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. During the transition, old and new category and sub-category names COEXIST in the AMFI feed. 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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