In-Hand Salary Calculator

Why CTC is not your salary

CTC stands for Cost to Company: the total amount your employer spends on employing you in a year. It is not the amount deposited in your account, because it includes two components that never reach you directly.

• Employer PF contribution, the company's own share of your Provident Fund, paid into your PF account rather than to you
• Gratuity provision, money set aside for a benefit you only receive after five or more years of continuous service, or on leaving the company under specific conditions

How this calculator builds your CTC breakdown

Enter your annual CTC and choose what share of it is basic pay, commonly 40 to 50% depending on your employer's own salary structure, with 45% used as a reasonable default. From there, the calculator works through the same chain a payroll system uses:

• Employer PF contribution: 12% of basic pay
• Gratuity provision: 4.81% of basic pay (the standard shorthand for 15 days' pay per year of service)
• Gross salary: CTC minus employer PF minus gratuity
• Income tax: calculated on gross salary, under your chosen regime, exactly as on the income tax calculator
• Employee PF contribution: 12% of basic pay, deducted from your gross salary
• Professional tax: an optional toggle, since it is a state-level tax that some states do not levy at all

Three worked examples

These examples use the new tax regime, a 45% basic-pay assumption, and no professional tax, so you can see how CTC translates into monthly in-hand pay at different levels.

Notice the gap between CTC and monthly in-hand: on the Rs 12,00,000 CTC example, in-hand pay works out to about Rs 10,44,426 a year, roughly 87% of the headline CTC figure. At Rs 6,00,000 CTC the gap is similar in percentage terms, since no income tax is owed at either level once the standard deduction and Section 87A rebate apply, the difference is almost entirely PF and gratuity rather than tax.

Does professional tax apply to you?

Professional tax is levied by individual state governments, not the central government, and it is not uniform across India. States including Maharashtra, Karnataka, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Tamil Nadu levy it, typically capped around Rs 2,500 a year and deducted monthly by your employer. Several other states and union territories, including Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab, do not levy it at all. Because the exact amount and the slab it is charged at both vary by state and sometimes by income band within a state, this calculator offers a simple toggle for an approximate Rs 2,500 annual figure rather than a full state-by-state lookup. If your payslip already shows an exact professional tax line, use that figure directly instead and adjust the in-hand result by the difference.

Basic pay percentage: why it changes the result

Your basic pay share of CTC is set by your employer's own compensation structure, not by a single fixed rule, and it changes almost every figure downstream. A higher basic pay percentage means a higher employer PF contribution and a higher gratuity provision (both calculated as a percentage of basic), which reduces gross salary for the same CTC. It also means a higher employee PF deduction, since that too is a percentage of basic pay. In practice this usually means a higher basic percentage results in slightly lower monthly in-hand pay for an identical CTC figure, because more of the CTC is being routed into PF and gratuity rather than paid out directly. If you know your employer's exact basic pay percentage from your own offer letter or payslip, use it instead of the 45% default for a more precise result.

Provident Fund: what the 12% actually covers

Both employer and employee PF contributions default to 12% of basic pay in this calculator, matching the statutory rate most private-sector employers apply. There is a wage-ceiling nuance worth knowing: the Employees' Provident Fund scheme technically defines its mandatory contribution base as basic pay up to Rs 15,000 a month, with contributions above that threshold optional for many employers. In practice, a large share of private employers voluntarily apply the 12% rate to the employee's full basic pay rather than capping it at the statutory ceiling, which is the more common real-world case and the one this calculator models. If your own employer applies the Rs 15,000 wage ceiling instead, your actual PF deduction, and therefore your actual in-hand pay, will be somewhat higher than this estimate.

Converting the other way: from in-hand pay to required CTC

If you already know the monthly in-hand salary you need and want to work backward to a target CTC, the fastest approach is to try a few CTC figures in the calculator above and adjust until the monthly in-hand result matches what you are aiming for, since the CTC-to-in-hand chain does not invert cleanly into a single formula once tax slabs are involved. For a specific gross salary figure (rather than a full CTC), the salary calculator and income tax calculator both work directly from gross pay and may be the faster tool if you already know that number from an offer letter.