ITAT and CESTAT Case Status on eCourtsIndia: Search Every Tax Tribunal Bench

Last updated: 23 September 2026. Bench tables rebuilt from the live index (ITAT and CESTAT counts are several times larger than when this guide first ran), dead bench codes removed from links, and the tribunal CNR generator added.

To check an ITAT or CESTAT case status online, open eCourtsIndia search, pick the bench by its court code (for example ITADLIT for Delhi ITAT appeals or CESMUCU for Mumbai CESTAT customs matters), then search the party name or paste the 16-character CNR. The Income Tax Appellate Tribunal and the Customs, Excise and Service Tax Appellate Tribunal sit in the same free index as the Supreme Court, the High Courts and the district courts, and the search box reads inside the full text of uploaded orders. As of 23 September 2026 the index holds about 3 lakh ITAT records across all 30 bench cities and 1.26 lakh+ CESTAT records across all nine zonal benches. This guide gives you every bench link, the case types and four ways to find a tax appeal.

Key takeaways

• All 30 ITAT bench cities are searchable on ecourtsindia.com/search, with 2,99,836 records as of 23 September 2026. Plain income tax appeals (the IT stream) account for 2,80,532 of them.
• Delhi and Mumbai alone hold 1,19,051 ITAT records, about 40 percent of the total.
• All nine CESTAT zonal benches, including Mumbai, Kolkata and Hyderabad, now carry records: 1,26,571 in total, split into customs, excise and service tax streams.
• Each bench has one court code per appeal type. The links below include only codes that actually hold records, so none of them opens an empty page.
• Have only the tribunal’s own appeal or diary number? The ITAT and CESTAT CNR generators convert it into a searchable CNR.

Where ITAT and CESTAT sit on eCourtsIndia

ITAT and CESTAT are two of 18 tribunal and commission types in the eCourtsIndia index, which together hold 44 lakh+ tribunal records. The same search covers the company-law forums in our NCLT and NCLAT guide, the new GST Appellate Tribunal, the debt recovery forums, SAT, CAT, NGT and the consumer commissions. Our India courts and eCourts access directory lists every forum in one place.

For tax work this means one search instead of several portals. A direct tax appeal can be followed from ITAT to the High Court and on to the Supreme Court, and a customs or excise dispute from CESTAT along the same path, without switching systems or learning a new numbering scheme at each step.

What ITAT and CESTAT are

The Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT) is the second appellate authority for direct tax in India, and the Customs, Excise and Service Tax Appellate Tribunal (CESTAT) is the appellate forum for customs, central excise and legacy service tax disputes. ITAT hears appeals against orders of the Commissioner of Income Tax (Appeals), and its findings of fact are final; only a substantial question of law travels on to the High Court. It is often called the mother tribunal of India because it was the country’s first.

Direct tax law is itself in transition. The Income-tax Act, 2025 has replaced the Income-tax Act, 1961, and section numbers did not carry over between the two, so older appeals cite the 1961 Act while newer assessments will cite the 2025 Act. Both texts are on IndiaCode, and when you search ITAT orders by section it pays to try both numberings.

CESTAT hears appeals on customs duty, central excise and service tax, plus smaller anti-dumping and central sales tax streams. GST has taken over most indirect tax going forward, but a large legacy caseload still moves through CESTAT, and customs disputes continue to arrive. In plain terms, a dispute over a direct tax assessment may end up at ITAT, and a fight over a customs or excise demand may end up at CESTAT.

Tribunal	Hears appeals on	Benches	Goes next to
ITAT	Income tax, and legacy wealth tax, black money and other direct tax appeals	30 bench cities	High Court, on a question of law
CESTAT	Customs, central excise, service tax, anti-dumping, central sales tax	9 zonal benches	High Court or Supreme Court, depending on the issue
GSTAT	GST disputes	State benches across India	See the GSTAT guide

All 30 ITAT benches, and how to open each one

eCourtsIndia now carries records from all 30 ITAT bench cities, from Delhi and Mumbai down to Varanasi and Dehradun. Each bench has one court code per appeal type: IT for income tax appeals, CO for cross objections, SA for stay applications, MA for miscellaneous applications, SS for search and seizure, TP for transfer pricing, IX for international taxation, and a few rarer ones. The first count column is the main appeal stream; the second is every stream at that bench. Codes were re-verified against the live court-code list on 23 September 2026.

Bench	Main code	Income tax appeals	All ITAT records	Open the bench
Delhi	ITADLIT	59,698	62,003	Search Delhi
Mumbai	ITAMBIT	55,204	57,048	Search Mumbai
Chennai	ITACNIT	21,979	23,633	Search Chennai
Kolkata	ITAKLIT	20,315	21,574	Search Kolkata
Bangalore	ITABLIT	16,646	17,535	Search Bangalore
Pune	ITAPUIT	15,327	16,458	Search Pune
Ahmedabad	ITAADIT	12,355	13,512	Search Ahmedabad
Hyderabad	ITAHYIT	10,428	11,269	Search Hyderabad
Jaipur	ITAJPIT	7,385	7,984	Search Jaipur
Chandigarh	ITACHIT	6,200	6,963	Search Chandigarh
Kochi (Cochin)	ITAKCIT	6,094	6,866	Search Kochi
Indore	ITAIDIT	5,764	6,454	Search Indore
Surat	ITASRIT	4,988	6,007	Search Surat
Visakhapatnam	ITAVZIT	3,891	4,394	Search Visakhapatnam
Cuttack	ITACTIT	3,510	4,071	Search Cuttack
Nagpur	ITANGIT	3,523	3,859	Search Nagpur
Rajkot	ITARJIT	3,434	3,804	Search Rajkot
Amritsar	ITAASIT	3,410	3,537	Search Amritsar
Raipur	ITARPIT	2,922	3,284	Search Raipur
Patna	ITAPTIT	3,012	3,118	Search Patna
Lucknow	ITALKIT	2,518	2,870	Search Lucknow
Agra	ITAAGIT	2,301	2,482	Search Agra
Ranchi	ITARNIT	1,916	2,333	Search Ranchi
Jodhpur	ITAJDIT	2,038	2,170	Search Jodhpur
Panaji	ITAPJIT	1,402	1,656	Search Panaji
Guwahati	ITAGUIT	1,363	1,613	Search Guwahati
Jabalpur	ITAJBIT	1,062	1,245	Search Jabalpur
Allahabad	ITAALIT	800	906	Search Allahabad
Dehradun	ITADDIT	619	727	Search Dehradun
Varanasi	ITAVNIT	428	461	Search Varanasi

The concentration is familiar. Delhi (62,003) and Mumbai (57,048) sit far ahead of the rest, because the largest assessments and the heaviest corporate tax disputes are concentrated in the two biggest commercial centres. Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore and Pune form the next tier, and a long tail of benches handles regional caseloads. Each link above opens a bench filtered and ready, so you can scan its pending appeals in one click.

A word on how much this has grown. When the first edition of this guide ran in June 2026, the index held 62,575 ITAT records and 5,128 CESTAT records, and three CESTAT benches had no data at all. The same benches now hold several times that, which is why the tables here are so different from the earlier version. The counts will keep moving, so use them to judge the relative size of a bench, and read the live figure off the search page whenever the exact number matters, for example in a research note or a court filing.

The ITAT case types you will see

ITAT uses its own vocabulary of case-type codes, and a wrong code returns nothing, so it helps to know the main ones. The table adds up each appeal-type stream across all 30 benches.

Case type	Code	What it is	Indexed records
Income Tax Appeal	ITA	The ordinary appeal against a CIT(A) order	2,80,532
Miscellaneous Application	MA	Rectification and other applications in a decided or pending appeal	6,924
Stay Application	SA	A request to stay recovery of a disputed demand while the appeal is heard	4,521
Cross Objection	XOBJ	The other side’s objections filed within an appeal	3,855
Search and Seizure Appeal	ITSSA	Appeals arising from search assessments	2,162
Transfer Pricing Appeal	ITTPA	Related-party pricing disputes, usually cross-border	719
International Taxation Appeal	ITITA	Treaty and non-resident taxation appeals	385
Wealth Tax Appeal	WTA	Legacy appeals under the Wealth Tax Act	369
Black Money Appeal	BMA	Appeals under the Black Money Act, 2015	365

Transfer pricing and international taxation appeals are usually the most complex matters a bench hears, often involving multinational groups and large sums, and they are full-text searchable alongside everyday appeals. To make sense of where any matter stands, the case status dictionary explains all 71 status codes, and the case type encyclopedia covers the wider vocabulary. The always-current code list lives in the API enum reference.

All nine CESTAT benches

CESTAT sits at nine zonal benches: Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Allahabad, Hyderabad and Chandigarh. All nine now carry records on eCourtsIndia. Each bench has up to five court codes, one each for customs (CU), excise (EX), service tax (SV), anti-dumping (AD) and central sales tax (CT). Anti-dumping and central sales tax records exist only at some benches, and the links below leave out any code that is empty.

Bench	Customs	Excise	Service tax	All CESTAT records	Open the bench
Delhi	11,151	13,542	6,194	31,756	Search Delhi
Mumbai	12,135	13,042	4,622	29,799	Search Mumbai
Ahmedabad	3,879	7,803	3,240	15,399	Search Ahmedabad
Chennai	3,416	3,285	4,070	11,006	Search Chennai
Kolkata	3,185	3,855	3,166	10,206	Search Kolkata
Bangalore	2,137	2,543	4,415	9,525	Search Bangalore
Allahabad	1,319	2,710	2,799	7,003	Search Allahabad
Chandigarh	1,180	3,140	2,043	6,529	Search Chandigarh
Hyderabad	1,131	1,688	2,529	5,348	Search Hyderabad

Delhi and Mumbai are again the two heavyweights, together holding about half of the CESTAT records on the platform, with Mumbai carrying the largest customs stream of any bench, which fits its role as one of the country’s major port cities. Excise is the biggest stream overall, followed by customs and then service tax. Most of the Delhi records are already disposed, which makes the bench useful for research into how a line of dispute has been decided over time. If you need the live total, read it straight off the search page rather than relying on a number in a blog post.

How to check an ITAT or CESTAT case status

Open eCourtsIndia search, narrow to the bench with its court code, then search by party name or CNR. There are four reliable routes, depending on what you already have.

1. By party name. Type the assessee or company name into the free-text box and add the bench filter, for example ecourtsindia.com/search?cc=ITAMBIT for Mumbai income tax appeals. The index matches names on both sides, so it works whether your client is the appellant or the respondent, and in tax matters the department is very often one of the parties. To trace one name across every bench, drop the filter or use the litigant search; our litigant search guide shows how to handle spelling variants.

2. By CNR. Every ITAT and CESTAT matter on eCourtsIndia carries a 16-character CNR. It starts with the three-letter tribunal prefix, then the bench and the appeal type (so ITADLIT for a Delhi income tax appeal or CESDLCU for a Delhi customs matter), then a five-digit number and the year. Paste it into the search and you land on that case. Our guide to the CNR number decoded explains each character.

3. From the tribunal’s own number. If you have an ITA number from a notice or the ITAT website, or a CESTAT diary number, open the ITAT CNR generator or the CESTAT CNR generator, pick the bench and type, enter the number and year, and copy the CNR it builds. The tribunal CNR explainer publishes every bench and type code if you want to build CNRs in bulk.

4. By bench, then filter. To browse, open a bench with its cc= link and narrow by case type, status and filing year in the sidebar. This is how tax counsel scan every pending transfer pricing appeal at a bench, or every service tax matter at a CESTAT zone. For every filter and URL parameter, keep the eCourtsIndia search guide open in another tab.

Reading orders and keeping a matter on watch

On a case page you get the order sheet and, where uploaded, the full text of each order. For ITAT, where the reasoning in a transfer pricing or international tax order can run to many pages, full-text access is the difference between knowing a case was decided and knowing how. The free-text box searches inside that text, so you can find every order that turns on a particular section, doctrine or argument, which is how a tax researcher builds a line of authority.

To stay on top of a hearing without checking daily, add the appeal to tracking and switch on WhatsApp and email alerts: tracking is Rs 5 per case per month and each alert Rs 0.50, and our case alerts guide walks through the setup. The AI Clerk can summarise a long order for Rs 2, and the eCourtsIndia Chrome extension shows tomorrow’s listings and updates while you work in the browser. Prices are on the pricing page; searching stays free.

Who this helps

Chartered accountants and tax counsel can look up every appeal for a client across benches in one search and organise the matters client by client. Companies facing a transfer pricing or customs dispute can see where their own matter stands without logging into a separate tribunal portal. In-house finance and legal teams can fold direct and indirect tax exposure into the rest of their case research, or pull it into their own systems through the eCourtsIndia API (23 endpoints, Rs 200 of free credits on signup), the workflow in legal due diligence on the eCourtsIndia API.

Individual taxpayers can see where an appeal stands without chasing it through several systems, and if they need representation the verified advocate directory lists bar-card verified lawyers. Journalists and researchers tracing how the tribunals treat a recurring issue can do it in one query, and students of tax law get a clean, full-text dataset. For disputes under the new GST regime, continue with our GSTAT guide.

Frequently Asked Questions