AFT Case Status on eCourtsIndia: How to Search Armed Forces Tribunal Cases

Last updated: 23 September 2026.

To check an AFT case status, open the Armed Forces Tribunal on eCourtsIndia search and type the applicant’s name or paste the 16-character CNR. The platform holds 40,000+ decided AFT matters, each with the judgment text attached, so you can read how the tribunal actually decided a pension, disability or promotion dispute and search inside that reasoning, not just the case header. One thing to know before you start: on eCourtsIndia every AFT record currently sits under the Principal Bench code, AFTDL, so the reliable way in is that one link plus a name or CNR, not a regional bench filter. This guide explains why, shows the routes that work, and covers how to follow a matter once you have found it.

Key takeaways

• The Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT) is searchable on ecourtsindia.com/search. Every indexed record sits under the Principal Bench code AFTDL.
• AFT is the court for the service matters of soldiers, sailors and airmen, set up under the Armed Forces Tribunal Act, 2007.
• 40,000+ decided matters are indexed, each carrying the judgment text.
• The regional bench codes (Chandigarh, Lucknow, Kolkata and the rest) exist in the court list but hold no records yet, so search by name or CNR under AFTDL.
• Have only the AFT case number? The AFT CNR generator builds the CNR. Searching is free, with no login and no paid ranking.

Where the AFT fits on eCourtsIndia

The forum that decides the service disputes of serving personnel and veterans sits on eCourtsIndia alongside the Supreme Court, the High Courts, the district courts and the other tribunals. Civilian government employees take the same kind of pay, pension and promotion disputes to a different forum, covered in our CAT case status guide, and the environmental court is covered in our NGT guide. The AFT matters because it touches a group that ordinary legal databases almost always miss, the men and women of the armed forces and their families, whose pension, disability and service claims run into the tens of thousands.

The AFT collection here is deep and, importantly, decided. Every matter indexed is disposed, and because the tribunal issues reasoned judgments, the judgment text is attached. That means a veteran, a serving officer or their lawyer can read how the tribunal has treated a claim just like theirs, rather than starting from scratch. The Union of India is the respondent in almost every case, and our Ministry Litigation Index shows how that plays out for the Ministry of Defence across every forum. For every other court and tribunal, start from our India courts and eCourts access directory.

What the Armed Forces Tribunal is

The Armed Forces Tribunal is the special court that decides service and disciplinary disputes of personnel governed by the Army, Navy and Air Force Acts, and hears appeals against court martial verdicts. It was created under the Armed Forces Tribunal Act, 2007. Its work splits into two halves. On the service side it decides original applications about pay, pension, disability benefits, promotion, seniority and conditions of service. On the disciplinary side it hears appeals against the findings and sentences of courts martial. The respondent is almost always the Union of India and the defence establishment.

The AFT sits as a Principal Bench in New Delhi and a set of regional benches across the country. On eCourtsIndia, however, the records do not yet carry their regional bench: all of them are filed under the Principal Bench code, as the next section explains, so a search on that one code covers every indexed AFT matter.

How AFT records are organised on eCourtsIndia

The live court-code list has twelve AFT codes: AFTDL for the Principal Bench in New Delhi, ten regional bench codes (Chandigarh, Lucknow, Kolkata, Guwahati, Jaipur, Jabalpur, Kochi, Mumbai, Chennai and Srinagar) and a general AFT orders code. When we checked on 23 September 2026, all 40,000+ indexed AFT matters sat under AFTDL. The ten regional codes returned no records at all, and neither did the general code.

In practice that means two things. First, a regional bench link would show you an empty page, so we have removed them from this guide rather than send you nowhere. Second, a matter heard at, say, the Lucknow or Chandigarh bench is still on the platform, but you reach it through the Principal Bench code, by name or by CNR. Typing a city name into the search box only finds judgments that mention that city in their text, which is not the same as a bench filter, so treat it as a rough pointer at best.

AFT code	What it covers	Indexed matters	Open on eCourtsIndia
AFTDL	Principal Bench, New Delhi, and on eCourtsIndia every indexed AFT matter	40,000+	Open AFT search
AFTCH, AFTLK, AFTKO, AFTGW, AFTJP, AFTJB, AFTKU, AFTMU, AFTCO, AFTSR	Regional benches at Chandigarh, Lucknow, Kolkata, Guwahati, Jaipur, Jabalpur, Kochi, Mumbai, Chennai and Srinagar	No records yet	Search under AFTDL instead

We have flagged the bench mapping to our data team. When regional bench records are split out, the bench links will come back to this page. Until then, one search covers the whole tribunal, which for most readers is simpler anyway.

How to check an AFT case status

To check an AFT case status, open eCourtsIndia search with the AFT code AFTDL, then search by the name or the CNR. There are three reliable routes, depending on what you already know.

1. By name. If you know the applicant, open AFT search and type the name into the free text box. Personnel are often listed with rank and service number, so a surname plus a rank or service number usually finds the matter. To trace a name across every court and tribunal at once, drop the AFT filter and search the name alone.

2. By CNR. Every AFT matter carries a 16 character CNR that never changes, even if the case is renumbered. An AFT CNR on eCourtsIndia begins with the court code, AFTDL, followed by the case type letters, the running number and the year. Paste the CNR into the search and you land on that exact matter. If you are not sure how to read the code, our guide on the CNR number decoded walks through each character.

If you only have the AFT filing or registration number, the tribunal CNR generator for AFT turns the bench, case type, number and year into the 16-character CNR that eCourtsIndia uses, so you can open the case directly. Our explainer on how eCourtsIndia mints a tribunal CNR walks through the format for all 14 supported tribunals. One caveat for AFT: because indexed records sit under AFTDL, a CNR generated for a regional bench may not match yet. If it returns nothing, search the applicant’s name under AFT search instead.

3. By tribunal, then filter. If you want to browse rather than look up one matter, open AFT search and use the sidebar to narrow by case type, status and filing year. This is the route a lawyer or a researcher takes when scanning all the matters of a particular kind, say disability pension claims filed in a given year. For a complete tour of the filters and query operators, our eCourtsIndia search guide is the reference to keep open in another tab, and the litigant search guide is the route for tracing one name across every court at once.

The AFT matters you will see

The AFT record is built around service claims, and a few subjects dominate. The table below lists the main ones you will meet.

Matter type	What it is
Original Application, service matters	The core claim on pay, pension, benefits or conditions of service, the most common kind of matter
Pension and retirement benefits	Claims about grant of pension, family pension and other retirement dues, a very large share of the docket
Disability pension	Claims for disability pension by personnel invalided out or injured in service
Promotion, rank and seniority	Disputes over selection, promotion and grant of substantive rank
Appeal against court martial	Challenges to the findings and sentences of a court martial

The pattern is telling. Pension, disability and promotion claims fill most of the docket, which is why full text access matters so much here. For the full vocabulary across every court, see our case type encyclopedia, and to make sense of where a matter stands, the case status dictionary explains every status code in plain English.

Reading orders and judgments

Search is only the first step. Once you are on a case, eCourtsIndia gives you the case record and the full text of the tribunal’s judgment where it has been uploaded. Because the AFT matters indexed here are decided, that judgment text is attached to the record, and it is what makes this collection so useful. For a service dispute, where the finding on entitlement, the rate of disability pension or the reading of a service rule is the whole point, full text access is the difference between knowing a case was decided and knowing how it was decided. The free text box searches inside that judgment text, so you can find every matter where a particular rule, benefit or kind of claim comes up. That portfolio style view, following an issue across many cases at once, is the same workflow we cover for legal teams in our piece on legal due diligence on the eCourtsIndia API.

Who this helps

The people who get the most out of this are veterans, serving personnel and the lawyers who act for them. A veteran chasing a disability pension can read how the tribunal decided identical claims. A lawyer preparing a promotion or seniority matter can pull every relevant judgment before filing. Ex-servicemen’s associations that help members with their dues can point to the ruling that fits.

On the other side, the defence establishment and its legal branches can see how a line of claims has been decided across benches. Researchers studying military service law, and journalists covering how the country treats its soldiers after service, have a clean, full text dataset to work from. This is what we mean by putting the public record in a form a normal person can actually use.

Once you have found an AFT matter, you do not need to keep checking it by hand. eCourtsIndia can track the case for Rs 5 a month and send a WhatsApp or email alert when a new order, listing or status change lands, at Rs 0.50 per alert, with an AI summary of any order for Rs 2 (see pricing). The same case opens on the Android app, the iOS app and through the eCourtsIndia Chrome extension, and if you need someone to appear for you, the verified advocate directory lists practitioners by court. Teams that follow hundreds of matters can pull the same records through the eCourtsIndia API (23 endpoints, Rs 200 of free credits on signup) or plug an AI assistant into the eCourtsIndia MCP server.

Following an AFT matter after the judgment

Because the indexed AFT matters are decided, the next step for many readers is not the hearing but what comes after: implementation of a pension order, a review, or a further appeal. Tracking the case keeps you alerted if anything new is added to the record, and if the matter moves to the Supreme Court or a High Court, the same account follows it there.

Bookmark AFT search. When regional bench records are split out, the bench links will return to this guide.

Frequently Asked Questions