Old IFSC to new IFSC: every merged bank, and the date its codes actually stopped working

Search for when an old bank's IFSC codes stopped working and you will mostly be given the amalgamation date — 1 April 2020 for six of them. That date is correct, and it is the wrong answer to the question.

The amalgamation is a legal event. Switching off the old branch codes is an operational one, and the acquiring banks did it more than a year later, on dates they set themselves and announced separately. Canara Bank put it plainly in a notice to former Syndicate customers:

This is to inform that after merger of Syndicate Bank with Canara Bank, all eSyndicate IFSC codes starting with SYNB have been changed. All the IFSC starting with SYNB will be disabled W.E.F 01.07.2021.

Canara Bank, notice to customers. The page at canarabank.com/IFSC.html now returns 404 — this is the archived copy.

Syndicate Bank ceased to exist on 1 April 2020. Its codes kept working until 1 July 2021 — fifteen months later.

Every merger, with both dates

The "codes disabled" column is the date the acquiring bank itself gave. The last column is measured: it is the last release of the official RBI branch list in which those codes were still present. We hold every release that shipped a branch list since February 2016 — 135 of them, which reduce to 132 distinct builds once byte-identical rebuilds are removed.

The six 2020 amalgamation dates come from the Government of India schemes notified in the Gazette on 4 March 2020, confirmed by the RBI's own notification of 30 March 2020, which states that the notifications "shall come into force on April 1, 2020". Vijaya and Dena come from the scheme of 2 January 2019; Lakshmi Vilas, the SBI associates and ING Vysya each from their own separate schemes. The disable dates come from each acquiring bank's own customer notice.

The official list did not keep up

This is the part that has practical consequences, and we have not seen it written anywhere else.

Compare the last two columns. For six of the banks, the RBI branch list was still publishing the old codes after the acquiring bank had already switched them off:

• Syndicate and Allahabad codes were disabled on 1 July 2021. They were still in the release published on 12 July 2021 — 11 days later. That release carried 4,344 Syndicate codes and 3,225 Allahabad codes that no longer worked.
• Vijaya and Dena codes were disabled on the same day, and carried the same 11-day overhang — another 2,301 Vijaya and 1,791 Dena codes in that release.
• Oriental Bank of Commerce and United Bank codes were disabled on 1 April 2021. They were still in the release published on 14 April 2021 — 13 days later.

For two others it went the other way: Andhra Bank and Corporation Bank codes vanished from the list on 15 September 2021, a fortnight before Union Bank's stated cut-off of 30 September. Lakshmi Vilas codes left the list on 25 January 2022, a month before DBS said they would stop being valid.

Neither direction is a scandal. Publication schedules and operational cut-overs are run by different people. But it does mean something specific for anyone using an IFSC lookup site: for those windows, the authoritative file said a code was fine when it was not, and every site built on that file said the same thing. Being in the RBI list is not the same as working.

What replaced what

The prefix changes are straightforward. The branch part usually does not survive.

The last column is the honest one, and the reason for each figure is different.

For Oriental Bank of Commerce, Corporation Bank and Lakshmi Vilas we can name the replacement for nearly every code, because old-to-new mapping files for exactly those three still exist on old releases of the dataset — 5,442 exact pairs in total. United Bank's 2,037 resolved codes come from somewhere else: an exact address match inside Punjab National Bank, which works unusually well there because the address strings were carried across verbatim. For Syndicate we use Canara's renumbering pattern, but only where a second signal — the branch name, or an identical address — confirms it.

For Allahabad Bank, Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank we can name almost nothing. No mapping file for them was ever shipped in a release, and the renumbering leaves no derivable trail in the public data. Indian Bank does publish its own erstwhile-Allahabad conversion on its website, which is linked below and is the authoritative source for those branches — it is simply not in a form we can ingest. Anyone showing you a bulk ALLA-to-IDIB conversion derived from the public dataset is guessing.

The banks' own notices are disappearing

The RBI required banks to move to the .bank.in domain, and in the migration a lot of merger-era guidance was lost. Checked on 4 September 2026:

• Canara Bank — canarabank.com/IFSC.html, the page quoted at the top of this article, now redirects to canarabank.bank.in/IFSC.html and returns 404. It survives only on the Internet Archive.
• Union Bank of India — the amalgamation microsite carrying the Andhra and Corporation cut-off date returns HTTP 503. Union Bank's live amalgamation page still links to it.
• Punjab National Bank — its amalgamation page is still live but carries no IFSC mapping. The Oriental Bank of Commerce old-to-new file survives inside release 1.5.7 of the dataset; we found no equivalent United Bank file anywhere.
• Indian Bank and Bank of Baroda — notices still live.

This is why the date on this page is worth writing down. In a few years the primary evidence for it may only exist in archives.

How to find your own new code

1. Paste the old code into the search box on this site. If it is one of the 15,319 codes we can resolve, you will get the replacement together with its branch name and address, plus the evidence we used. If it is one we cannot resolve, you will be told that instead of being given a guess.
2. Confirm it with the bank before you send money. Under the RBI's NEFT rules, credit is released on the account number, so the IFSC decides where the instruction is routed. This is not a field to be approximately right about.
3. If we cannot name a replacement, use the acquiring bank's branch locator. It knows which branch took over; a third-party file does not.

Not every retired code is a merger

Worth saying, because it is where most write-ups on this subject go wrong. Of the 46,719 codes in our archive that are no longer in the RBI list, only about two thirds are merger-related. The other 15,712 are ordinary branch closures and renumberings — including nearly 4,000 State Bank of India codes and around 1,700 Bank of India codes, neither of which involved any merger at all.

If a page tells you a withdrawn code "was merged into" something without saying which bank merged, it is filling in a reason it does not have.