Your trading year starts in April
FY26 means the year ending March 2026. Label it, or spend every April reconciling two calendars.
Most trading software is built on a January-to-December calendar. Every Indian tax conversation runs from 1 April to 31 March.
That mismatch is small until the day you sit down with a CA, at which point it is the only thing that matters.
The shape of the Indian year
Four quarters, starting in April. Advance-tax discussions are pinned to those quarters, and broker tax statements are produced on the same basis.
FY26 runs 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026 — named for the year in which it ends.
Label the year on every chart
Write FY26, not 2026, and say what it means in a tooltip. A reader used to calendar years will otherwise assume January, and they will be wrong by a quarter in both directions.
Quarters are for grouping, not for computing tax
A quarter chip in a journal helps you review. It is not an advance-tax calculator, and a green financial year on a heatmap does not mean your figures agree with the broker statement — reconcile before anything is filed.
| Label | Period it covers | Commonly written as |
|---|---|---|
| FY25 | 1 Apr 2024 – 31 Mar 2025 | FY 2024-25 |
| FY26 | 1 Apr 2025 – 31 Mar 2026 | FY 2025-26 |
| FY27 | 1 Apr 2026 – 31 Mar 2027 | FY 2026-27 |
The financial year is named for the calendar year in which it ends.
Key takeaways
- Default Indian reviews to 1 April – 31 March.
- Label the financial year by the calendar year it ends in.
- Quarter chips are review tools, not tax computations.
Where these numbers come from
Not advice, not a call. NiyataBook is a personal trading journal, not a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst. Everything above looks backwards at trades that already closed. What happened in a book does not promise what happens next, and F&O can take a year’s savings in a week.