Filing Season 2026: The 12-Point Checklist Salaried Employees Miss.

Every July, salaried professionals rush through their income tax filing thinking it’s a five-minute job. Download Form 16, upload to the portal, verify, done. Except the refund never matches expectations, and nobody can figure out why.

The reason is almost always missed deductions or incorrect assumptions. Here’s what slips through the cracks year after year.

Most employees forget to claim HRA exemption correctly when they’ve changed cities mid-year. Leave encashment taxation varies depending on whether you received it during service or at retirement. Interest on home loans has separate limits under Section 24 and Section 80EE that people routinely confuse. Employer NPS contributions under Section 80CCD(2) sit outside the 1.5 lakh ceiling but rarely get claimed separately.

Then there are the basics that still trip people up not reconciling Form 26AS with actual TDS deducted, ignoring interest income from savings accounts that crosses the 10,000 threshold, skipping the standard deduction update, not declaring capital gains from mutual fund redemptions made during the year, and forgetting that fixed deposit interest is taxable in the year it accrues, not when it pays out.

Switching between old and new tax regimes without actually running the numbers for your specific salary structure is perhaps the most expensive mistake of all. The better regime depends entirely on your deduction profile, and guessing costs real money.

Before you file this year, run your actual numbers through the Income Tax Calculator on HRTailor.AI. It compares both regimes against your real salary structure — so you file with clarity, not assumptions.