Form 16 Part B: What Goes In It, and Where Each Figure Comes From

For tax deducted on salary from 1 April 2018, Part B is generated and downloaded from TRACES as well, not typed by the employer. Rule 31(6A) and the Systems notification of 6 May 2019 put it there.

And TRACES does not invent it. It builds Part B out of Annexure II of the fourth quarter Form 24Q, which is the salary detail record the employer already filed.

That single fact explains most of the questions a practice gets in June. Part B cannot exist before the fourth quarter statement is filed and processed, because Part B is that statement, rearranged. If the Annexure II was wrong, Part B is wrong, and the fix is a correction to the statement, not an edit to the certificate.

The layout is published, and it is worth knowing in order because the arithmetic is cumulative and an error in an early row quietly changes everything below it.

It opens with a question rather than a figure: whether the employee is opting out of taxation under section 115BAC(1A). Everything after reads differently depending on that answer.

Then the gross salary breaks into three:

Row 1(e) is the one that is most often empty when it should not be. It is reported salary, which means an employee who joined mid-year and handed in their previous employer details has a figure here, and one who did not hand them in does not.

Row 2 is the allowances exempt under section 10, each on its own line: travel concession under 10(5), gratuity under 10(10), commuted pension under 10(10A), leave encashment under 10(10AA), house rent allowance under 10(13A), other special allowances under 10(14), and a line for any other exemption under section 10.

Row 3 is the salary from the current employer after those come off.

Row 4 is the deductions under section 16: the standard deduction under 16(ia), entertainment allowance under 16(ii), and tax on employment under 16(iii).

Below that sit the Chapter VI-A deductions, with the 80C group totalled separately from the ones that carry a gross amount, a qualifying amount and a deductible amount as three distinct figures. Those three are not the same number, and a certificate that shows only one of them is the usual source of an employee believing they claimed more than they did.

Three checks catch nearly everything.

Does Part B agree with the Annexure II that was filed? If it does not, TRACES is not the problem.

Is the regime answer at the top right for this employee? It governs every row beneath it, and it is a single character.

Is the certificate for the right employer and the right year? This matters more than it sounds. The safe way to attach a downloaded certificate to an employee is by PAN and never by name, because two employees with similar names in one payroll is ordinary and a wrong attachment is not caught by anything downstream. A file showing another employer TAN, or another year, should be refused outright rather than filed.

Greenote matches a downloaded certificate to an employee by PAN only, taking the PAN from the file contents or failing that from the name TRACES gave it, and refuses one that carries a different TAN or year.

A certificate given to an employee is signed by the person responsible for deducting tax, by hand or with a digital signature.

The practical trap is joining. If Part A and Part B are two PDFs and you combine them into one certificate, a digital signature that was on either file does not survive the join, because joining changes the file. The combined certificate has to be signed as a combined certificate.

This is worth saying to whoever in the office does the joining, because a stack of certificates that look signed and are not is only discovered when an employee needs to rely on one.

The salary certificate is renumbered along with everything else. From tax year 2026-27 it is Form No. 130, under rule 215(1) of the Income-tax Rules, 2026.

Two changes matter beyond the number.

First, the lettering moves. In Form 130 the salary, the exemptions, the deductions, the tax and the relief are Part C (Annexure-I), not Part B. Part A names the employer and the employee. So "Part B" and "the salary part" stop meaning the same thing, exactly when a practice is handling both years at once.

Second, the rule itself now says where the certificate comes from. Form 130, all of it, is generated and downloaded from the portal specified by the Director General of Income-tax (Systems) and then given to the employee. What was a procedure in a notification is now in the rule.

The first Form 130 falls due in 2027, and its own salary annexure, carrying 2025 Act section references rather than 17(1) and 16(ia), is not something any practice should assume maps one to one onto the old layout. The full form and section mapping is here.