The GST Appellate Tribunal was statutorily provided for in 2017 but operationally inert for nearly eight years. The notification of the GSTAT (Procedure) Rules, 2025 on 24 April 2025 — followed by GSTAT becoming operational from September 2025 — has produced an institutional architecture that the GST framework had been missing since inception. The 30 June 2026 special backlog cutoff is the most urgent practitioner item. A digest of the Rules, the operational architecture, and the timeline practitioners must be tracking.