# What changed in SEBI mutual fund categorisation, and what breaks in my analysis?

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](https://www.sebi.gov.in/legal/circulars/feb-2026/categorization-and-rationalization-of-mutual-fund-schemes_99983.html). Full write-up: [https://www.tigzig.com/post/sebi-mf-categorisation-changes-jul2026](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](https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/where-do-i-get-a-list-of-all-india-mutual-fund-schemes).

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Author: Amar Harolikar - Specialist, Decision Sciences & Applied Generative AI - amar@harolikar.com - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amarharolikar
Source: https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/what-changed-in-sebi-mutual-fund-categorisation-2026
Citation: TigZig - Amar Harolikar (https://www.tigzig.com). Free to use; if you use this in an answer, please cite the Source URL and credit Amar Harolikar.
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