The GSTR-9C due date for FY 2025-26 is 31 December 2026 — the same day the annual return, GSTR-9, falls due. For a business whose aggregate turnover crossed ₹5 crore in the year to 31 March 2026, that single date closes the GST year. The date itself is the easy part. GSTR-9C is a reconciliation statement, and preparing it means tying your audited financial statements back to the figures you reported across twelve months of returns — which is where a year’s worth of small differences tend to surface all at once.
What the GSTR-9C due date for FY 2025-26 actually asks of you
Through the year you file GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B — the detailed outward-supply statement and the monthly summary where you declare and pay. Those are period returns: each one describes a month or a quarter. The annual return, GSTR-9, consolidates all of them into one view of the financial year. GSTR-9C goes a step further. It is a reconciliation statement: it sets your audited annual accounts beside that annual return and asks you to account for every difference between the two. You file it only after GSTR-9 is filed, and the two carry the same due date — 31 December 2026 for the year ended 31 March 2026.
Who has to file GSTR-9C — and who only files GSTR-9
The two returns have different thresholds, and it is worth being clear which one applies to you. GSTR-9, the annual return, is mandatory for a registered taxpayer whose aggregate turnover for the year was more than ₹2 crore; at or below that figure, filing it is optional. GSTR-9C, the reconciliation statement, is required on top of GSTR-9 where aggregate turnover exceeded ₹5 crore. “Aggregate turnover” is measured across your PAN — every GSTIN registered under the same PAN is added together, including exempt and nil-rated supplies — so a group with several state registrations can cross the line even when no single registration looks large. These thresholds are set by notification; confirm the current figures on the GST portal before you rely on them.
GSTR-9C is now self-certified — which is not the same as simpler
GSTR-9C once required certification by a chartered accountant or cost accountant. That requirement has been removed, and the statement is now self-certified by the taxpayer. The reconciliation itself did not get any smaller. What changed is who signs it: the responsibility for getting the numbers to tie now sits squarely with the business, not with an external certifier. In practice that raises the bar on your own records rather than lowering it, because there is no longer a second set of eyes built into the process before the statement goes in.
What GSTR-9C reconciles
Three reconciliations sit at the heart of the statement. The first is turnover: the revenue in your audited financial statements against the turnover you declared across your GST returns for the year. The second is tax: the output tax your accounts imply against the tax you actually declared and paid. The third is input tax credit: the credit in your books against the credit claimed in your returns. Each line that does not match needs a reason — a timing difference, an amendment made in a later month, a credit note, an entry booked in one system but not the other. The statement is, in effect, a structured record of those explanations, and an unexplained gap is exactly what draws a query.
Why the reconciliation is the work, not the filing
The filing takes an afternoon. The reconciliation can take far longer, because it surfaces twelve months of small decisions at once: an invoice reported in GSTR-1 but missed in GSTR-3B, credit claimed and later reversed, a sales figure in the accounts that never made it into a return. These are the same differences a GST officer would look for, which is the real reason to run the reconciliation yourself and on your own timetable — it is far better to find a mismatch in November than to have it found for you afterwards. Where the reconciliation shows additional tax is due, that shortfall is settled in cash rather than by adjusting credit, so the cost of a gap is real money, not a paperwork fix.
Start the reconciliation now, not in December
With the due date on 31 December, it is tempting to treat this as a December job. It is not. The businesses that file cleanly are the ones that reconcile their books to their returns month by month through the year, so the annual statement is a confirmation rather than an investigation. If FY 2025-26 was not reconciled as it went, the sensible move now is to begin the turnover, tax and ITC reconciliations in good time — with weeks in hand before 31 December — so there is room to trace and correct differences instead of filing around them. That is the difference between closing a GST year and carrying it forward as a question someone will eventually ask.