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SEBI Has Revised Mutual Fund Categorisation and Introduced a New Fund Type. The Major Changes, and What They Mean for MFPRO Users and Analysts.
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SEBI Has Revised Mutual Fund Categorisation and Introduced a New Fund Type. The Major Changes, and What They Mean for MFPRO Users and Analysts.

Published: July 30, 2026

Related toolsMFPRO - Mutual Fund Analytics•TREMOR - Macro Stress Signals•Quants Agent

SEBI has modified mutual fund categorization and introduced new fund type...sharing the major changes, what it means for Tigzig MF API users and analysts.

The circular came on 26 February 2026. Existing schemes have six months to comply, so by late August every fund house will have re-filed its schemes under the new categories.

The circular: Categorization and Rationalization of Mutual Fund Schemes

The circular explains the changes very nicely .. key points below:-

Key changes in the circular

  1. A brand new category called Life Cycle Funds. These are target date funds, e.g. Life Cycle Fund 2041. They start equity heavy and automatically shift toward debt as the maturity year approaches. Zerodha has already launched the first two.

  2. Solution Oriented schemes are discontinued. Children's funds and retirement funds stop taking new subscriptions and will be merged into other schemes.

  3. Sectoral and Thematic are now two separate categories, with portfolio overlap limits between them.

  4. Most debt categories are renamed. Short Duration becomes Short Term, Dynamic Bond becomes Dynamic Term Fund, and so on across the duration ladder.

  5. Fund names must match the category. A large cap fund has to be called Large Cap Fund, and words that hint at returns are not allowed in names. As I understand it using terms like 'Bluechip' and 'Opportunities' etc. in scheme name not allowed. Expect a wave of fund renames over the next month.

What the transition looks like in the AMFI data

We watch AMFI's daily NAV files closely at TigZig MFPRO, and the transition is already visible in the raw data. New fund filings started carrying the new category headers from 17 July. One fund launched as Multi Asset Allocation and was re-filed as a Life Cycle Fund within two weeks.

Analysts would need to be mindful that old and new category / sub-category names will coexist in the data for a while...as that can cause issues in analysis pipelines.

What this means for MFPRO users (Tool and API)

The change would be carried over the next few days and data dictionary and docs updated once done.

The category and sub-category fields

Full data dictionary on the docs site on MFPRO tigzig.com/mfpro. Some quick points regarding the category and sub-category fields. The counts below are as they stand today and are moving as new filings come in.

category

Raw category text from the AMFI header. About 65 distinct values accumulated over time. Modern: 'Equity Scheme - Large Cap Fund'. Old-style: single words like 'Income'. Prefer the clean fields below.

category_group

Raw field from AMFI. About 21 distinct values. For practical use, use the category_group_clean field below.

sub-category

About 52 distinct values. e.g. 'Large Cap Fund', 'Liquid Fund'...BLANK for ambiguous old-style schemes by design; those rows will not appear in sub-category filters.

category_group_clean

RECOMMENDED category field. Now exactly 4 values: Equity Scheme, Debt Scheme, Hybrid Scheme, Other Scheme. The update is done, and it went to four rather than the five I first expected, because Fund of Funds moved as well as Solution Oriented. Both of those now sit inside Other Scheme, and their schemes stay fully findable through the raw category group and the sub-category. Old-style names are mapped in deterministically (Income -> Debt, Growth -> Equity, Balanced -> Hybrid, etc.).