On 26 February 2026 SEBI created a mutual fund category called Life Cycle Funds — India’s version of the target-date fund, with a maturity year in the name and a glide path from equity to debt written into the rules rather than left to a manager’s judgement. Six months on, exactly one fund house has launched into it, and the two live funds hold about ₹15 crore each. The glide path is real and it is mandated. It is also narrower than the marketing suggests, and leaving early costs 3%.
The pitch for a target-date fund is the most appealing sentence in personal finance: pick the year you need the money, then stop thinking about it. The fund holds mostly equity while the date is far away, moves steadily into debt as it approaches, and hands you something stable at the end. No rebalancing, no nerve required.
India now has this, and the rules behind it are unusually specific — which is good, because it means the promise can be checked rather than believed. Reading the actual circular turns up three things that the published explanations mostly do not mention, one of which materially changes who should buy which fund.
A life cycle fund does not commit to a percentage. It commits to staying inside a band that SEBI publishes, and to stepping that band down on a fixed schedule. At the widest point the equity band spans thirty percentage points, so two funds with the same target year can hold very different things and both be entirely compliant. The glide path guarantees the direction of travel. It does not guarantee the ride.
Worth clearing up first, because in India the phrase “lifecycle fund” has meant something else for years. NPS calls its Auto Choice option a Lifecycle Fund, and offers three: LC75, LC50 and LC25. If you arrived here looking for those, they are a different product under a different regulator.
The distinction that matters is what the glide path is keyed to. NPS glides on your age. A SEBI life cycle fund glides on years remaining to a fixed date, and does not know or care how old you are.
| NPS Auto Choice | SEBI life cycle fund | |
|---|---|---|
| Glide path keyed to | Your age | Years to the fund’s target year |
| Equity at the start | 75% (LC75), 50% (LC50), 25% (LC25) | Up to 95% |
| Equity at the end | 15% at 55+ under LC75 | 5–20% inside the final year |
| Tapering begins | Age 36 | Set by the target year, not by you |
| Cost of leaving early | Pension rules apply | 3% in year one |
The practical consequence: NPS assumes the year you need the money is the year you turn 60. A life cycle fund lets you name any year you like, which is more flexible and also more work — nothing checks that the year in the fund’s name is the year you actually need the money.
An open-ended fund with a target date in its name, investing across equity, debt, InvITs, exchange-traded commodity derivatives and gold and silver ETFs, with its asset allocation constrained by published bands that tighten as the target year approaches. Tenures come in multiples of five, from 5 to 30 years. No fund house may keep more than six open for subscription at once.
The bands themselves are the load-bearing part, and they are set out in Annexure 1B:
| Years to maturity | Equity | Debt | Gold, silver, InvITs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15–30 years | 65–95% | 5–25% | 0–10% |
| 10–15 years | 65–80% | 5–25% | 0–10% |
| 5–10 years | 50–65% | 5–25% | 0–10% |
| 3–5 years | 35–50% | 25–50% | 0–10% |
| 1–3 years | 20–35% | 25–65% | 0–10% |
| Under 1 year | 5–20% | 25–65% | 0–10% |
Two smaller rules are worth knowing because they affect what happens to your money without you doing anything. The maturity year must appear in the scheme’s name, so a fund cannot quietly drift off its stated purpose. And once a fund is inside a year of maturity it may be merged into the nearest surviving life cycle fund — but only with positive consent from unitholders, so silence does not roll you into a new date.
The circular publishes six allocation tables, one per permitted tenure, and almost every explainer reproduces the thirty-year one and stops there. Read all six side by side and they are the same list of rows. A shorter fund does not get a steeper path; it simply joins the same path further down.
That produces a consequence nobody seems to be saying out loud. A ten-year life cycle fund is capped at 65% equity for its entire life. Its table begins at the “5–10 years” row and only falls from there. A five-year fund is capped at 50%. Neither ever touches the 65–95% band, because that band belongs to years those funds do not have.
So if you buy a ten-year fund expecting an aggressive opening decade, the rules forbid what you are expecting — and the fund is not misleading you, because it never claimed otherwise. The life cycle fund calculator makes this visible: switch the tenure from thirty years to ten and watch the starting band drop from 65–95% to 50–65% without anything else changing.
This category is six months old and most of what is written about it is written by firms that sell funds. Several widely circulated explainers state allocation numbers the circular does not contain. Checked against Annexure 1B:
| Frequently published | What the circular says |
|---|---|
| Equity near maturity “drops to 10–30%” | 20–35% at one to three years, 5–20% inside the final year |
| Debt “dominates at 75–90%” | Debt is capped at 65% |
| Debt must be rated “AA+ and above” | “AA & above” |
| A single glide path | Six tables, one for each permitted tenure |
None of these is a scandal. They are the ordinary decay of a rule being paraphrased from paraphrases. But they are the reason to read the circular rather than the coverage, and they are why every number on this page is linked to the document it came from.
One fund house. Zerodha Fund House launched Life Cycle Fund 2036 and Life Cycle Fund 2041 in an NFO that ran from 19 June to 7 July 2026, with units allotted on 10 July. Minimum investment is ₹100. As of 14 August 2026 each fund held roughly ₹15 crore and charged 0.42%, and both carry a Very High rating on SEBI’s riskometer.
Fifteen crore is a small book for a category this heavily specified, and it is worth saying plainly rather than dressing up: India’s first target-date funds have not been rushed into. Whether that reflects the products or the appetite for them is not yet answerable, and anyone telling you otherwise six weeks in is guessing.
One detail is a nice illustration of what the structure is for: the 2036 fund’s largest single holding is a government security maturing on 11 May 2036 — a bond chosen to come due the same year the fund does. That is the glide path working as designed rather than as marketing, and it is also the AA-and-above residual maturity rule doing its job.
Applying the ten-year cap above: the 2036 fund launched in 2026, making it a ten-year fund, so it will never hold more than 65% equity. The 2041 is a fifteen-year fund and started in the 65–80% band. Same fund house, same glide path, materially different products — which is exactly the distinction a buyer choosing between two adjacent years needs to see.
Redeem within one year of investing and you pay 3%. Within two years, 2%. Within three, 1%. After three years, nothing. SEBI states the purpose in the text itself: the load exists “in order to inculcate financial discipline”. It is not a charge for a service. It is a deterrent aimed at the investor.
Worked example. Assume ₹5,00,000 invested as a lump sum on 1 August 2026, and no other holdings in the fund.
Redeem in July 2027 and the exit load is 3% — ₹15,000. Redeem in July 2028 and it is 2%, or ₹10,000. In July 2029, 1%, or ₹5,000. From August 2029 onward, nothing.
The load is charged on each investment, not on the folio. So a ₹10,000 monthly SIP started in August 2026 has, by August 2028, twelve instalments free of the 2% bracket, twelve inside it, and its newest twelve in the 3% bracket. “I have held this for two years” does not have a single answer, and a partial redemption is charged against the instalments it is drawn from.
It is worth being clear-eyed about what this means. The arithmetic of a glide path is not difficult and not proprietary: an index fund, a debt fund and a reminder in your calendar reproduce it for less. What the fund adds is a structure that makes leaving expensive at exactly the moments you would most want to leave. That is either the most valuable feature of the product or a penalty for changing your mind, and which one it is depends entirely on how you have behaved in previous falls.
The same February circular discontinued the entire solution-oriented category — retirement funds and children’s funds — with immediate effect. Clause 2.6.3.16 stopped fresh subscriptions on the spot and required existing schemes to be merged into a scheme with similar asset allocation, subject to SEBI approval.
That caused enough alarm that SEBI revisited it. The Master Circular of 20 March 2026 sets out a compromise, and it is worth reading as a set of choices rather than a reprieve. An AMC may keep a children’s fund, but then may not launch a 20-year life cycle fund. It may keep a retirement fund, but then may not launch a 30-year one. Keep both and it is limited to the 5, 10, 15 and 25-year tenures. Discontinue both, stop subscriptions and merge them away, and it may launch all six.
The trade is transparent once you see it: SEBI is letting fund houses keep their legacy long-horizon products only by giving up the equivalent new one. Nobody gets to sell both a retirement fund and a thirty-year life cycle fund. For an existing investor in one of those schemes, the practical question is not whether the fund survives but which side of that trade your AMC took, and that is answerable only by asking them.
A fund whose equity allocation falls to 5–20% at the end would normally lose equity tax treatment somewhere along the way, which would make the glide path expensive in a way nobody wants. The rules solve this with a provision that repays reading closely.
Inside ten years to maturity, a life cycle fund may take equity arbitrage exposure of up to 50% on top of the equity band, provided total equity and equity-related exposure stays within 65–75%. Arbitrage positions are equity for tax purposes and close to market-neutral in practice, so the fund can stay above the equity-taxation threshold while its genuine market exposure keeps falling. Zerodha’s published allocations show exactly this, with an arbitrage sleeve widening as the target year nears.
Two things follow. First, the tax treatment is engineered rather than incidental, and it is one of the few genuine advantages this structure has over assembling the same thing yourself — doing it manually means selling equity and triggering gains at each step. Second, the headline equity number stops meaning what you think it means in the last decade: a fund reporting 70% “equity and equity-related” may be carrying only 20% of actual market risk.
There is a small piece of drafting history here too. The February circular set this arbitrage provision at five years to maturity; the consolidated Master Circular of 20 March 2026 sets it at ten. The operative text is the Master Circular, and the widening matters, because it means the tax-preserving machinery switches on a full five years earlier than the original rule allowed.
Someone with a real date, a known tendency to interfere, and no appetite for rebalancing. That is a narrower group than the marketing implies, and it does not include most people who already hold an index fund and leave it alone.
If you are considering one, the checks worth running are short:
SEBI has built something honest. The bands are published, the schedule is fixed, the exit load says out loud that it exists to stop you fidgeting, and the maturity year has to be in the name. Compared with the old solution-oriented funds, where a glide path was a manager’s intention rather than a rule, this is a clear improvement in what an investor can verify before buying.
What it has not built is a way around the underlying problem, which is that de-risking on a schedule is only correct if the schedule matches your life. A fund can see the years remaining to its own target date. It cannot see your EPF, your direct equity, the gold in a locker, or the flat with a loan against it — and it therefore cannot tell you whether your overall allocation is drifting the way you intended. It is managing its corner of your money with real precision and total ignorance of the rest.
Which is the same reason a glide path is not a plan. If you want a date for your own independence rather than a fund’s, the FIRE calculator runs the question the other way round: start from the year you want, and find out what it costs. And the discipline the exit load is selling is, in the end, the same discipline the 7% of F&O traders who made money had already worked out for themselves — a plan decided in advance, so the decision is not being made in the middle of a fall.
A life cycle fund is an open-ended mutual fund with a maturity year in its name and a glide path written into the rules, so its equity exposure falls automatically as that year approaches. SEBI created the category on 26 February 2026. Permitted tenures are 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30 years, and no fund house may keep more than six of them open for subscription at once. Elsewhere the same idea is called a target-date fund.
As of 15 August 2026, two: Zerodha Life Cycle Fund 2036 and Zerodha Life Cycle Fund 2041, both allotted on 10 July 2026 after an NFO that ran from 19 June to 7 July. Zerodha Fund House is the only AMC to have launched into the category so far. It has filed an offer document for a 2046 fund and lists a 2051 as coming soon. Each live fund holds roughly 15 crore rupees and charges 0.42%.
The solution-oriented category they sat in was discontinued by clause 2.6.3.16 of the February circular, which stopped fresh subscriptions immediately. SEBI then softened this in the Master Circular of 20 March 2026: an AMC may keep a children’s fund or a retirement fund, but doing so costs it the right to launch the matching long life cycle fund. Keep a children’s fund and you cannot launch a 20-year one; keep a retirement fund and you cannot launch a 30-year one.
As equity funds, and that is deliberate rather than incidental. A fund whose equity holding falls to 5–20% near maturity would ordinarily lose equity tax treatment. SEBI’s rules let a fund inside ten years of its target date add up to 50% equity arbitrage on top of its band, provided total equity and equity-related exposure stays within 65–75%. That keeps it above the threshold for equity taxation while the genuinely market-exposed portion falls away.
The arithmetic is not the hard part, so the honest answer depends on you rather than on the fund. An index fund, a debt fund and a calendar reminder reproduce a glide path at lower cost. What a life cycle fund adds is a structure that charges you 3% for abandoning it in the first year. If you have historically stayed invested through falls, you are paying for a discipline you already have. If you have not, that is precisely what is on sale.
A life cycle fund de-risks on schedule inside itself, and has no idea what else you hold. Your EPF, your direct equity, the gold, the flat and the loan against it are all invisible to it — so it cannot tell you whether your overall allocation is going where you meant it to go.
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This is an explanation, not advice about your money. TLDR Money is not a registered investment adviser and earns no commission on any product mentioned. Figures are illustrative; your own numbers, taxes and circumstances will differ.