Advance Tax Calculator

Who has to pay advance tax

Advance tax is the requirement to pay your income tax during the year it is earned, rather than after it. Under Section 208 it applies to anyone whose tax for the year, after deducting TDS and TCS, comes to ₹10,000 or more. Below that, nothing is due and neither interest section can apply.

That subtraction is the part most salaried people get wrong in their favour and freelancers get wrong against themselves. If your employer's TDS covers your whole liability, you owe no advance tax however large your salary. If you have consultancy income, rent, capital gains or interest that nobody deducted tax on, you probably do.

The four instalments

Section 211 sets four due dates, and the percentages are cumulative — the 45% due by 15 September includes the 15% due by 15 June, it is not an additional 45%.

Taxpayers who declare income on a presumptive basis under Section 44AD or 44ADA do not use this schedule at all. They pay the whole liability in a single instalment by 15 March.

The 12% and 36% safe harbours almost nobody applies

This is the most commonly missed relief on the whole subject, and it is in the first proviso to Section 234C(1).

If the advance tax you pay by 15 June is at least 12% of the tax due — not the 15% the instalment asks for — no interest is charged for that instalment. The same applies at the second date: pay at least 36% by 15 September instead of 45%, and that instalment is free too.

It is a genuine shortfall that the statute forgives, not a rounding tolerance. On a ₹2,00,000 liability, paying ₹24,000 by 15 June rather than the ₹30,000 the instalment states costs nothing, where a naive calculation would bill three months of interest on the ₹6,000 gap. There is no equivalent relief at the December or March dates — those are charged on the full shortfall.

Income that arose after the due date

You cannot be penalised for failing to predict a gain you had not yet made, and the proviso to Section 234C says so. Where income under any of these heads arises after an instalment's due date:

• Capital gains of any kind;
• Winnings from lotteries, crossword puzzles and similar (Section 115BB);
• Dividend income, other than deemed dividend under Section 2(22)(e);
• income from a business or profession in its first year;

— then each instalment falling before that income arose is computed as though the income did not exist. The condition is that you pay the tax on it in a remaining instalment, or, if the income arose after 15 March, by 31 March.

So a property sold in January creates no June, September or December liability. It creates a 15 March obligation, and meeting that leaves your 234C bill at zero. Sell it on 20 March instead and you have until 31 March.

🔑 Paying on 20 March is not the same as paying on 10 March

Tax paid between 16 and 31 March is still advance tax. Section 211 and Explanation 1 to Section 234B both treat it as such, so it counts toward the 90% test and reduces — often eliminates — your 234B charge.

But it is after the 15 March due date. It therefore does nothing for the fourth 234C instalment, which was already missed.

The practical consequence, on a ₹2,00,000 liability paid entirely in that fortnight: 234B is nil and 234C is ₹10,100 — the full year's deferment interest, because every one of the four instalments was missed. Paid ten days earlier, on 15 March, the 234C bill is ₹8,100: the fourth instalment is then met, so only the first three are charged. The same money, the same month, a ₹2,000 difference.

Section 234B: the other interest

234C charges you for paying late during the year. Section 234B charges you for not paying enough during it. If your total advance tax comes to less than 90% of the assessed tax, interest runs at 1% a month on the entire shortfall from 1 April of the assessment year until you pay.

The two stack. A taxpayer who pays nothing all year and settles at filing faces both — and because 234B runs from April rather than stopping at March, the longer you leave the return the larger it grows. A part of a month counts as a whole month under both sections, so filing on 1 August rather than 31 July costs a full extra percent.

How to use this calculator

1. Enter your total tax for the year — if you do not have it, work it out on the Income Tax Calculator first, which applies the FY 2026-27 slabs and the Section 87A rebate.
2. Enter TDS and TCS already deducted. Advance tax applies only to the remainder.
3. Enter what you actually paid at each due date — the amount in that instalment alone, not the running total.
4. If capital gains or similar income arose late, enter the tax on it and the date it arose, and the calculator will apply the proviso.

Verify before you rely on this

The 1% monthly rate in both sections and the instalment percentages in Section 211 are statutory, not notified figures, so they do not change between Budgets in the way GST rates or small-savings rates do. The slabs that produce your liability do change — which is why this page takes the liability as an input rather than recomputing it, so it cannot drift out of step with the Income Tax Calculator.

This tool computes interest on the figures you enter. It does not know about relief under Section 89, foreign tax credits, MAT/AMT, or a revised return, any of which change the assessed tax the sections operate on. For anything material, check the result against the Income Tax Department's own computation before paying.