Linking Aadhaar with PAN: check first, then the parts nobody explains

Check whether you are already linked, before doing anything else

This is the first section for a reason, and the reason is the order of payment rather than a claim about how many readers are already linked. People do arrive here already linked — through an earlier filing, through a PAN issued on an Aadhaar-based application, or through something done years ago and forgotten — and we have no way of knowing how often, so this page will not put a number on it. What matters is that the check is free and the fee is not, and the fee comes first in the sequence.

The check sits on the Income Tax e-filing portal under “Link Aadhaar/View Status” in the Quick Links panel on the home page. It needs no login and no payment: you click through to the View Status tile, supply the PAN and the Aadhaar number, and the portal displays a message about the state of play. The same status is also visible after logging in, from the dashboard or under My Profile.

If it says you are linked, you are finished, and the rest of this page is background. If it says you are not, read the exemptions section next, because you may not be required to link at all — and then, only then, the process.

One caution about the answer you get. The status page reports what the Income Tax Department’s records say. If it says linked and a bank, an employer or a deductor is nevertheless treating your PAN as inoperative, that is a real and specific problem with its own answer further down this page, and the answer is not to submit the request again.

Which provision actually requires this, and who it applies to

The requirement is that a person who has been allotted a PAN must intimate their Aadhaar number to the Department. It now sits in section 262(6) of the Income-tax Act, 2025, which came into force on 1 April 2026 and replaced section 139AA of the Income-tax Act, 1961. Section 262(6)(b) provides that where a person fails to intimate their Aadhaar number, “the Permanent Account Number allotted to that person shall be made inoperative in such manner as may be prescribed”.

The manner is prescribed by rule 162 of the Income-tax Rules, 2026, notified by CBDT Notification No. 22/2026, G.S.R. 198(E) dated 20 March 2026 and in force from the same day as the Act. Rule 162 does three things: it makes the PAN inoperative, it lists what follows while it is, and it gives the Department thirty days to restore it once the Aadhaar number is intimated and the fee paid.

Two things follow that are worth stating plainly. The first is that nothing about the substance changed on 1 April 2026 — the same requirement, the same ₹1,000, the same thirty days. The second is that essentially every page you will read about this, including the Income Tax Department’s own help pages and the PAN service provider’s own article, was still citing the repealed provisions when this page was last checked. If you have just read three pages about section 139AA, you were reading about this, under its old numbering.

On who it applies to: the Department states it as “every individual who was allotted a PAN as on 1st July 2017 and is eligible to obtain Aadhaar”. The two limbs both matter. A PAN allotted after that date was generally allotted against an Aadhaar in the first place. And eligibility to obtain Aadhaar is what carves out several of the exempt categories below.

Are you exempt? Four categories, and how to tell

The Income Tax Department mentions that exemptions exist and, on its main topic page, lists them. Its step-by-step help page — the one most readers actually land on — does not, which is one of the six things that page leaves out. Here they are, with what each actually means in practice.

The process, as a sequence rather than a screenshot walkthrough

Three things happen, in a fixed order, and the order is the part people get wrong: the fee is paid first, it has to settle, and only then can the link request go in. Submitting the request before the payment has reflected is the single most common cause of a request that appears to vanish.

1. 1Check the status. Free, no login, and it may end the exercise here.
2. 2Pay the fee through e-Pay Tax on the e-filing portal. The Department’s own manual routes you from Link Aadhaar → Continue to Pay Through e-Pay Tax → selecting the applicable Act, which is now the Income-tax Act, 2025 → an OTP → the Income Tax tile → the relevant tax year, payment type “Other Receipts (500)” and sub-type “Fee for delay in Linking Pan with Aadhaar”. The amount is pre-filled. Note that the OTP at this step goes to whatever valid mobile number you enter on the payment screen — the manual says “any valid mobile number” — and not necessarily to the number registered against your Aadhaar.
3. 3Wait for the payment to reflect. The Department’s help page says payment verification requires four to five working days before the link request is submitted. This is not a formality — a request submitted before the challan is visible to the system is a request that fails for a reason nobody explains to you.
4. 4Submit the link request, either from the Link Aadhaar quick link without logging in, or from Profile after logging in. You supply the PAN and the Aadhaar number, the portal validates them and confirms that your payment details are verified, you enter the details it asks for, and you confirm with a six-digit OTP sent to the mobile number you gave on the previous screen.
5. 5Note the acknowledgement. It is the only evidence you have that a request was made on a particular date, and it is what you will quote if anything afterwards goes wrong.
6. 6Check the status again after a few days. Do not submit a second request because the first has not shown up yet — a duplicate does not accelerate anything, and the portal’s own answer to a request whose payment is not yet verified is to wait rather than to resubmit.

The fee: what it is, and which provision now charges it

The fee for a late intimation is ₹1,000. That figure has not moved since June 2024. What has moved is where it comes from: it is now prescribed by rule 158(10) of the Income-tax Rules, 2026, which provides that a person required to intimate an Aadhaar number under section 262(6)(a) who failed to do so by 30 June 2023 is liable, at the time of the later intimation, to pay a fee of ₹1,000.

Before 1 April 2026 the same ₹1,000 was charged under section 234H of the Income-tax Act, 1961, read with rule 114(5A) of the Income-tax Rules, 1962. Both are repealed. If you are reading a page that tells you to pay ₹1,000 under section 234H, the amount is right and the citation is stale — including, when this page was checked, on the PAN service provider’s own website.

The fee is paid before the request, not after it, and it is not refunded if the request fails or if you turn out to have been exempt. That is the whole argument for the status check at the top of this page.

One more figure belongs here, because it is the answer to a case further down. Where the ordinary linking route keeps failing on a mismatch, the Department’s own FAQ points to biometric authentication at a dedicated centre of a PAN service provider — Protean or UTIITSL. What it says to bring is the PAN, the Aadhaar and the copy of the ₹1,000 fee-paid challan, and it adds that the centre charges its own “requisite biometric authentication charge”, which it does not state. So the biometric route is not a second ₹1,000; it is a separate charge set by the provider, and its own website is where the current figure is. This page does not give one.

What “inoperative PAN” actually means — the consequences, from the rule itself

This is the section every competitor page hand-waves, usually into a sentence about the PAN becoming “invalid”. It does not become invalid. It becomes inoperative, which is a defined state with a defined list of consequences, and the list is shorter and more specific than the panic around it suggests.

Rule 162(3) of the Income-tax Rules, 2026 sets out what follows during the period the PAN is inoperative. Everything below comes from the rule.

When the request fails: every path, and what to do about each

This is the section that decides whether this page is worth anything. The Income Tax Department’s own help page goes as far as a phone number. The commercial pages go as far as “correct the mismatch”. Neither tells you which record to correct, what happens when the portal and your bank disagree, or what to do when the money has left your account and nothing has happened.

The six situations below cover almost everything that actually goes wrong.

• The names do not match. The most common failure by a distance, and the one with the most expensive wrong answer — because changing the wrong record costs you one of only two name updates Aadhaar allows in a lifetime. The resolver and the decision tree on this page exist for this.
• The dates of birth do not match. Less discussed, particularly where Aadhaar holds only a year of birth, or holds the first of January as a placeholder for a person enrolled without a birth certificate. Aadhaar allows a date-of-birth change once in a lifetime and only at an enrolment centre, and what evidence it takes depends on what UIDAI already holds — so it is the change worth planning before spending.
• The request has shown as pending for days. Check the challan first. The Department’s own note is that where the fee has been paid but the payment details are not yet found, the thing to do is wait four to five working days and then submit — not to pay again.
• The portal says linked; a bank, employer or deductor says otherwise. Two different records are being read. Get the status page itself — not your memory of it — in front of whoever is refusing, and if a higher rate has already been applied, Circular 9/2025 is what you send the deductor.
• It is linked to the wrong PAN, or to somebody else’s. This is not something the portal will let you undo. The Department’s own manual says to contact the Jurisdictional Assessing Officer for a delink request, and that is genuinely the route — it is an offline problem with an offline answer.
• The fee was paid and the linking did not go through. The challan is the asset here — the Department tells you to carry a copy of it to a biometric authentication centre, which is at least an official acknowledgement that a paid challan survives a failed attempt. What the Department does not publish is a rule about reusing a challan on a fresh online request, so this page states what it does say and no more: keep the challan, and if the portal asks you to pay again when your payment has already been verified, that is a question for the helpdesk rather than a second payment.

The date-of-birth mismatch, which nobody writes about

Names get all the attention. Dates of birth quietly account for a large share of the refusals, and they are harder, because unlike a name a date of birth cannot simply be corrected to whatever is right.

Three shapes recur. The first is a PAN holding a full date and an Aadhaar holding only a year, which happens to a great many people who enrolled without a birth certificate. The second is an Aadhaar showing the first of January, used as a placeholder at enrolment where only a year was known. The third is a genuine transcription error in one of the two.

What makes this different from a name problem is that the Aadhaar side is a once-in-a-lifetime field and cannot be done online at all — UIDAI says the feature is not supported on its portal, so it is an Aadhaar Seva Kendra visit. Which document will move it depends on what UIDAI already holds: where the recorded date is “declared” or “approximate”, an adult may use any accepted proof of date of birth and anyone under 18 must use a birth certificate; where it is already “verified” on a birth certificate, only a corrected certificate with the same registration number from the same registrar will do. Where the single update has already been spent, UIDAI’s Regional Office exception process is the route.

The practical sequence: establish which of the two is right, using your birth certificate rather than your memory; correct the one that is wrong; wait for it to be reflected rather than assuming; then submit the linking request again. And if the error originates in the birth certificate itself, correct that first — a correction made downstream of an uncorrected source has to be made twice.

What happens after you link a PAN that had gone inoperative

Rule 162(2) is the provision that matters here: where a person has intimated their Aadhaar number after paying the fee, the PAN “shall become operative within thirty days from the date of intimation”. Thirty days is the outer limit rather than a promise of thirty; but it is the only sourced figure, and any page telling you it is instant is inventing.

What comes back automatically: refunds can issue again, interest accrues again from that point, and deduction and collection revert to the ordinary rates.

What does not come back automatically, and this is the part worth knowing. Interest for the period the PAN was inoperative is not paid retrospectively — that period is simply gone. Tax already deducted at the higher rate does not reverse itself either: it sits in your account with the Department and is claimed through your return, or corrected by the deductor if Circular 9/2025 applies to the payment.

What this page will not tell you is that you must go and notify every bank, deductor and institution by hand. No official source says a notification step is required, and how quickly any given institution re-reads a PAN status is its own affair. The practical point is narrower and defensible: if a particular bank or deductor was actually applying the consequence to you, it is worth checking that it has stopped, and the status page is what settles the argument if it has not.

Six things the Income Tax Department’s own help page does not tell you

Said plainly, because the official page is the single biggest competitor for this question and it is procedurally excellent. It is the best walkthrough of the screens that exists, and matching it is table stakes. These are the six places it stops, and each one has a section on this page.

Worked examples