Which of these actually pays more after tax?

Because the three treatments are far apart. On the defaults, at a 30% slab, a 9.25% bond keeps 6.48% and a 6.5% arbitrage fund keeps 6.21%, because equity treatment taxes at 12.5% above an annual exemption rather than at 30% on everything.

A reader comparing 9.25% with 6.5% would not look twice. After tax the gap closes to a quarter of a percentage point, and it inverts on a smaller amount: the ₹1.25 lakh exemption is a fixed sum, so on ₹3 lakh the whole arbitrage gain falls inside it and keeps the full 6.5%, ahead of the bond. Change the slab to 0% and the ordering reverses again.

At your slab rate, whatever the holding period, with no indexation, for units bought on or after 1 April 2023. The old three-year long-term treatment at 20% with indexation is gone for those units.

A great many Indian articles and calculators still show the old regime, and it flatters debt funds in every comparison they appear in. What debt funds retain is deferral: the tax is not due until you redeem, so the money compounds gross in the meantime. Over a long holding that is worth real money, and it is a much smaller advantage than indexation was.

It buys a stock in the cash market and simultaneously sells the same stock in the futures market, locking in the small price difference between them. The economic return behaves like a short-term deposit, but because more than 65% of the portfolio is in equity the fund qualifies for equity taxation. That is the entire appeal for a higher-rate taxpayer: a deposit-like return taxed at 12.5% instead of 30%. The return is not fixed and it depends on market conditions, which is the risk you are taking for the tax treatment.

It is the single most important input on the page. At a 0% slab, the highest headline rate simply wins, because nothing is taken away. At 30%, roughly a third of the interest on every slab-taxed row disappears while the equity-taxed row loses far less. The instruments do not change; your position does. Anyone quoting post-tax comparisons without asking your slab is not making a comparison.

Bank deposits are insured to ₹5 lakh per depositor per bank, principal and interest together, through the DICGC. Nothing else on this list has any equivalent. A company deposit paying more than a bank is being paid for exactly that difference, and a bond paying more again is being paid for taking a company’s credit risk without insurance. The yield gap between the rows is not free money, it is the price of that protection.

No, and the page deliberately does not sort the table for you. The rows differ in risk, in liquidity and in whether the return is contractual or market-linked. A deposit pays what it promises; a fund pays what it earns. The right use of this page is to rule out the options where the tax treatment quietly destroys the advantage, then choose among what is left on the things the table does not show.

It lowers every row by roughly the same amount, so it rarely changes the ordering, and it changes how you should feel about the result. At a 30% slab, most of these instruments produce a real return close to zero or below it. That is not an argument against fixed income, which is bought for certainty rather than for growth. It is an argument against holding more of it than the certainty is worth.

Identical in rate and slightly different in timing. Both are taxed at your slab as the interest accrues. A cumulative deposit and a cumulative bond both produce a tax liability in years when no cash has reached you, which is worth planning for. The one genuine difference is that any gain from selling a listed bond before maturity is a capital gain rather than interest, and is taxed differently.