Notice Period Calculator: TCS, Infosys, Wipro & Accenture

Search “TCS notice period” on Glassdoor’s India community and you’ll find the same scene playing out on repeat. One thread from earlier this year: an employee resigns, braces for the standard three months, then gets a call from HR a week later saying the business no longer needs them on the account and they’re free to go in seven days. The thread reads like a template because it basically is one. That gap, between what the offer letter promises and what actually happens once you hand in your resignation, is the real problem with notice periods at India’s big IT services firms.

It matters more than usual this year. TCS shed more than 23,000 people from its payroll in FY26 while restructuring around AI, Deccan Herald reported in April, and churn at that scale means a lot of people are dealing with resignations, releases, and exit dates at once. If you just want your own dates, skip to the calculator further down. Everyone else, here’s what notice period actually looks like at TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Accenture, Cognizant, and HCLTech in 2026, and why it runs longer here than almost anywhere else in tech.

Why service companies keep notice periods longer than product companies

Ask someone at a product company or a well-funded startup what their notice period is and you’ll usually hear 30 to 60 days. Ask someone at TCS, Infosys, Wipro, or HCLTech and the number jumps to 90. One HR compliance breakdown that tracks the split by company type puts it plainly: product firms like Google India and Microsoft India typically run 30 to 60 days, while the big IT services names default to 90 for experienced hires. The gap isn’t random.

Three things drive it, and only one is really about the client. First, IT services runs on a bench-and-billing model: an engineer gets staffed on a client account, the client is billed for that time, and pulling someone off mid-engagement without a replacement lined up creates a revenue gap someone has to answer for. Second, client contracts frequently specify knowledge-transfer windows for anyone touching production systems, so a 90-day runway gives an incoming replacement time to actually learn the account instead of inheriting a half-documented mess. Third, and this part doesn’t make it into the recruiting deck, the policy has roots in the attrition spike of the 2000s and 2010s, when annual attrition at Indian IT majors ran well above 20 percent and a long notice period became a blunt tool for slowing people down before they left.

Whether that tool still works is a separate question, and my honest read is that it mostly doesn’t. Gaurav Chattur, an APAC recruiting executive, argued in a Business Today column that the 90-day standard costs Indian IT roughly $6 billion a year industry-wide, with TCS alone losing an estimated $121 million to unproductive notice-period time based on its attrition figures. His conclusion, stated flatly: “There is no rationale as to why Indian companies need to have a 90-day notice period.” I’d go a step further. A policy built to punish flight risk mostly just makes the last three months miserable for the person leaving, while doing very little for the replacement pipeline the client actually cares about.

What’s actually standard at each company right now

None of these six companies publish their notice-period policy on a public careers page. Everything below comes from HR compliance write-ups plus dozens of independent employee threads on Glassdoor, Grapevine, and Quora that land on similar numbers. Treat the ranges as strong signal, not gospel. Your own offer letter or appointment letter always wins the argument.

I don’t have a single company-published number for Wipro, Cognizant, or HCLTech that I’d bet on without you checking your own offer letter first. The shape of the pattern holds anyway. Whichever of these six you’re at, notice period scales up with seniority and how billable your role is, not with tenure by itself.

Experience level matters more than the company logo, honestly. Across the sector, entry-level hires with 0 to 2 years on the job commonly get 30-day notice periods, mid-level employees in the 2 to 7 year range see 60 to 90 days, and senior or management-track employees at 7-plus years are almost universally locked into the full 90, per the same HR compliance breakdown referenced above. Probation periods run shorter still, commonly 7 to 30 days, though Infosys is the one name in this list where multiple people report the full 90-day clause surviving into probation rather than shrinking. If you’re a fresher reading this because your offer letter says something unfamiliar, that’s normal. Fresher notice periods get negotiated and rewritten far more often than anyone advertises.

Notice period calculator: why last working day isn’t the same number

Your notice period is a length, typically 30, 60, or 90 calendar days written into your offer letter. Your last working day is a specific date, and getting from one to the other trips up more people than it should: does the day you resign count as day one? Do weekends inside the window count toward the total? Almost every Indian IT offer letter counts notice period in calendar days, not working days, so a 90-day notice period really is 90 straight days including every weekend in between, not 90 days spent at a desk.

That distinction is exactly what our free notice period calculator for India solves. Enter your resignation date and notice period (there are presets for 30, 60, and 90 days, plus a custom field for anything else, including the shorter probation-period notices some of these companies use), toggle whether your employer counts the resignation day as day one, and it hands back your exact last working day plus a full breakdown: total calendar days, actual working days once weekends are stripped out, the halfway point, and the date exactly two weeks before you walk out. It takes about ten seconds and saves you from doing toggle-dependent date math by hand and getting it wrong by a day, which happens more often than you’d think.

What happens if you can’t serve the full notice period

Sometimes 90 days isn’t an option. A new employer wants you sooner, or you’ve already committed to a start date that doesn’t leave room for three months of overlap. Most of these six companies allow a notice period buyout in that situation: you, or increasingly your new employer, pay for the days you won’t serve, calculated against your basic or gross salary depending on the company, and HR shortens your last working day once the payment clears. It’s a negotiated exception, not a default right. Accenture and TCS in particular treat early release as fully discretionary rather than something you can demand.

The math itself is simple in structure, even though the exact multiplier varies by employer: take your monthly salary, divide by 30, multiply by the number of notice days you won’t serve. A ₹60,000-a-month employee buying out 60 unserved days lands around ₹1,20,000, before anyone argues about whether variable pay counts (usually it doesn’t). We go deeper on how buyout amounts are actually calculated, including the basic-versus-gross split and who typically ends up paying, in a separate piece. Worth reading before you assume your new employer covers it automatically.

Check your offer letter before you plan around any of this

Everything above is a pattern built from public write-ups and enough independent employee threads to trust its shape. It is not your contract. Bands change, accounts get restructured, and HR discretion swings wider than any of these six companies admit publicly, so the number that’s “standard” for your employer might not be your number at all.

What is worth planning around is the market you’re resigning into. Entry-level tech hiring is down while AI-adjacent roles are up compared to two years ago, and that changes how much runway you actually have if your notice period runs longer than a new employer is willing to wait. If you’re already resigning, that’s the moment to start actually job hunting rather than waiting for your last working day to arrive, and a job search that ranks openings by real resume fit beats scrolling LinkedIn for three months straight. Run your own dates through the calculator, then go figure out where you’re actually headed next.

One number worth knowing before you resign

We index the public Greenhouse feed for our auto-apply product. On 17 July 2026 it held 62,766 open roles. Of those, 2,341 were in India. That is about 3.7 percent.

Greenhouse is used mostly by product companies and venture-backed startups, so this is not the whole Indian market. It is a fair picture of one specific slice of it, and that slice is the one most people leaving a service company are aiming at.

The practical consequence is simple. That pool is smaller than the LinkedIn feed suggests. A 90-day notice period against a pool that size means the role you resigned for may well be filled before you are free. Get the offer in writing first. Then negotiate the buyout. Never the other way round.

The statutory position on notice varies by state under the relevant Shops and Establishments Acts, and the enforceable terms are whatever your signed appointment letter says. Read that document before you rely on anything you read online, including this. Company-level policy detail is discussed on Glassdoor India.

Frequently asked questions

Can I buy out my notice period?

Usually yes at the large service companies, and the rate is normally your gross salary for the remaining days. Whether your manager approves it is a separate question from whether the policy allows it.

What happens if I just leave?

You risk losing your relieving letter. That document gets asked for at the next background check, and its absence is harder to explain than a bought-out notice.

Do new employers wait 90 days?

Product companies often will. Startups frequently will not. Ask during the offer conversation rather than after you accept.

Can notice period be negotiated at offer stage?

Yes, and that is the right moment. Many companies will cover part of a buyout if you raise it before signing. Almost none will after.