Salary, without the HR jargon

Reading an Indian payslip: CTC, in-hand and the bits in between

Offer letters in India quote annual CTC. The amount that lands in the account is smaller, and not only because of income tax. This walk-through names the usual line items and points at the calculators that estimate them — not at a payroll product.

CTC is a bundle

Cost to company usually includes basic, HRA, special allowance, employer PF, and sometimes gratuity or variable pay. Two colleagues with the same CTC can have different monthly in-hand if one has a larger HRA and pays rent in a metro, and the other does not.

IndiaKit’s CTC-to-in-hand tool subtracts the employee PF you type and a small professional-tax sketch. It does not model every state PT slab or every company’s “special allowance” split. Use it to sanity-check an offer, then read the annexure.

What to run after the offer letter

If you have rent receipts, run HRA on the old-regime path. If you have a bonus line, the bonus-tax sketch shows a flat rate you choose — it is not your slab computed from Form 16. Provident fund at 12% employee plus 12% employer (capped in many shops) is the PF calculator’s assumption, labelled as such.

None of these pages file a return. None of them want PAN. The Income Tax utility and your payroll admin remain the source of truth.