Form 10F Online Without a PAN: What NRIs Can Actually Do in 2026

✍️ RebaseNest Team · Last updated 30 May 2026

·8 min read
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Educational only. Not investment, tax, legal, or immigration advice. RebaseNest is not a registered investment adviser under SEBI, SEC, or FCA. Indian tax, FEMA, and DTAA rules change frequently — verify every threshold and citation with a qualified cross-border CA before acting. Full disclaimer.

Assuming you are an NRI or a foreign company earning income from India — interest, royalty, fees for technical services, capital gains — and you want the Indian payer to withhold TDS at the lower DTAA rate instead of the domestic rate. Two pieces of paper decide whether that lower rate actually applies: a Tax Residency Certificate (TRC) from your home country, and Form 10F filed with the Indian tax department.

For years, Form 10F was a one-page physical declaration. In 2022, the income tax department moved it online. That created a real problem for non-residents who did not have a PAN and were not otherwise required to obtain one. The e-filing portal needed a PAN to register, and Form 10F needed the e-filing portal. The department eventually opened a separate non-resident registration path on the portal, but the fix went through several extensions and most NRI taxpayers we hear from are still unclear about which version of the rule is currently in force.

This is the working version, grounded in CBDT notifications and Rule 21AB.

1. Why Form 10F exists in the first place

Section 90(4) of the Income-tax Act, 1961 says a non-resident can claim DTAA benefits only if a TRC is obtained from the home country's tax authority. Section 90(5) and Rule 21AB go one step further — if the TRC does not already contain every prescribed particular, the taxpayer must additionally furnish those particulars in Form 10F.

Rule 21AB lists the prescribed particulars: status (individual, company, firm), nationality or country of incorporation, tax identification number in the country of residence, period for which residential status is claimed, and address during that period.

Most TRCs issued by foreign tax authorities do not include all of these. So in practice, Form 10F is almost always required.

2. What changed in 2022

DGIT(Systems) Notification No. 03/2022 dated 16 July 2022 (issued with CBDT approval) mandated electronic filing of Form 10F through the Income Tax e-filing portal. The intent was clean — a verifiable, digitally-signed record instead of a scanned PDF passed between the deductor and deductee.

The unintended consequence: the e-filing portal only allowed login via PAN. Non-residents without a PAN — many foreign companies receiving one-off royalty payments, foreign individuals earning bank interest, foreign investors with passive income — could not register, let alone file.

For about a year, the department issued a series of partial relaxations allowing manual Form 10F filing for non-residents without a PAN. Those relaxations were extended through multiple notifications, each with a new sunset date. This is the part that gets stale fastest, so do not rely on any blog post — including this one — for the current cut-off without checking the income tax department site.

3. The current online route for non-residents without PAN

The income tax department eventually enabled a dedicated registration path on the e-filing portal for non-residents who do not hold and are not required to hold a PAN. The exact UI breadcrumb has shifted across portal versions, so use the official "How to register" help page on the e-filing portal as the current source of truth rather than memorising a click path. The category is commonly referred to as the "NR ID" registration.

Once registered, Form 10F is filed under the file-income-tax-forms section. Mandatory fields:

Field Source Status Individual / Company / Firm / other Nationality / country of Passport or country of incorporation incorporation TIN in country of residence Foreign tax ID — or, if no TIN exists, the unique number used by the foreign government to identify the taxpayer (Rule 21AB language) Period of residential status TRC validity dates Address Foreign address during the period Attachment TRC PDF

For PAN-holding non-residents the form is verified with EVC or DSC. For the no-PAN NR ID registration, the official portal help describes a separate OTP-based verification flow to the registered email and mobile.

4. Practical traps

A few that we see repeatedly:

  • The TRC must cover the same period as the income event. A TRC for calendar year 2025 does not help against TDS on a payment made in January 2026. Renew before the next withholding cycle.
  • The TIN field is mandatory but flexible. Rule 21AB allows a "unique number by which the person is identified by the Government of the country or specified territory" if no TIN is issued. The deductor's CA may still ask for a covering letter explaining the substitute identifier used.
  • Verification needs an email and mobile you can actually access. Many NRIs lose access to an old Indian mobile and then cannot complete OTP-based verification on the NR ID path.
  • Confirm the validity scope of one filed form with your deductor. Filings are made for a tax year and a covering TRC period; treat each new financial year as a fresh filing exercise unless your CA confirms otherwise based on the latest portal guidance.
  • Indian payers usually want the filed Form 10F acknowledgment PDF before they release payment at the DTAA rate. Build a buffer of three to four weeks into the payment cycle the first time, especially if a TRC has to be obtained from the home authority too.

5. What about the rumored extensions or further relaxations

You will see commentary suggesting that the manual filing window has been extended further, or that PAN-less filing is being made permanent, or that a parallel paper route will continue indefinitely. As of writing, the operative position is the online route via the dedicated non-resident registration category. Anything beyond that — including future relaxation windows — is not officially confirmed unless it appears in a CBDT notification on incometaxindia.gov.in or a press release on pib.gov.in. Treat news-site reports of upcoming changes as signals to watch for the formal notification, not as the rule itself.

6. The cost of getting this wrong

If Form 10F is missing or invalid when the Indian payer makes the payment, withholding defaults to the rate in force under domestic law rather than the (usually lower) DTAA rate. The actual numbers depend on the type of income and the section that applies:

Income type Typical DTAA cap Indicative domestic rate Interest (qualifying) 10-15% 20% (Section 115A, certain interest) Royalty 10-15% 10% (Section 115A, gross basis) Fees for technical services 10-15% 10% (Section 115A, gross basis)

Section 195 is the withholding mechanism — it directs deduction at "the rates in force", which means whichever rate (Section 115A, treaty, or otherwise) is correctly applicable. If TRC + Form 10F are not in place, the treaty rate is unavailable and the payer falls back to the rate prescribed by the relevant substantive section, plus applicable surcharge and cess. Confirm the exact rate for your stream with the deductor's CA — the numbers above are indicative, not a substitute for the actual computation.

The differential is recoverable later by filing an Indian return and claiming a refund — but that means tying up cash for a full assessment cycle and dealing with refund processing timelines. Cheaper to get the paperwork right upfront.

7. A short checklist before the next payment

  1. Confirm the TRC is valid for the period in which the payment will be made.
  2. Confirm Form 10F has been filed online for the relevant Indian financial year — or filed manually only if the CBDT relaxation window currently in force still permits it for your facts.
  3. Share both the TRC and the e-filed Form 10F acknowledgment with the Indian deductor before invoice approval.
  4. Keep digital copies — the deductor will need them at the time of the TDS return filing.

To each their own on whether to handle this in-house or hand it to an Indian CA who specialises in non-resident compliance. For one-off payments the marginal cost of help is small; for recurring royalty or interest flows it pays to set up the e-filing account once and run it yourself.

A note on what this is. This article is one returnee's working notes, not personalised advice. Numbers age. Rules change. The only person who can sign off on your specific case is a qualified cross-border chartered accountant looking at your full facts. Use this as a checklist of questions to take to that conversation, not as the answer.

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Reviewed by RebaseNest CA Review Panel — an independent panel checking all tax-related claims against IndiaCode and RBI primary sources.