SEBI's 26 February 2026 circular on categorization and rationalization of mutual fund schemes changed five things, with a six-month compliance window for existing schemes:
- A new category: Life Cycle Funds - target-date funds (for example "Life Cycle Fund 2041") that start equity-heavy and shift toward debt as the maturity year approaches.
- Solution Oriented schemes are discontinued - children's and retirement funds stop taking new subscriptions and get merged into other schemes.
- Sectoral and Thematic become two separate categories, with portfolio overlap limits between them.
- Most debt categories are renamed - Short Duration becomes Short Term, Dynamic Bond becomes Dynamic Term Fund, and so on across the duration ladder.
- Fund names must match the category, and words hinting at returns are not allowed - so terms like "Bluechip" or "Opportunities" in a scheme name go, which means a wave of fund renames.
Now the part that matters if you work with the data, and it is the reason this page exists. Old and new category and sub-category names COEXIST in the AMFI feed, and they still do. In the scheme master for 14 October 2026, 4 active schemes were filed under the old "Dynamic Bond" label and 156 under the new "Dynamic Term Fund". Nothing errors. A pipeline that groups or filters by category name will silently split one category across two labels, or drop schemes whose label moved - and the totals will still look plausible. The transition is already visible in the raw data: new filings began carrying the new category headers from 17 July 2026, and at least one fund launched under one category was re-filed as a Life Cycle Fund within two weeks.
What to do about it. Do not key your analysis on a single raw category string across the transition window. Map old and new labels to a stable bucket of your own, or use a feed that exposes both: MFPRO keeps the exact category text as filed by AMFI on every scheme so you can always filter on the raw value, while a cleaned top-level view rolls everything into four buckets (Equity, Debt, Hybrid and Others, with Life Cycle sitting in Others). Expect scheme names to change too, so a name is a poor join key right now - use the scheme code or ISIN.
Circular: sebi.gov.in. Full write-up: https://www.tigzig.com/post/sebi-mf-categorisation-changes-jul2026. The scheme-level data to work with: https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/where-do-i-get-a-list-of-all-india-mutual-fund-schemes.
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