Income Tax Return Filing for Salaried Individuals in Lahore

Your employer deducting tax is not the same as you filing

Every month your employer deducts tax from your salary and deposits it against your CNIC. That is withholding, and it is entirely separate from filing. If you never file a return, that tax stays with FBR, you never appear on the Active Taxpayer List, and you pay the non-filer rate on everything else you do, your bank profit, your vehicle token, your next property transaction. You end up paying twice for the privilege of not filling in a form.

The refund most salaried people never claim

Tax is deducted from a salaried person at more points than they realise. The obvious one is payroll. The less obvious ones add up: withholding on bank profit, on cash withdrawals if you were off the ATL, advance tax on your vehicle token, tax collected at property transfer, tax on your children's school fee above the threshold. Every one of those is a credit against your annual liability, but only if it is claimed on your return.

The most common single miss we see is a person who was a non-filer for part of the year, paid 0.8% on cash withdrawals and double token tax, then filed a bare-bones return that claimed only the payroll deduction. That is money left on the table. Bring us the bank statements and we will find it.

The wealth statement is not optional

A resident individual filing a return is required to file a wealth statement under section 116, and it has to reconcile: opening wealth, plus income, minus expenses, equals closing wealth. People treat this as a formality and put in round numbers. It is precisely the mismatch between a modest declared income and an unexplained jump in assets that triggers a section 122 amendment notice two years later. We prepare it as a real statement, and if there is a gap we would rather talk to you about it now than explain it to a Commissioner later.

The 30 September deadline, and what happens after it

For salaried individuals the return for a tax year is due by 30 September following the June year end. FBR sometimes extends this, sometimes does not, and the extension is usually announced late. Filing after the due date puts you in the "late filer" category, which carries higher withholding rates on property transactions than an on-time filer, a distinction that costs real money at the sub-registrar's office.

If you have already missed it, the position is recoverable. See late and previous-year returns.

What we need from you, honestly

The single document that unblocks everything is the salary and tax deduction certificate from your employer's HR or finance department. Ask for it by name, "annual tax deduction certificate for tax year ending 30 June". Most companies in Lahore issue these on request within a day or two. Send us that and we can begin; the bank statements and asset details can follow while we work.

How online filing on IRIS actually works

The return is filed electronically on FBR's IRIS portal, there is no paper route for a salaried individual. The filing is a declaration under section 114, submitted together with the section 116 wealth statement, and the "tax year" it covers runs from 1 July to 30 June: tax year 2026 means the year that ended on 30 June 2026, which confuses almost everyone the first time. If tax is payable on the computation, it is deposited through a PSID (payment slip ID) generated on the portal and paid at a bank or through mobile banking, producing a CPR, the computerised payment receipt that is your legal proof of payment. Once submitted, IRIS issues an acknowledgement; keep it, because that acknowledgement plus the CPR is what you produce if your filing is ever questioned. We handle all of this inside your own IRIS account, and both documents come back to you as PDFs.

Your employer's withholding under section 149

Employers deduct salary tax under section 149, computing it on your estimated annual salary at the published slab rates and adjusting through the year. Two practical consequences follow. First, the monthly deduction on your payslip is an estimate, job changes, bonuses, increments and months without pay all push the total away from your true annual liability, which is exactly why year-end filing so often produces a refund. Second, your employer files withholding statements with FBR, so the tax deducted from you is already visible against your CNIC before you file anything. The return does not tell FBR something new about your salary; it claims what is already sitting there in your name. You can estimate your own position in advance with our salary tax calculator, which applies the current slab rates and shows the working slab by slab.