ITR Filing — HUF

Filing basis under the Income-tax Act, 1961. An HUF is a distinct assessee and cannot use ITR-1 (Sahaj), which is available only to individuals.

Applicable form: ITR-2 where the HUF has no business/professional income (salary is not applicable to an HUF, but house property, capital gains, and other-source income are); ITR-3 where the HUF carries on business or profession outside the presumptive schemes; or ITR-4 (Sugam) where the HUF opts for presumptive taxation under Section 44AD, 44ADA, or 44AE and total income does not exceed ₹50 lakh. The return is verified and signed by the Karta (or, where the Karta cannot act, by an adult member).

Clubbing under Section 64(2): where a member converts individual property into HUF property, or transfers it to the HUF without adequate consideration, the income arising from that property continues to be taxed in the hands of the individual member who made the transfer/conversion, not the HUF — a common area of misreporting.

Due dates, AY 2026-27: 31 July 2026 where ITR-2 applies (no business income); 31 August 2026 for ITR-3/ITR-4 filings not subject to tax audit; 31 October 2026 where the HUF's accounts require a Section 44AB tax audit (audit report due 30 September 2026).

Sources cross-checked: taxguru.in, tax2win.in, and taxgarden.in on Section 64(2) clubbing and HUF ITR-form selection; ITR-2/ITR-3 eligibility per zerodha.com/varsity and taxbuddy.com; AY 2026-27 due-date schedule corroborated against cleartax.in and pkcindia.com industry guidance (7-8 Sep 2026).

Income tax return filing for a Hindu Undivided Family covers the return of the HUF as a separate taxable entity under Section 2(31) of the Income-tax Act 1961. The HUF's income — the ancestral property, the business and the investments held in the HUF's name — is assessed in the HUF's hands, taxed at the slab rates, and the return is filed in ITR-2 under Section 139(1) with the PAN of the HUF. The HUF is a distinct assessee, and its income is separate from the members'.

The HUF's return is the annual declaration of the family's joint income, and the entity's reality is what the assessment tests. The income must genuinely be the HUF's — the corpus, the assets and the accounts in the HUF's name — and the clubbing provisions of Section 64 pull back the income that was never genuinely the HUF's. The return is where the family's structure meets the department's reading of it.

The cost of a mismanaged HUF return is the clubbing and the assessment risk: the income treated as the HUF's without the records, the clubbing under Section 64 into the members' hands, the double taxation of the income that was never cleanly the entity's. The HUF that runs real records keeps its separate assessment.

This service is for HUFs and their kartas. We review the HUF's corpus, the assets and the accounts, compute the income under the Act with the deductions and the exemptions, prepare and file the return in ITR-2 under Section 139(1), manage the advance tax and the assessments, and coordinate with the members' returns so the family's income is taxed once, in the right entity.