Form 16, decoded for the person who receives it

What is it, actually?

A certificate of tax deducted. Two separate duties sit behind it. Your employer must deduct tax from your salary at the time it pays you, on an estimate of what you will earn for the whole year — that first duty is at s.392(1), and the 2025 Act put salary TDS and the provident-fund-withdrawal TDS that used to have its own section into one section. And having deducted it and paid it over, your employer must give you a certificate saying how much, at what rate, and that it reached the government.

That second duty is the certificate. It is prescribed as Form No. 130 by Rule 215(1) [Table: Sl. No. 1], Income-tax Rules, 2026, and the duty to issue it is at s.395(4)(a) of the Income-tax Act, 2025 — the erstwhile section 203. There is a second limb, s.395(4)(b), for the case where your employer chose to bear the tax on a non-monetary benefit itself rather than deduct it from you.

What it is not: it is not a return, it does not discharge anything, and it is not an assurance that your tax is settled. It reports one employer's view of one part of your income. If you have interest, a second job, or capital gains, none of that is here and its absence is not a mistake.

Why does it say Form No. 130 when everyone calls it Form 16?

Because the forms were renumbered with the sections. The Income-tax Act, 2025 replaced the 1961 Act from 1 April 2026, and the rules made under it renumbered the prescribed forms as well. Same document, same job, new number — and one structural change worth knowing before you open yours: it now has 3 parts, where the old one had two.

Its own heading, in the rules: “Certificate under section 395 for tax deducted at source on salary paid to an employee under section 392 or pension or interest income of specified senior citizen under section 393(1) [Table: Sl. No. 8(iii)]”

What is in each part?

The parts are not chapters of one narrative. They come from different places and can disagree with each other, which is the single most useful thing to know about the document.

Part A and Part B are generated from what your employer filed with the department. Part C is your employer's own computation of your salary and tax. That is why a wrong assumption in the last part does not show up as an error anywhere in the first two — the arithmetic is internally consistent and simply describes a different person's tax.

How do I read it against my payslip?

A payslip is monthly and gross-to-net. The certificate is annual and gross-to-tax. They almost never line up on first reading, and the reasons they do not are all boring ones.

What would mine say?

Below is the salary computation part of a certificate for the example our CTC to in-hand calculator opens with: ₹18,00,000 of cost to company, the default regime, one employer for the whole year and nothing else reported. Every figure is produced by the same engine that runs the calculator, so if you want a version with your own numbers in it, the calculator is where it comes from.

The row numbers are the form's own. Every row it has that this example leaves at nil — a second employer, exempt allowances, a house-property loss, relief on arrears — is a row that would carry a figure for somebody else.

Read the last row against your payslip and it comes to ₹10,211 a month. Your own monthly deductions will not be twelve equal amounts of that: your employer may adjust an excess or a shortfall from earlier months, and a bonus or a proof of investment arriving mid-year changes the estimate every later deduction is computed on. The annual total is the figure that has to agree.

Five things worth checking

Not a compliance exercise. These are the five places where an error changes what you pay or where the money goes, and each of them is a single field you can read in under a minute.

The last one is the one people are surprised by. Your employer had to assume a regime in order to deduct anything at all, and it deducted all year on that assumption. If the assumption was wrong, nothing on the certificate is wrong — it is an accurate certificate of a computation done for a different set of facts. Our regime comparison computes both sides on your own figures, and the section 202 entry sets out what the default actually is.

What if it does not match?

First, work out which mismatch you have, because the two common ones have nothing to do with each other.

The certificate disagrees with the department's own statement. These come from two different duties. Your certificate is issued under one provision; the periodic statement your employer files is a separate obligation under s.397(3)(b), the erstwhile section 200. The department's annual information statement — Form No. 168, uploaded into your registered account under s.510 read with Rule 245, Income-tax Rules, 2026 — carries the information taken from those filings. A discrepancy in a filed statement is corrected by the deductor delivering a correction statement; the Act sets the window for doing it.

The certificate disagrees with your payslips. That is a computation question rather than a filing one, and it belongs in the salary computation part: an exempt allowance not counted, a deduction claimed on evidence that arrived late, or a perquisite valued differently from the way you expected. The statement of perquisites and their values — Form No. 123 under Rule 204(2)(b), Income-tax Rules, 2026 — is the document that explains the second one, and your employer is required to furnish it.

Two smaller cases the rules deal with directly. If you lost the certificate, the rules provide for a duplicate (Rule 215(3), Income-tax Rules, 2026). If you changed jobs during the year, each employer issues the first two parts for its own period, and the salary computation part may be issued by each of them or by the last one — at your option, not theirs (Rule 215(2), Income-tax Rules, 2026). If arrears pushed you into a higher band, relief is a separate computation under s.157, the erstwhile section 89, and it has its own row on the form.

Everything in this section describes what the provisions say. What to do about your own position depends on facts this page cannot see, and it is a question for somebody qualified who has seen them.

When should it reach me?

Rule 215(1) [Table: Sl. No. 1] sets the date, in these words:

“By the 15th June of the financial year immediately following the tax year in which the income was paid and tax deducted.”

Rule 215(1) [Table: Sl. No. 1], Income-tax Rules, 2026

For the tax year 2026-27, that is 15 June 2027. Note where the date lives: the Act itself says only that the certificate must be issued within such period as may be prescribed, and the period is prescribed by the rules. A page that cites the Act for the date is citing a provision that does not contain one.

That date is not your filing date, and the two provisions on the other side of the difference were renumbered along with everything else. The fee for filing late is now section 428, where every explainer written before 1 April 2026 says 234F — renumbered and nothing else, which is why the amounts you read on those pages are still right and the authority they give is not. And once the return is in, it is processed under section 270, the erstwhile 143 — its first sub-section is the intimation that lands in your inbox, the rest of it is the scrutiny assessment. That intimation is the department’s arithmetic on your return set against what your employer reported, which is the step at which a certificate nobody reconciled turns into a demand.

Why does every other explainer cite a section that no longer exists?

Because the Income-tax Act, 1961 was repealed on 1 April 2026 and the pages explaining this document were written before that. The figures on those pages are usually right. The authority they give for them has been withdrawn.

Here is the whole of it, in the order the certificate meets them. Every row links to our own mapping page for that section, with the government source we read it from.

One vocabulary change goes with them, and it is on your certificate. The Act works in tax years — the term is defined in the Act and used throughout it — where the old Act spoke of a previous year assessed in an assessment year. The form's own row is headed “Tax year”. If an explainer is still telling you to match your certificate to an assessment year — the repealed Act’s term, not this one’s — it is describing a document you were not sent.

Where do I check my own numbers?

Put your cost to company into the CTC to in-hand calculator and it produces the same computation this page worked above, with the provision printed beside each figure. The regime comparison answers the one row on the certificate that your employer had to guess at. And the section mapper takes any number an older explainer gives you and returns the one in force, with the government source we read it from. What we read, when we last read it, and where we are still unsure is on our methodology page.

The form, its parts and the date it is due were read from the Income-tax Rules on incometax.gov.in; the sections behind them from the enacted Act on egazette.gov.in.