The Income Tax e-Filing Portal: Registration, Login and Every Task You Need

Almost everything an individual taxpayer needs to do with the Income Tax Department now happens on one site: incometax.gov.in. Registering, filing, verifying, paying, responding to a notice, tracking a refund, and uploading an audit report all sit behind the same login. This is the practical guide to operating it.

Registering for the first time

You need a valid PAN, a mobile number and an email address you actually control. The mobile and email you register here are where every OTP and every departmental communication will go, so use your own, not an accountant’s or a former employer’s.

1. On the portal, choose Register and enter your PAN. The system validates it and tells you whether it is already registered.
2. Enter your name, date of birth, gender and residential status exactly as they appear against the PAN. A mismatch here stops the registration.
3. Enter your contact details and your address.
4. Verify with the OTPs sent to the mobile and the email separately.
5. Set a password and a personalised message. The personalised message is shown to you on future logins and is how you tell the real portal from a phishing copy. Do not skip it.

Your User ID is your PAN. For a company, LLP or firm the process is similar but is completed by the authorised signatory, whose own PAN must already be registered.

If your PAN is inoperative

An unlinked PAN goes inoperative, and an inoperative PAN blocks refunds and triggers higher TDS. Check the link status before anything else. See our guide to PAN Aadhaar linking.

Logging in and recovering access

Log in with your PAN and password. If you have forgotten the password, the reset options include an OTP to the registered mobile, an Aadhaar OTP, a bank account or demat validation, and a digital signature certificate.

The two situations that genuinely lock people out are a mobile number no longer in use and a PAN registered years ago by a consultant against their own contact details. Both are fixable, but both take longer than the day before a deadline, which is invariably when they are discovered. Check that you can log in well before the filing season.

Before you file: the three things to download

Under Services and e-File, download the Annual Information Statement, the Taxpayer Information Summary and Form 26AS. Between them they show what the department already knows about your income, your tax credits and your high-value transactions.

Reconcile these against your own records before filing. A mismatch between the AIS and the return is the single most common trigger for a query, and it is far easier to explain a discrepancy in the return than to answer for it afterwards. Where an AIS entry is genuinely wrong, submit feedback against that entry rather than ignoring it.

Our full document checklist sets out what to gather by source of income.

Filing the return

Return filing is now governed by Section 263 of the Income-tax Act, 2025, which replaced Section 139 from 1 April 2026.

Under e-File, Income Tax Returns, File Income Tax Return, you choose the year, the filing status and the form. Two routes are available: filing online in the browser, where much of the data is pre-filled from the AIS and Form 26AS, or preparing offline in the utility and uploading a JSON file.

Use the online route for a straightforward return. Use the offline utility where the return is large, where you want to work on it over several sittings, or where you are preparing a return with extensive capital gains or foreign asset schedules.

Whichever route you use, check the pre-filled data rather than accepting it. Pre-fill is a convenience, not a certification, and the responsibility for what is in the return is yours.

Salaried taxpayers should start with our guide for salaried employees; those with capital gains or foreign assets should see the ITR-2 checklist.

Verifying the return

A filed return that is not verified within the time allowed is treated as never filed. This catches people out every year. Verification takes a minute; the consequence of skipping it is that the whole filing is void.

See how to e-verify your return for each of the available methods.

Paying tax

Advance tax, self-assessment tax and TDS payments are all made through e-Pay Tax, under the e-File menu. The critical fields are the assessment year and the minor head: a payment made under the wrong combination does not appear as credit against the right demand, and correcting it is slow.

See how to pay income tax online for the payment modes and the challan correction route.

Uploading forms and audit reports

Statutory forms, including tax audit reports, are filed under e-File, Income Tax Forms, File Income Tax Forms. The sequence matters and is often misunderstood:

1. The taxpayer adds the chartered accountant under Authorised Partners, My Chartered Accountant, specifying the form and the year.
2. The CA accepts the assignment from their own login.
3. The CA uploads and signs the report with their digital signature certificate.
4. The taxpayer accepts the uploaded report from their own login.

The report is not filed until the fourth step is done. A report uploaded by the CA but never accepted by the taxpayer counts as not filed, and the taxpayer bears the consequence. Check the status rather than assuming.

Tax audit is now governed by Section 63 of the Income-tax Act, 2025, formerly Section 44AB.

Registering a digital signature certificate

Companies, LLPs, audit cases and anyone filing on behalf of another must sign with a DSC. It has to be registered against the PAN on the portal before it can be used, and re-registered every time the certificate is renewed. See how to register a DSC on the income tax portal.

Tracking a refund and responding to notices

Refund status is visible under Services, Know Your Refund Status and in the return’s own filing history. Where a refund is delayed, the usual causes are an unvalidated bank account, a PAN that has gone inoperative, or the return being taken up for verification.

Pre-validate the bank account you want the refund in, under My Bank Account. An unvalidated account is a common and entirely avoidable cause of delay.

Notices and departmental communications appear under Pending Actions, e-Proceedings, and under e-Response for specific campaigns. Respond within the portal, within the time given. Ignoring a portal message because no letter arrived in the post is not a defence.

Grievances

Where something is genuinely stuck, a grievance can be raised under Grievances, Submit Grievance, selecting the right category. Attach the relevant acknowledgement or challan. Grievances resolve faster when they identify a specific transaction than when they describe a general problem.

A short list of things worth doing once

• Confirm you can log in, and that the registered mobile and email are yours.
• Set the personalised message, so you can spot a phishing site.
• Pre-validate the bank account you want refunds paid into.
• Check that PAN and Aadhaar are linked.
• Check that any DSC you rely on has not expired.

Each takes a few minutes and each removes a way for a filing to fail at the worst moment.

Or let us operate it for you

We file and verify returns, pay the tax on time under the correct heads, handle the audit report workflow end to end, and respond to portal proceedings. See income tax filing for individuals, business tax filing for firms and companies, and NRI tax filing if you are filing from outside India.

Book a call, or upload your documents securely through the TAXAJ client portal.

The e-filing portal changes frequently and menu paths move. This article describes the process in general terms; confirm the current navigation on the portal itself.