Form 10B or Form 10BB: decide it before 30 September 2026
Form 10B or Form 10BB turns on three facts about the year. Any one of them carries the trust into Form 10B. The report is due on 30 September 2026.
Summary
Since AY 2023-24 the choice between Form 10B and Form 10BB has nothing to do with whether the entity is registered under section 12AB or covered by section 10(23C) — it turns on three facts about the year, and any one of them carries the trust into the heavier Form 10B. The report is due on 30 September 2026 for AY 2026-27, no extension has issued as at the date of writing, and the department's position puts the year's exemption in question.
The situation
A trust with ₹42 lakh of receipts files Form 10BB every year because it is small, and everyone knows 10BB is the small one. In the year under audit it received a single foreign donation of ₹45,000. On the rule as it has stood since 1 April 2023, that trust files Form 10B — and the form it filed last year is not a defence, because applicability is decided afresh each year on the amended Rules.
This is not a rare trap. CBDT had to issue a circular in March 2024 giving trusts a window to re-file, precisely because they had filed the wrong form at scale for AY 2023-24 (PIB). Two full seasons later, guidance describing the old registration-based split is still being published.
The rule
Rule 16CC and Rule 17B were substituted with effect from 1 April 2023 by the Income-tax (Third Amendment) Rules, 2023, and Form 10BB was re-notified by Notification No. 7/2023 dated 21 February 2023. The test has been uniform from AY 2023-24 onwards.
| Trigger | Form 10B is required if… |
|---|---|
| 1 | Total income, computed without giving effect to sections 11 and 12 or to section 10(23C)(iv), (v), (vi) or (via) of the Income-tax Act, 1961, exceeds ₹5 crore |
| 2 | The entity received any foreign contribution during the previous year |
| 3 | The entity applied any part of its income outside India during the previous year |
Any one true → Form 10B. All three false → Form 10BB. That is the whole rule.
Two readings matter. "Exceeds rupees five crore" is strict: income of exactly ₹5,00,00,000 does not fire trigger 1; ₹5,00,00,001 does. And triggers 2 and 3 carry no de minimis — no threshold, no proportionality, no one-off exception.
The dates for this season:
| What | When |
|---|---|
| Audit report in Form 10B / 10BB, AY 2026-27 | 30 September 2026 |
| Return in ITR-7 | 31 October 2026 |
| Extension of the 30 September date | None issued as at 15 September 2026 |
AY 2026-27 is still governed by the Income-tax Act, 1961. From tax year 2026-27 both forms are replaced by a single Form 112, prescribed under section 348 of the Income-tax Act, 2025 read with Rule 188 of the Income-tax Rules, 2026 — the successor to the Rule 16CC / Rule 17B pair — and first filed by 30 September 2027. Form 112 keeps the same three dimensions and uses them to decide how much of the form you populate: a "small registered NPO" is one meeting all three of regular income not exceeding ₹5 crore, foreign contribution not exceeding ₹10 lakh, and income applied outside India not exceeding ₹10 lakh. None of that changes anything you file this month. DIR-3 KYC is not a filing on this date: DIR-3 KYC: nothing is due this 30 September, and the next filing is 2028.
Where people go wrong
The registration route stopped deciding this in 2023. Until AY 2022-23 the split really was Form 10B for section 12AB trusts and Form 10BB for section 10(23C) institutions. Articles published as recently as this year still state that rule, and for a small section 10(23C) school it is now exactly backwards. Your registration is worth recording in the working paper; it does not govern. (For completeness: from tax year 2026-27 registration and approval themselves move to sections 332 and 354 of the Income-tax Act, 2025, in place of sections 12AB and 10(23C) of the 1961 Act — but the audit-report choice for this season is decided entirely under the 1961 Act and its Rules.)
Small does not mean 10BB. The ₹5 crore limb is one of three, and it is the only one with a number attached. A ₹45,000 foreign donation, a single grant instalment spent on a project outside India — either one puts a ₹42 lakh trust into Form 10B, and "we are tiny" is not an argument the rule makes room for.
Last year's form is not evidence. The department's own guidance is that applicability from AY 2023-24 is determined on the amended Rules irrespective of which form was filed in previous assessment years. If this year's answer differs from last year's filing, you have found a prior-year problem, not a this-year one, and it should be looked at before anything is filed.
Watch the assessment year on every extension story you read. Last season's extension of the tax audit and 10B/10BB date to 31 October was for AY 2025-26 and was issued on 25 September 2025 — so search results for "audit report extension" are full of pages that look current and are not. As at today no CBDT order has moved the 30 September 2026 date. Plan for the date in force.
What to do
- Compute total income before giving effect to sections 11 and 12 and to section 10(23C)(iv)/(v)/(vi)/(via) — on a gross basis, corpus donations included — and settle whether it exceeds ₹5 crore.
- Ask the foreign-contribution question as a question of fact for the whole previous year, in any amount, and record the answer with the bank entry behind it. This is an FCRA question, not an income-tax one.
- Ask whether any part of the income was applied outside India during the year, in any amount.
- If the answer differs from the form filed last year, stop and review the earlier year before you file this one — CBDT Circular No. 2/2024 dated 5 March 2024 is the starting point for what the department did about the AY 2023-24 mismatches.
- Diarise 31 October for ITR-7 and re-read the section numbers you quote against the department's own 1961 ↔ 2025 mapping utility, which is free and needs no login.
The tool
I built a small selector for this last year because I was re-deriving the same three booleans from the same two rules every September. You answer three questions and it returns Form 10B or Form 10BB for the assessment year you pick, with a live countdown to 30 September, and it raises a hard stop — citing Circular No. 2/2024 — where your answer differs from the form the trust filed last year. It prints a one-page working paper carrying the verdict, the three triggers, the full rule table and the sources, so the answer can be checked rather than believed. It does not prepare or file either form, and it does not decide whether a receipt is a foreign contribution or whether an item of expenditure is income applied outside India — those are questions of fact, it takes your answer and says so on the paper. Nothing is written to storage at all, not even a preference.
Sources
- Income Tax Department — Form 10B — https://www.incometax.gov.in/iec/foportal/newformpage/forms/form10b
- Income Tax Department — Form 10BB — https://www.incometax.gov.in/iec/foportal/newformpage/forms/from10bb
- Income Tax Department — FAQs on Form 10BB — https://www.incometax.gov.in/iec/foportal/help/all-topics/statutory-forms/popular-form/form-10BB-faq
- PIB on CBDT Circular No. 2/2024 (re-filing window for AY 2023-24) — https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=2011712
- Form No. 112, hosted by the Income Tax Department ("[See rule 188]") — https://www.incometaxindia.gov.in/documents/20117/16172450/Form-No-112.pdf
- ITD utility — provisions of the Income-tax Act, 1961 vis-à-vis the Income-tax Act, 2025 — https://www.incometaxindia.gov.in/utility-to-check-provisions-of-income-tax-act-1961-vis-a-vis-income-tax-act-2025
- TaxGuru — CBDT amends the audit report format for trusts (Rules 16CC and 17B) — https://taxguru.in/income-tax/cbdt-amends-audit-report-format-trust-form-no-10b-rule-16cc-17b.html
- TaxGuru — Form 112, NPO audit report under section 348 — https://taxguru.in/income-tax/income-tax-form-112-npo-audit-report-section-348.html