Professional tax by state

Which states in India charge professional tax?

Professional tax is a state levy, so it exists in some states and not others. 19 states and union territories are covered here with full slab tables: Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Manipur, Meghalaya, Odisha, Puducherry, Punjab, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Tripura, West Bengal. A further 3 levy it but are not tabulated here because published slabs for them could not be cross-checked: Chhattisgarh, Mizoram, Nagaland. And 12 states and union territories charge no professional tax at all, including Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.

Is there professional tax in Delhi, Haryana or Uttar Pradesh?

No. None of them levies professional tax, and neither do Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Arunachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand. This is worth stating plainly because at least one widely syndicated table prints a slab table for Delhi, a city that has never charged it. If your workplace is in one of these, there is nothing to register for and nothing to deduct.

What is the maximum professional tax in India?

₹2,500 per person per financial year. Article 276(2) of the Constitution fixes that ceiling and no state legislature can raise it, which makes it a useful check on any table you read: if a state appears to charge more than ₹2,500 across a year, the table is wrong. The usual cause is an annual amount printed under a column headed "per month".

Which state you pay in: where you live or where you work?

Where the employment is, not where the employee lives. Professional tax follows the workplace, so a business registered in one state with staff working in another registers and deducts under the state its people actually work in. For a business with locations in more than one state that means more than one registration, and for remote staff it is the state the employee works from that governs.

Is professional tax deductible from income tax?

Yes. Section 16(iii) of the Income Tax Act allows professional tax actually paid during the year to be deducted from salary income, so it is not taxed twice. The deduction is on the amount paid, not the amount payable, which matters when an arrear from a previous year is cleared: it belongs to the year it was paid in.

How often do these slabs change?

With state budgets, and without warning to anyone running payroll. Assam raised its exemption from ₹10,000 to ₹15,000 a month with effect from April 2025; Karnataka added a February top-up in the same month, raising its annual maximum from ₹2,400 to ₹2,500; Maharashtra moved the threshold for women to ₹25,000 a month in 2023. Each of those turned a correct payroll into an incorrect one on a single date, with no error message. Everything here is stated as in force in August 2026.

Karnataka looks the band up on monthly salary and collects over the same period, so the ₹200 above is both the band figure and the amount deducted.

February is different. Karnataka takes ₹300 in February instead of ₹200, so the year lands on ₹2,500 exactly. That is ₹200 for 11 months and ₹300 for one, not ₹200 12 times over. Payroll that deducts a flat ₹200 all year under collects by ₹100, and the shortfall is the employer's to make good.

The February figure is new. The Karnataka Amendment Act 2025 received assent on 10 April 2025 and took effect from 1 April 2025, raising the annual maximum from Rs 2,400 to Rs 2,500 by adding Rs 100 to February alone. Tables that still show a flat Rs 200 for all twelve months are a year out of date.

The full Karnataka table

Bands are monthly salary. Amounts are per month. Both column headings say so, because a table that leaves either one implied is how the wrong figures spread.