The last date to claim input tax credit for FY 2025-26 is 30 November 2026, and it is one of the few GST deadlines that takes something away permanently if you miss it. Under section 16(4) of the CGST Act, a registered person cannot take input tax credit on any invoice or debit note after “the thirtieth day of November following the end of the financial year to which such invoice or debit note pertains,” or after you furnish the annual return for that year, whichever is earlier. FY 2025-26 ended on 31 March 2026, so that November date is 30 November 2026 — a Monday. Credit you have not claimed by then does not roll over. It lapses.
What the last date to claim input tax credit for FY 2025-26 actually covers
Three separate year-end jobs share this one date, and it is easy to remember the first and forget the other two.
The first is the obvious one: claiming the credit itself. Any GST you paid on a purchase during FY 2025-26 but never took into your returns — an invoice that sat unbooked, a credit that was held back pending a dispute, a reverse-charge liability paid but never claimed — has to be taken into a GST return by 30 November 2026 or it is gone.
The second is credit notes. Under section 34, a credit note for a FY 2025-26 supply — a return, a discount, a cancellation — must be declared in a return no later than the same 30 November cut-off. Miss it and you cannot reduce your output tax for that sale: you will have paid GST on money you ultimately did not collect.
The third is correcting your own outward supplies. The proviso to section 37(3) lets you rectify errors and omissions in the GSTR-1 details you filed through the year — a wrong GSTIN, a missed invoice, a figure keyed incorrectly — but only up to the 30 November deadline. After that, the year’s outward record is frozen as filed, and your customers’ input tax credit is frozen with it.
Why 30 November, and which return is really your last one
The 30 November date is fixed in the statute, but you claim credit and declare notes through a return, so the practical question is which return still reaches the deadline. For a monthly filer, the GSTR-3B for October 2026 is due on 20 November 2026 (a Friday). The next one, November’s GSTR-3B, is not filed until 20 December — well after the cut-off. So your October 2026 GSTR-3B, filed by 20 November, is the last monthly return in which FY 2025-26 input tax credit can be claimed. Treat 20 November as the working deadline and 30 November as the outer wall behind it.
If you file quarterly under QRMP, the arithmetic is different: your July–September 2026 quarterly GSTR-3B (due 22 or 24 October depending on your state) is the last quarterly return that lands before 30 November, because the October–December quarter is not filed until January. Confirm your own filing cycle before you rely on a date.
One more trap sits inside the statute’s own wording: “or furnishing of the relevant annual return, whichever is earlier.” GSTR-9 for FY 2025-26 is itself due 31 December 2026, so for most businesses the 30 November return date bites first. But if you file your annual return early — before 30 November — the window for claiming credit and fixing that year’s records closes on the day you file it, not on the 30th. File GSTR-9 last, not first.
Unclaimed input tax credit is not a timing difference you can catch up on next year. On 1 December it stops being working capital and becomes a cost you have already paid and can no longer recover. The only cheap time to find it is now.
What you actually lose if you miss it
The amounts hide in ordinary places. A supplier’s invoice that reached accounts late and never made it into a return. Credit deliberately parked because the goods or the paperwork were in question, and then forgotten once the question was resolved. A reverse-charge payment made correctly but never claimed back. Each of these is real money you are entitled to — and each one quietly expires on 30 November 2026 if it is not in a return by then. For a business running on thin margins, a few lakhs of lapsed credit is the difference between a profitable quarter and a flat one, and it is invisible until someone reconciles the year.
The credit-note side cuts the other way. A FY 2025-26 sale that was returned or discounted, where the credit note was never declared, leaves you having paid output tax you were entitled to reverse. That, too, is settled on 30 November.
The year-end ITC check to run now
Keep it mechanical, and do it against the whole financial year, not just the last month. Line up your purchase register for all of FY 2025-26 against the input tax credit you actually claimed in your returns, and against your auto-drafted GSTR-2B statements. Pull out every invoice where credit is sitting unclaimed, and decide — eligible or not — before the return that carries it is filed. Do the same sweep for credit notes you have issued but not declared, and for any GSTR-1 details that need correcting for the year. Then claim, declare and correct what belongs to FY 2025-26 in your October GSTR-3B and GSTR-1, comfortably before 30 November.
This is exactly the kind of year-end reconciliation that is straightforward when the books are current and painful when they are not. If pulling a clean FY 2025-26 ITC position together before the deadline is one more thing than the next few weeks can hold, it is the sort of routine an outsourced finance team runs in the background. Talk to our team and the 30 November deadline stops being a scramble.