How to Identify LTCG-Eligible
Shares in Zerodha

If you've ever opened Zerodha Console before selling a stock and tried to figure out whether your gain will be taxed at 12.5% (LTCG) or 20% (STCG), you've probably noticed Console doesn't make this easy. Here's why — and exactly how to find the answer.

Where to check your holdings in Zerodha

1. 1 Log in to console.zerodha.com
2. 2 Go to Holdings — this lists every stock you currently own, with quantity and average buy price
3. 3 Notice what's missing: there's no column showing how many days each lot of shares has been held — only a single blended average price per stock

The problem: average price hides individual lot eligibility

Say you bought Reliance three times: 20 shares in January 2023, 20 more in September 2023, and another 20 in April 2024. Zerodha Console shows this as a single holding of 60 shares at one average price. But for tax purposes, those are three separate lots with three different holding periods.

India's Income Tax Act requires the First-In-First-Out (FIFO) method for equity — when you sell, the oldest shares you bought are considered sold first. So if you sell 20 shares today, it's the January 2023 lot that goes — and whether that's LTCG or STCG depends entirely on today's date relative to that specific purchase, not your blended average.

Step-by-step: identify LTCG-eligible shares manually

1. 1 Download your tradebook from Console → Reports → Tradebook for every financial year you've held the stock
2. 2 Filter every BUY and SELL row for the stock you're checking, and sort by date, oldest first
3. 3 Apply FIFO by hand: match each SELL against your oldest remaining BUY quantity first, working forward chronologically
4. 4 For your remaining (unsold) quantity, calculate the holding period of each BUY lot: today's date minus that lot's purchase date
5. 5 Any lot held more than 365 days is LTCG-eligible; anything else is still STCG

This works fine for one stock with two or three purchases. It gets unmanageable fast once you're tracking dozens of stocks, multiple demat accounts, or years of SIP-style periodic buying — which is exactly where most manual spreadsheets start producing wrong numbers.

The faster way: LotSight's Holdings Tracker

Upload your Zerodha tradebook to LotSight and every one of your open positions is automatically split into its individual FIFO lots, each tagged LTCG or STCG based on today's date — no manual date math required.

• Every holding classified as LTCG or STCG at a glance, live
• Multi-lot purchases correctly split and matched using FIFO — including buys on NSE and sells on BSE
• The LTCG Optimizer shows holdings approaching their 365-day mark in the next 30 or 60 days, so you can plan ahead instead of missing the window
• Works across multiple demat accounts as one unified view