Your crypto TDS doesn't match Form 26AS or the AIS
Three numbers, three different answers, and none of them is necessarily wrong. Here is what each one is actually measuring — and which one belongs in your return.
You add up the 1% TDS shown in your exchange statements. You open Form 26AS. The figures do not agree. Then you run the numbers yourself and get a third answer.
This is normal, and in most cases nothing has gone wrong. The three figures are answers to three different questions.
| Source | What it is actually telling you |
|---|---|
| Your exchange statement | What that one exchange deducted, on the trades that one exchange can see. |
| Form 26AS / AIS | What was actually deducted and deposited against your PAN, by everyone, and reached the department. |
| The rule applied to your year | What the 1% should have come to on your combined sale value across every venue. |
The trap: two exchanges, neither one deducting
The 1% under Section 194S — renumbered to Section 393(1) of the Income-tax Act 2025 for transfers from 1 April 2026 — only starts once your sale value for the financial year passes a threshold. For most individuals that threshold is ₹50,000; for others it is ₹10,000.
The threshold is yours. The visibility is not.
What goes wrong
Say you sell ₹40,000 on one exchange and ₹40,000 on another, in the same year.
| Exchange A | Exchange B | You | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sale value it can see | ₹40,000 | ₹40,000 | ₹80,000 |
| Past the ₹50,000 threshold? | No | No | Yes |
| TDS deducted | ₹0 | ₹0 | ₹0 |
Neither exchange did anything wrong. Both applied the rule correctly to what was in front of them. Your Form 26AS shows nothing, and you are still the person who crossed the threshold.
The same thing happens in reverse, less painfully: sell heavily on one exchange and lightly on another and you can end up with more withheld than the year actually required.
The smaller reason the figures differ
When a single sale is the one that takes you past the threshold, there are two defensible ways to handle it. Some exchanges deduct 1% on the whole crossing transaction. The more conservative reading — the one this site's calculator uses — deducts only on the portion above the threshold.
This is a difference in how much credit lands in your 26AS and when. It is not a difference in what you owe. Your liability is settled by the 30% computation, not by the withholding.
Which number goes in your return
The short version
- Claim credit for what is in Form 26AS / the AIS. That is the money the department has actually received on your behalf. You cannot claim credit for tax nobody deducted, however correct the arithmetic.
- Compute your liability on your real gains. 30% plus 4% cess on each winning disposal, whatever was or was not withheld along the way.
- Pay the difference. If less was withheld than the rule required, the balance is yours to pay on filing. Under-deduction by an exchange does not reduce the tax.
- Or claim the refund. If more was withheld than you owe — entirely possible in a losing year, because TDS is charged on sale value while tax is charged on gains — you are in a refund position.
Why the gap is worth closing before you file, not after
Exchanges operating in India report TDS deducted under Section 194S against your PAN, independently of your return. Reporting by exchanges is a statutory obligation in its own right — Section 285BAA, carried into the Income-tax Act 2025 as Section 509. The department therefore holds a record of the transaction before you file anything.
The practical consequence, reported through the 2026 filing season: a return showing no crypto income while an exchange has reported TDS against the same PAN is a visible mismatch, and it is the kind of gap that attracts a query. The asymmetry matters — a mismatch in the department's favour tends to surface; one in yours does not surface at all.
How to reconcile it yourself
- Get every export, not the convenient ones. Every exchange, every wallet, the whole financial year — 1 April to 31 March. A venue you forgot is the single most common cause of a total that will not reconcile.
- Total your sale value across all of them. Not your profit — the gross value of everything you sold. That is what the threshold is measured against.
- Compare against Form 26AS and the AIS. Both, because they are not always populated identically. Look at the entries per deductor, not just the total.
- Account for each difference before you accept it. A missing exchange, a threshold applied per venue, a whole-transaction deduction, a trade in the wrong financial year because of a timezone — each produces a specific, explainable gap. An unexplained gap is the one to worry about.
- File on your real gains and claim credit for what was actually deposited.
Where a calculator helps, and where it does not
A tool can total your year across every export, apply the threshold once to the combination, and show you which trades produced which part of the figure — which turns "the numbers don't match" into a specific list of differences you can check. That is a reconciliation job, and it is what the calculator on this site is for.
What a tool cannot do is tell you what your exchange deposited. Only Form 26AS and the AIS know that. The point of computing your own figure is not to replace them; it is to know what the right answer looks like before you accept theirs.
Timezones move trades between years
A sale late on 31 March or early on 1 April can land in either financial year depending on the timezone your export was generated in — and exchange exports do not agree on this. A trade in the wrong year changes both your threshold arithmetic and which return it belongs in. Check what your export declares about its own timestamps before trusting a total near the boundary.
The honest caveats
Two of the points above rest on readings, not on settled text. Whether the threshold is properly measured per deductor or across the taxpayer's whole year, and whether the crossing transaction is sliced or deducted in full, are both matters where practitioners differ. This site takes the conservative reading of each and says so rather than presenting a choice as a rule. Where real money rides on the difference, that is a question for a qualified professional with your actual figures in front of them.
Work out your own position
Drop your exchange exports into the calculator and open up every number it produces. It runs entirely in your browser — no account, no upload, and your files never leave your device.