Your 26AS Shows More Income Than You Earned

You earned about Rs. 18 lakh last year. Your AIS says Rs. 22 lakh. Nobody paid you Rs. 22 lakh, you have the bank statements to prove it, and the return you are about to file is going to disagree with the department’s own record by four lakh rupees.

For an Indian freelancer this is usually not an error and usually not fraud. It is a difference in what is being measured. The department is looking at what your clients and platforms paid out; you are looking at what landed in your account. Between those two numbers sit platform fees, GST, reimbursements and sometimes the same engagement counted twice. This page works through them in the order they actually occur.

Cause 1: your marketplace reports gross, and pays you net

If any of your income comes through Upwork, Fiverr, Toptal or a similar marketplace, this is almost certainly your answer, and it accounts for the largest gaps.

Under Section 194-O, the e-commerce operator deducts TDS at 1% on the gross consideration for the services supplied through it — the amount the client paid, before the platform takes its own commission. What reaches your bank is that gross figure minus the platform fee minus the TDS. The statement records the top of that chain. You experience the bottom.

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The platform’s fee is an expense you paid, not income you never received. That is the whole difference, and it is why the correct fix is an accounting one rather than a correction request.

The consequence that catches people out is presumptive taxation. Section 44ADA computes your income as 50% of gross receipts. If you have been running that calculation on your payouts rather than on the gross consideration, you have declared less than the statement shows, and the difference is exactly your platform fees. Where the amounts are material, this is worth putting in front of your CA rather than deciding alone — the treatment of marketplace commission is the single most consequential number in a platform-heavy freelance return.

Cause 2: GST is sitting inside the reported amount

If you are GST-registered and invoice Rs. 1,00,000 plus Rs. 18,000 GST, some deductors report the whole Rs. 1,18,000 as the amount paid or credited. The GST was never your income — it was collected on the government’s behalf and paid onward — so an eighteen per cent overstatement appears across your whole year’s billing with no error anywhere in your books.

Whether this is your client’s mistake or yours turns on one thing, and CBDT Circular 23/2017 is explicit about it. Where GST is shown separately on the invoice, TDS is deducted on the value of the service excluding GST — the tax is a statutory levy you collect on the government’s behalf, not your income. A deductor withholding and reporting on the tax-inclusive total in that case is over-deducting, and it is worth raising.

Cause 3: the same work counted twice

Two mechanisms can report the same engagement:

• Platform and end client both deduct. The marketplace deducts under 194-O, and the end client — not realising the platform has already done it — also deducts under 194J. One piece of work, two entries, two gross amounts.
• A single project reported across quarters. An advance in one quarter and the balance in another can be reported in a way that looks like two separate engagements.

Both are visible the moment you lay your own invoice list against the statement — the duplicate has no second invoice behind it.

Cause 4: reimbursements billed at cost

Travel, software licences and subcontractor costs re-billed to a client at cost appear in the statement as amounts paid to you, because they were. They are receipts, and they carry matching expenses. The gap they create is real and it is explained by your expense side, not by an error in the statement.

Finding which one it is

Every cause above resolves the same way: put your own invoices next to the statement and see which entries have nothing behind them, which have more behind them than you recorded, and which are duplicates of each other.

When to submit AIS feedback — and what it does not do

AIS carries a feedback mechanism: against an entry you can record that the information is a duplicate of another entry, that it relates to a different PAN or a different year, or that it is not fully correct. As of August 2026 this is done from the annual information statement area of the e-filing portal, against the individual entry.

Two things to understand before you use it.

• Feedback is your statement, not a correction. It records your position against the reported information. It does not rewrite what the reporting entity filed.
• It does not touch your TDS credit. Credit is given under Section 199 read with Rule 37BA on the basis of the deductor’s statement. If a deduction is missing or wrong, AIS feedback will not release it — that needs a correction statement from the deductor. Those are a different problem entirely.

A note on which year you are in

For FY 2025-26 the statements are Form 26AS and AIS, and deductions cite 194-series sections. For income earned on or after 1 April 2026 both statements become Form 168 and deductions cite Section 393(1) with a Table Serial No. reference. CBDT’s mapping treats 26AS and AIS as the same statement going forward, so the cross-check described here changes shape — the full mapping is here.

An over-reporting statement is one of six things that commonly go wrong with a deduction. The overview of what a client’s TDS deduction means covers the others.