How to file your ITR online in 2026, step by step

• Form 16 from each employer in the year, and Form 16A for tax deducted on interest, rent or fees.
• Form 26AS and the Annual Information Statement, downloaded from the portal, showing every tax credit and every reported transaction against your PAN.
• Interest certificates from banks and post office, savings and deposit interest separately.
• Capital gains statements from brokers and fund houses, with dates of purchase and sale, and the property sale deed and purchase cost where a property was sold.
• Proof of deductions if you use the old regime: 80C investments, health insurance, home loan interest certificate, rent receipts, donation receipts with the donee’s registration number.
• A pre-validated bank account on the portal, in your name and linked to your PAN, or the refund will not be paid.

Check that your PAN is linked to Aadhaar and operative; an inoperative PAN cannot file. Then decide the form with our form guide.

Go to the e-filing portal, enter the PAN as the user ID and the password. First-time filers register with PAN, the Aadhaar-linked mobile and an email; the OTPs confirm both. If the password is lost, reset it through Aadhaar OTP or net banking.

From the e-File menu choose Income Tax Returns, then File Income Tax Return. Select assessment year 2026-27 for income earned between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026, the online mode, and start a new filing. Choose the filer type (individual) and then the form. If the portal suggests a form, check it against the rules; the suggestion is based on last year and on the pre-filled data, not on what you know about your income.

The return opens with personal details, salary, interest, dividends, TDS and, increasingly, capital gains pre-filled from the AIS and from the returns your employer, banks and brokers filed. Treat it as a draft. The things to check, in order of how often they are wrong:

• Salary and the tax deducted match Form 16, including exempt allowances and the standard deduction.
• Interest includes savings interest the bank did not deduct tax on, and does not include fixed deposit interest that belongs to a joint holder.
• Every TDS entry in Form 26AS appears; missing credits are the usual cause of a smaller refund.
• Capital gains match the broker statement by holding period, and the cost of long-term listed equity bought before 1 February 2018 uses the grandfathered value.
• AIS entries that are not yours, or are duplicated, get feedback submitted through the AIS screen so that the mismatch is on record.

The new regime is the default. Salaried taxpayers choose afresh each year inside the return. Taxpayers with business or professional income who want the old regime must file Form 10-IEA before the due date and can switch back only once. Run both with your numbers first; our regime calculator does the arithmetic.

Work through each schedule the form presents: salary, house property with the interest deduction, capital gains by asset class, other sources, the deductions chapter if on the old regime, exempt income, and for the longer forms the assets and liabilities schedule above ₹1 crore, foreign assets, and the business schedules. Confirm the schedules, and the portal computes the tax.

If the computation shows tax payable, pay it as self-assessment tax before submitting: e-Pay Tax on the portal, challan type for the assessment year, net banking or UPI. The challan reflects within a few hours; enter its details in the tax-paid schedule and the balance drops to nil. Interest under sections 234A, 234B and 234C is computed into the figure automatically.

The preview shows the full return as filed. Validation flags missing fields and inconsistencies, such as a deduction claimed without the schedule filled. Fix them, confirm the declaration, and submit. The acknowledgement number appears on screen and the ITR-V is emailed.

A return that is not verified within 30 days of submission is treated as not filed. Verify immediately: Aadhaar OTP is the fastest; net banking, a bank-account or demat-account EVC, or a digital signature also work, and companies and audit cases must use the DSC. The fallback is to sign the ITR-V and post it to the Centralised Processing Centre in Bengaluru within the same 30 days.

The CPC processes the return and issues an intimation under section 143(1), usually within weeks, either accepting it, adjusting it, or raising a demand. Refunds are credited to the pre-validated account. A mistake found after filing is corrected by a revised return, available up to 31 March 2027 for this year; after that, the updated return under section 139(8A) with additional tax. Deadlines and late-filing costs are in our due-date guide.

The offline route. The same forms can be filled in the department’s offline utility, exported as a JSON file and uploaded. It suits returns with many entries or a slow connection, and is the only route for some of the longer forms early in the season.

• Name or date of birth on the portal not matching PAN records, which blocks verification.
• An inoperative PAN, or a bank account not pre-validated, so the refund fails.
• Submitting and never verifying: the most common way a return is silently invalid.
• Claiming relief under section 89 for salary arrears without filing Form 10E first.
• ITR-1 used by someone with share sales, a second property or a directorship, producing a defective-return notice.
• Ignoring an AIS entry instead of giving feedback, so the mismatch becomes a notice in the following year.

If the portal is not where you want to spend an evening, a chartered accountant files it from ₹499, with the regime comparison and the AIS reconciliation done first.