Form 12BB Investment Declaration, now Form No. 124 for Indian Employers

Form 12BB served for a decade, so there are thousands of copies of it. It stopped existing on 1 April 2026.

The Income-tax Act 1961 was repealed that day and the rules made under the new Act renumbered nearly everything an employer touches. The declaration form became Form No. 124 under rule 205. The obligation to collect it moved from section 192(2D) to section 392(5)(b). The deductions people call 80C now sit in Chapter VIII-A and B, as sections 123, 124, 130 and 131. We checked the notified rules directly: the string 12BB appears in them zero times.

One field on the new form is worth knowing about before you send it out. There is now a line for your relationship with the landlord, which the old form did not have. Renting from a parent or a spouse has always been allowed and has always attracted attention; what is new is that the answer is given up front, in writing, over a signature. The employee's email and phone are new too, which sounds trivial until you are chasing a declaration.

The annexures are named too, which the old form did not do. A rent agreement, documents for the leave travel claim, a loan agreement, and proof of the deductions. That removes the argument about what counts as evidence, which used to be settled differently by every employer.

One thing to settle before you collect anything: which regime each employee is on. The default regime allows no house rent allowance exemption and none of these deductions, so the form changes no tax for those people. Our HRA exemption calculator works out what the allowance is actually worth once you know, and the labour codes readiness kit covers the rest of what changed this year.