Tax Regime Comparison Tool (India)

Choosing between old and new tax regime is a high-value decision for salaried professionals. This tool helps you compare both regimes using salary, deductions, and rebate logic so you can choose the regime that minimizes annual tax outflow for your current profile.

The choice is really a trade: the old regime lets you shrink taxable income with deductions — 80C investments, health insurance under 80D, HRA exemption, home-loan interest — while the new regime offers lower slab rates, a larger standard deduction, and a more generous rebate, but takes most deduction doors away. Which side wins is pure arithmetic on your specific numbers, and the answer changes at different income levels even for the same deduction habits. That is why this page asks for your actual deduction amounts instead of offering a rule of thumb.

One habit worth building: run this comparison at declaration time and again before filing. Deductions people plan in April (a full 80C, rent receipts for HRA) do not always materialize by March, and a regime chosen on optimistic assumptions can quietly become the wrong one.

Take the defaults: ₹15 lakh salary with ₹1.5 lakh in 80C, ₹25,000 in 80D, ₹1.2 lakh of HRA exemption, and ₹30,000 of other deductions. That is a fairly disciplined deduction profile — ₹3.75 lakh trimmed off taxable income including the standard deduction — yet the new regime still wins: ₹97,500 against ₹1,56,000, a saving of ₹58,500 a year. With no deductions at all, the gap widens to ₹1,59,900.

So where is the crossover? Using this same engine, the old regime only pulls ahead at a ₹15 lakh salary once combined deductions (beyond its ₹50,000 standard deduction) exceed roughly ₹5.4 lakh — territory usually reached only with a substantial HRA exemption in a metro or large home-loan interest. At ₹25 lakh, the bar rises to around ₹8 lakh. And at ₹12 lakh, the comparison is not close: the new regime’s rebate takes the bill to zero while the old regime, even fully loaded with the default deduction bundle, still owes ₹80,600.

Both regimes use slab-wise marginal tax computation. Old regime applies standard deduction plus eligible deduction buckets before slab tax. New regime applies its configured standard deduction and slab rates. Cess and rebate checks are applied after base slab tax to derive final payable tax.

The deduction inputs are capped where the law caps them — 80C at ₹1.5 lakh and the 80D field at the standard individual limit — so overtyping a larger number will not flatter the old regime. HRA exemption is taken as you enter it because the exempt amount depends on your rent, salary structure, and city; compute it first with the HRA calculator and paste the result here. The comparison covers salary income only — capital gains are taxed separately under their own rules regardless of regime, so they belong in the capital gains calculator, not in this salary field.