and much lower cap applies to ULIPs specifically — and breaching it doesn't just make the payout taxable, it changes which tax rules apply to it entirely.