Payroll and TDS Excel Workbook for Indian HR teams
Paste your employees’ salary structure in bulk. The workbook splits every CTC into components, runs the full income-tax computation under both regimes, works out the monthly TDS under Section 392, and hands you a payroll register, payslips and a Form 130 summary. No macros, no add-ins, no subscription.
Download the workbook (.xlsx)Most payroll templates floating around stop at a salary breakup. This one carries the calculation all the way through to the number you actually need on the 7th of every month: how much tax to deposit, per employee, with a working you can hand to an auditor. It is built for Tax Year 2026-27, the first payroll year run under the Income-tax Act, 2025.
Bulk inputOld and new regimeSection 392 TDSForm 130 readyEPF, ESI, PTPayslipsNo macros
What you get inside
Employee Master
The only sheet you fill. One row per employee, 33 columns, dropdowns for regime and state. Paste 100 people in one go.
Salary Structure
Splits each CTC into Basic, HRA, employer PF, employer NPS, gratuity provision and a balancing special allowance.
Tax Computation
Fifty columns, one per step, so a reviewer can follow the arithmetic from gross salary to monthly TDS without guessing.
Payroll Register
The month’s pay sheet with earnings, deductions and net pay. Change the month on Settings and it recalculates.
Attendance
Loss-of-pay days by employee by month. Earnings prorate on paid days automatically.
Payslip
Pick an employee code and print. Company header, earnings, deductions, net pay and the annual tax position.
TDS Summary
Month-by-month tax payable against what you actually deposited, with every challan and return due date already filled in.
Form 130 Summary
Year-end position per employee. This is what you reconcile the TRACES-generated certificate against.
Tax Rates
Every slab, cap, threshold and rate in one editable table. If the law changes, edit one cell.
How to use it
- Fill in Settings. Company name, TAN, PAN, address, and the payroll month you are processing.
- Paste your salary structure into Employee Master. Employee code, name, PAN, CTC, the Basic and HRA percentages you use, the regime each employee declared, and their investment declarations. Only the yellow cells take input.
- Read the answer off Tax Computation. The last column is the monthly TDS for each employee. The Settings sheet totals it for you.
- Enter loss-of-pay days on Attendance if anyone had unpaid leave. Blank means a full month.
- Print from Payroll Register and Payslip, then use TDS Summary to track your challans against the due dates.
Nothing to enable. This is a plain .xlsx with ordinary formulas. There are no macros, so your IT policy will not block it and you will not see a security warning bar. It opens the same way in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice.
What changed for Tax Year 2026-27
1 April 2026 is when the Income-tax Act, 2025 took over from the 1961 Act. For payroll, the arithmetic is largely unchanged but almost every section number and form number you have been quoting for years is now different. The workbook uses the new references throughout.
| What you knew | What it is now | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Section 192 | Section 392 | TDS on salary. The employer’s obligation to deduct at average rates. |
| Form 16 | Form 130 | The salary TDS certificate. Three parts, plus a senior-citizen annexure. |
| Form 24Q | Form 138 | The quarterly salary TDS return. |
| Form 12BB | Form 124 | The employee’s declaration of deductions and investments. |
| Form 10-IEA | Form 122 | The employee’s declaration of which regime they have chosen. |
Collect Form 122 before you deduct anything. The new regime is the default. If an employee wants the old regime, you need their declaration on record before the first deduction of the year, otherwise you are deducting on the wrong basis for twelve months and correcting it in March.
Rates for the year
Budget 2026 left the slabs, the standard deduction, the Section 87A rebate, surcharge and cess exactly where they were. Under the new regime:
| Taxable income | Rate |
|---|---|
| Up to ₹4,00,000 | Nil |
| ₹4,00,001 to ₹8,00,000 | 5% |
| ₹8,00,001 to ₹12,00,000 | 10% |
| ₹12,00,001 to ₹16,00,000 | 15% |
| ₹16,00,001 to ₹20,00,000 | 20% |
| ₹20,00,001 to ₹24,00,000 | 25% |
| Above ₹24,00,000 | 30% |
Standard deduction is ₹75,000 in the new regime and ₹50,000 in the old. The Section 87A rebate of up to ₹60,000 wipes out the tax on taxable income up to ₹12,00,000, which is why a salaried employee earning ₹12.75 lakh pays nothing. Just above that line, marginal relief caps the tax at the amount by which income exceeds ₹12 lakh, and the workbook applies it. Surcharge runs 10, 15 and 25 per cent at ₹50 lakh, ₹1 crore and ₹2 crore, with 37 per cent reachable only in the old regime, and marginal relief is computed at every threshold. Cess is 4 per cent on top.
A worked example
Three employees ship with the workbook so you can see the chain working before you delete them and paste your own. These are the actual figures the file produces.
| Employee | Rahul | Priya | Imran |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regime | New | Old | New |
| Annual CTC | 12,00,000 | 18,00,000 | 24,00,000 |
| Basic | 6,00,000 | 9,00,000 | 12,00,000 |
| HRA | 2,40,000 | 3,60,000 | 4,80,000 |
| Annual gross earnings | 11,49,540 | 17,35,110 | 20,78,280 |
| HRA exemption | Nil | 2,70,000 | Nil |
| Standard deduction | 75,000 | 50,000 | 75,000 |
| Chapter VI-A | Nil | 2,25,000 | 1,20,000 |
| Taxable income | 10,74,540 | 11,87,610 | 18,83,280 |
| Tax at slab rates | 47,454 | 1,68,783 | 1,76,656 |
| Rebate u/s 87A | 47,454 | Nil | Nil |
| Total tax liability | Nil | 1,75,534 | 1,83,722 |
| Monthly TDS u/s 392 | Nil | 14,628 | 15,310 |
| Monthly gross | 95,795 | 1,44,593 | 1,73,190 |
| Monthly net pay | 93,795 | 1,27,957 | 1,45,880 |
Rahul pays nothing because the rebate covers his whole liability. Priya is on the old regime and it earns its keep: her HRA exemption of ₹2,70,000 plus ₹2,25,000 of Chapter VI-A deductions bring a ₹17.35 lakh salary down to ₹11.87 lakh taxable. Imran is on the new regime with employer NPS at 10 per cent of Basic, which is deductible under Section 80CCD(2) even in the new regime, worth ₹1,20,000 off his taxable income.
The one deduction the new regime still allows. Employer contribution to NPS under Section 80CCD(2), up to 14 per cent of Basic. For a mid-to-senior employee it is often the difference between paying tax and not. If you are restructuring salaries this year, that is the lever worth pulling. Our Salary Tax Optimiser works out the ideal structure for a single employee.
The compliance calendar the workbook fills in
| Quarter | Months | Challan due | Form 138 due |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 | April, May, June 2026 | 7th of the following month | 31 July 2026 |
| Q2 | July, August, September 2026 | 7th of the following month | 31 October 2026 |
| Q3 | October, November, December 2026 | 7th of the following month | 31 January 2027 |
| Q4 | January, February, March 2027 | 7th, except March which is 30 April 2027 | 31 May 2027 |
Form 130 goes to employees by 15 June 2027. It has to be downloaded from TRACES after the Q4 Form 138 is processed. A certificate you typed yourself is not valid, no matter how correct the numbers are.
Miss a deposit and interest runs at 1 per cent a month from the date the tax was deductible to the date you deducted it, then 1.5 per cent a month from deduction to deposit. A late Form 138 costs ₹200 a day, capped at the TDS amount. The TDS Summary sheet shows you the due date against every month so the dates are in front of you rather than in a calendar you forgot to check.
How the workbook is put together
Two sheets drive everything. Employee Master is where your data goes. Tax Rates holds every statutory number the file uses, in one editable table: slabs for both regimes, basic exemption by age band, standard deduction, the 87A thresholds, surcharge bands, the 80C and 80CCD(1B) ceilings, EPF and ESI rates and ceilings, the gratuity provisioning rate, professional tax by state, and the payroll calendar. Nothing is hard-coded inside a formula. If a rate changes mid-year, you edit one cell and the whole workbook follows.
The Tax Computation sheet deliberately shows its working. Rather than one clever formula producing a number, there is a column for each step: gross salary, HRA exemption, standard deduction, professional tax, Chapter VI-A by section, taxable income, slab tax, rebate, surcharge threshold, surcharge, marginal relief, cess, and the final liability. Five columns in the middle are the working for surcharge marginal relief, greyed in the header so nobody mistakes them for outputs. When an assessing officer or your auditor asks how you arrived at a figure, you point at the row.
What it handles
- Both regimes, per employee, on whatever each one declared on Form 122
- Basic exemption by age band for old-regime employees, including senior and super-senior citizens
- HRA exemption as the least of the three limbs, metro and non-metro
- EPF on full Basic or on Basic capped at ₹15,000 a month, your choice per employee
- ESI where monthly gross is within the ₹21,000 ceiling, employee and employer share
- Professional tax by state, deducted from pay in both regimes but allowed against income only in the old
- Section 87A rebate including marginal relief just above ₹12 lakh
- Surcharge at every band with marginal relief computed at each threshold, and the new regime’s 25 per cent cap
- Previous employer salary and TDS for mid-year joiners
- A 20 per cent floor where an employee’s PAN is missing or malformed, flagged in its own column
- Mid-year changes: adjust the months remaining and the balance re-spreads over what is left
What it does not do
- It does not value perquisites. Enter the taxable value you have already computed.
- It does not compute relief under Section 89 for arrears. Work that out separately and enter it.
- It does not generate the Form 138 upload file or run the FVU. For that, see our TDS Return Preparation Tool.
- Professional tax amounts in the state table are indicative. PT is a state levy that changes often, so check yours and edit the cell.
Frequently asked questions
Is the workbook actually free?
Yes. Download it, use it for your company, edit it, keep it. There is no trial, no signup and no per-employee charge.
How many employees can it handle?
100 rows are pre-formulated. To add more, select the last row on each calculating sheet and drag it down. Every formula uses relative row references so it extends cleanly. Past roughly 500 employees an Excel file stops being the right tool and you should be looking at payroll software.
Will it work in Google Sheets?
Yes. Upload it to Drive and open with Sheets. The formulas are all standard functions. The Indian number format and some cell styling may render differently, and the print layout of the payslip is tuned for Excel.
Does it have macros?
No. It is a plain .xlsx with ordinary formulas, so there is nothing to enable and no security prompt. That is deliberate — most corporate IT policies block macro-enabled workbooks arriving by email.
How does it spread the tax across the year?
Section 392 requires the estimated annual liability to be deducted in roughly equal instalments over the year. The workbook takes the annual liability, subtracts anything already deducted and anything the previous employer deducted, and divides the balance by the months remaining. Change the months-remaining figure as the year progresses and it re-spreads automatically.
An employee joined in October. What do I enter?
Their annual CTC as if they had worked the full year is not what you want. Enter the CTC they will actually earn for the part-year, put their previous employer’s taxable salary and TDS in those two columns, and set months remaining to 6. The workbook does the rest.
What if an employee has not given me their PAN?
Leave the PAN column blank and the workbook flags it and applies a 20 per cent floor on the taxable income, in its own column so you can see exactly what the shortfall costs. Chase the PAN — deducting at 20 per cent is a poor outcome for the employee and a compliance headache for you.
Which regime should I put employees on?
That is the employee’s choice, not yours, and you deduct on whatever they declare on Form 122. As a rule of thumb the new regime wins for most people because of the ₹75,000 standard deduction and the ₹12 lakh rebate, while the old regime still wins where there is significant rent in a metro plus a full ₹1.5 lakh of 80C and a home loan. Point employees at our old versus new regime calculator so they can decide for themselves.
The rates changed. Is the file now useless?
No. Open the Tax Rates sheet and edit the number. Every slab, cap, threshold and rate lives there and nothing is buried inside a formula, so the file survives a Budget.
Can I use it for a previous year?
You can, by editing the slabs and the standard deduction on the Tax Rates sheet to that year’s figures. The section and form references in the labels will still say 392 and 130, which only apply from 1 April 2026, so treat those as cosmetic if you go backwards.
Download the workbook
Eleven sheets, 100 employee rows, every rate editable. Built for Tax Year 2026-27.
Get the Excel fileBuilt and checked against the slabs and thresholds in force for Tax Year 2026-27 (1 April 2026 to 31 March 2027). Every calculation in the workbook was tested against an independent reference implementation before release. This is a computational aid for payroll teams, not tax advice — verify the output against the law as it stands on your payroll date and have a qualified professional review before filing.
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