Professional Tax Calculator for Indian States

Priya earns Rs 30,000 a month. Her employer has staff in five states and runs one payroll. Professional tax follows the state each person works in, so the same salary produces five different answers, ranging from nothing at all to the full constitutional maximum.

The same five, as a yearly cost

Two of those five land on Rs 2,500 exactly. That is not a coincidence and it is the most useful fact on this page. Article 276(2) of the Constitution caps professional tax at Rs 2,500 a person a year, so states that want the whole amount have to engineer their instalments to hit it. Karnataka gets there by charging Rs 300 in February and Rs 200 in the other eleven months. Madhya Pradesh gets there in its top band by charging Rs 208 eleven times and Rs 212 once. Those odd figures are arithmetic, not policy.

The mistake this page exists to stop

Look again at Madhya Pradesh. Its first band reads up to Rs 2,25,000, nil, and that figure is an annual income. Priya earns Rs 30,000 a month, which is Rs 3,60,000 a year, so she sits two bands up and Rs 167 a month is due.

Now read that same band as though Rs 2,25,000 were a monthly salary, which is exactly how a great many published tables label it. Rs 30,000 is comfortably under Rs 2,25,000, so the answer comes out as nil and the employer deducts nothing. The error is invisible, because nothing looks wrong on a payslip that has no professional tax line. It surfaces years later as Rs 2,004 a year per employee of arrears, plus interest, and it is the employer who pays it rather than the employee.

The same confusion runs the other way in Bihar, where the top band is Rs 2,500 and that figure is the whole year. Read as a monthly amount it becomes Rs 30,000 a year, which is twelve times a ceiling written into the Constitution. If a professional tax figure ever implies more than Rs 2,500 a year for one person, you have found a mislabelled table rather than an expensive state.

Why the calculator asks where the employee works, not where they live

Professional tax attaches to the place the work is done. A company registered in Bengaluru whose salesperson is posted in Hyderabad owes Telangana for that person, not Karnataka, and needs a Telangana registration to pay it. Most states want that registration within thirty days of employing someone in the state. Distributed teams have created this problem quietly for a lot of small businesses that think of themselves as having one office.

Professional tax is the rare Indian levy that has no central Act at all. It is a state subject, and everything below flows from two clauses of the Constitution.

• Article 276(1) lets a state tax professions, trades, callings and employments, and says so expressly notwithstanding that the Union taxes income. That single word is why professional tax and income tax sit on the same salary without either being a double tax, and why the question of which one takes priority never arises.
• Article 276(2) caps the levy at Rs 2,500 per person per year. The figure was raised to Rs 2,500 by the Sixtieth Amendment in 1988 and has not moved since. Raising it needs a constitutional amendment rather than a state budget, which is why states have spent thirty years rearranging instalments inside a ceiling that inflation has made very small.
• Section 16(iii) of the Income Tax Act allows professional tax actually paid as a deduction from salary income, under the old regime only. Under the new regime it is not deductible.

That ceiling explains the odd numbers. A state that wants the full Rs 2,500 and collects twelve times a year has to divide 2,500 by 12, which gives 208.33. So Madhya Pradesh charges Rs 208 eleven times and Rs 212 once. Karnataka and Maharashtra take a rounder route and charge Rs 200 for eleven months and Rs 300 in February. Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry avoid the problem entirely by collecting twice a year at Rs 1,250 a time. None of those figures mean anything on their own. They are all the same ceiling, approached differently.

Beyond the two Articles, each state runs its own Act, its own slabs, its own registration and its own due dates, and they change with state budgets. In Tamil Nadu and Kerala the rate is set lower still, by the local body rather than by the state, so two workplaces an hour apart can sit on different tables. The rates in this calculator were verified in August 2026. Three states that levy the tax, Chhattisgarh, Mizoram and Nagaland, are deliberately left out because published sources disagree about their current slabs and we would rather show a gap than a guess.