Salary Slip Generator — free payslip maker for India

📌 Statutory rates last reviewed 31 May 2026 · Maintained by the ToolAdda payroll tools team · Report an outdated rate

What is a salary slip (payslip)?

A salary slip is the document an employer issues each pay period showing exactly how an employee's pay was arrived at: every component earned, every amount deducted, and the net figure credited to their bank account.

It is not a courtesy. It is the employee's primary evidence of employment and income, and the employer's primary evidence of having paid wages correctly. Banks ask for three months of payslips before approving a home loan. Landlords ask for one. Visa officers ask for six. When an employee resigns, the payslip is what the next employer uses to benchmark the offer. When a labour inspector visits, the wage register and the wage slips are the first two things they ask to see.

The words salary slip, payslip, pay slip, wage slip and salary statement all describe the same document. Indian labour legislation tends to use "wage slip"; corporate HR tends to say "payslip". There is no legal difference between them.

Why a salary slip is legally required in India

Most Indian employers are under a positive legal obligation to issue wage slips. The obligation comes from several overlapping sources, which is why it is easy to miss:

• Payment of Wages Act, 1936 — Section 13A. Requires every employer to maintain registers and records showing the persons employed, the work performed, the wages paid to them and the deductions made from their wages, and to preserve those records.
• Minimum Wages (Central) Rules, 1950 — Rule 26(2). Requires the employer to issue wage slips to every employee at least one day before wages are disbursed, and Rule 26(4) requires the employer to obtain the employee's signature or thumb impression on the wage register and wage slip.
• Code on Wages, 2019 — Section 50. Consolidates the record-keeping regime across the earlier wage laws and requires every employer to maintain a register of persons employed, muster roll, wages and deductions, and to issue wage slips to the employees in the prescribed form.
• State Shops and Establishments Acts. Nearly every state's Shops & Establishments Act and rules impose their own wage-register and wage-slip requirements on commercial establishments, with their own prescribed forms and retention periods. This is usually the rule that actually binds an office-based startup.
• Factories Act, 1948. For factory establishments, adds its own register and record duties on top.

How to generate a salary slip online, step by step

1. Enter your company details once. Name, address, and optionally logo, CIN and GSTIN. Tick "Remember this company on this device" and you will never type it again.
2. Add the employee. Name, employee ID, designation, date of joining, PAN, UAN and bank account. The account number is masked to the last four digits on the printed slip by default.
3. Set the pay period and attendance. Month, year, pay date, total working days and loss-of-pay days. Paid days are calculated for you.
4. Enter earnings — or paste a CTC. Type Basic, HRA and allowances directly, or enter the annual CTC and press Split this CTC to have a standard structure generated.
5. Check the deductions. EPF, ESI and professional tax are computed from your inputs and the state you pick. Every one of them is editable, because real payroll always has exceptions. Enter TDS from your own computation.
6. Pick a template and download. Four layouts, live preview, then a text-based PDF — or press Print and save as PDF through your browser, which downloads no extra library at all.

What information must a salary slip contain?

Read together, the wage rules require the slip to make the wage calculation verifiable. In practice that means an Indian payslip should carry the following. Everything in this table is a field in the generator above.

Salary slip components explained — earnings

Basic salary is the anchor of the whole structure. EPF, gratuity, HRA exemption and often bonus and leave encashment are all calculated on Basic (or Basic + DA). Indian employers typically set Basic at 40–50% of CTC. Setting it artificially low to suppress PF cost is a well-known practice and a well-known compliance risk — the EPFO's position, backed by the Supreme Court's 2019 Vivekananda Vidyamandir ruling, is that allowances paid universally and ordinarily to all employees form part of "basic wages" for PF purposes regardless of what you label them.

Dearness allowance (DA) is an inflation-linked component, near-universal in government and PSU pay and in scheduled-employment minimum wages, and rarer in private companies. It counts as PF wages along with Basic.

House rent allowance (HRA) is conventionally 50% of Basic for employees in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, and 40% elsewhere — that convention comes from the exemption limits in Section 10(13A) of the Income-tax Act, not from labour law. The exemption is the least of: actual HRA received, rent paid minus 10% of Basic, or 50%/40% of Basic. It is only available under the old tax regime.

Conveyance allowance (commonly ₹1,600 a month) and medical allowance (commonly ₹1,250) are legacy amounts that lost their separate income-tax exemptions when the ₹50,000 standard deduction replaced them, but survive as structural habits in Indian payroll.

Special allowance is the balancing figure — whatever is left after the defined components are filled in. LTA, bonus (statutory bonus under the Payment of Bonus Act, 1965 is a minimum 8.33% of wages for employees drawing up to ₹21,000), overtime (payable at twice the ordinary wage rate under most Indian wage legislation) and incentives complete the picture. Use the custom rows in the tool for anything specific to your business — shift allowance, fuel reimbursement, attendance bonus, site allowance.

Salary slip components explained — deductions

The Payment of Wages Act permits only specified categories of deduction, which is exactly why every deduction on a payslip must be individually named. The usual set:

• Employee EPF — 12% of Basic + DA, discussed in detail below.
• Employee ESI — 0.75% of gross wages, only where the employee is covered.
• Professional tax — a state levy, from nil to a maximum of ₹2,500 per person per year.
• TDS under Section 192 — income tax withheld by the employer, entered manually here for reasons explained below.
• Labour Welfare Fund (LWF) — small periodic contributions in states such as Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Delhi and West Bengal, often deducted half-yearly or annually rather than monthly.
• Salary advance, loan EMI, notice pay recovery, canteen or asset recovery — permissible where authorised, and always to be shown separately rather than netted off an earning line.

Gross salary vs net salary vs CTC vs take-home

These four terms cause more confusion than anything else in Indian compensation, largely because only one of them is money you actually receive.

The gap between a headline CTC and the amount that lands in the bank is routinely 20–30%, which is why so many candidates feel misled by their first payslip. Nothing improper has happened — the employer's PF contribution and gratuity provision are genuine costs of employing you, they are just not yours to spend this month.

How to break up a CTC into a salary structure

Work outwards from CTC in this order. The generator does all of it in one click, but the logic is worth understanding because you will be asked to defend it:

1. Monthly CTC = annual CTC ÷ 12.
2. Basic = 40–50% of CTC. Higher Basic means higher PF and gratuity, so lower take-home now and a larger retirement corpus later.
3. Employer EPF = 12% of Basic + DA, capped at ₹15,000 of wages if you apply the statutory ceiling. Subtract from CTC.
4. Employer ESI = 3.25% of gross, only if gross ≤ ₹21,000. Subtract.
5. Gratuity provision = 4.81% of Basic, if your CTC includes it. Subtract.
6. Gross salary = what remains.
7. HRA = 50% of Basic (metro) or 40% (non-metro).
8. Special allowance = gross − Basic − HRA − other fixed components. This is the plug figure.
9. Net pay = gross − employee EPF − employee ESI − professional tax − TDS.

Worked example: a ₹6,00,000 CTC, rupee by rupee

Take an employee on ₹6,00,000 annual CTC — ₹50,000 a month — with Basic at 40% of CTC, working in Bengaluru (non-metro for HRA purposes, Karnataka for professional tax), with a full month's attendance.

Two things in that table are worth pausing on. First, TDS is nil — at ₹6,00,000 total income under the new tax regime the Section 87A rebate wipes out the liability, so the employer deducts nothing. Second, the employee's real annual benefit is higher than the ₹5,42,856 they take home: ₹21,600 of employer EPF and ₹11,544 of gratuity provision are being set aside for them. If you want to model what the take-home would service as a loan, run the net figure through our EMI Calculator before committing to anything.

EPF explained — rates, ceiling, and how it appears on a payslip

The Employees' Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952 applies to establishments employing 20 or more persons in a scheduled industry, and voluntarily below that. Contribution is on Basic + DA + retaining allowance, not on gross.

The ₹15,000 ceiling is where most payslip disputes start. An employer may restrict PF to 12% of ₹15,000 (₹1,800) even when Basic is ₹40,000, or may contribute on full Basic — both are lawful, the second is more generous, and the payslip must reflect whichever you actually do. Untick the ceiling option in the tool if you contribute on full wages.

Note also that only the employee's 12% is a deduction from net pay. The employer's 12% is a cost of employment, not a deduction, and printing it in the deductions column is a genuine error that makes net pay look wrong. Switch on the employer-contribution annexure in the tool and it prints in its own clearly labelled block instead.

ESI explained — eligibility, rates and the continuation rule

The Employees' State Insurance Act, 1948 covers employees drawing gross wages up to ₹21,000 a month (₹25,000 for employees with a disability) in establishments employing 10 or more persons — 20 in a few states. The employee contributes 0.75% of gross and the employer 3.25%. Employees whose average daily wage does not exceed the notified floor are exempt from the employee share, but the employer still pays its own.

The rule that trips up most payroll teams is the contribution-period continuation rule. ESI runs on two fixed contribution periods: 1 April to 30 September, and 1 October to 31 March. If an employee's wages rise above ₹21,000 in the middle of a contribution period — say a July increment — contributions do not stop in July. They continue on the higher wages until the end of that contribution period, i.e. until 30 September, and coverage runs to the end of the corresponding benefit period. Stopping ESI the month someone crosses the threshold is one of the most common and most expensive ESIC audit findings. The generator applies the threshold automatically for the simple case and leaves the field editable precisely so you can keep deducting through a continuation period.

Professional tax by state

Professional tax is levied by state governments under Article 276 of the Constitution, which caps it at ₹2,500 per person per year. Some states levy it monthly, some half-yearly, some annually, and a large number do not levy it on salary at all. The employer deducts it and deposits it.

State finance acts revise these slabs, and they do it without much publicity. Treat the table above as a working reference with a review date, not as gospel — and note that a tool which shows you a professional tax figure with no state selector and no review date is guessing on your behalf.

TDS on salary — why it varies, and why we don't auto-calculate it

Under Section 192 of the Income-tax Act, an employer must deduct tax at source on salary at the average rate of income tax computed on the estimated income for the whole financial year. That single phrase is why monthly TDS cannot be derived from a monthly payslip. To compute it correctly you need:

• the projected total salary for the full year, including expected increments and bonus;
• whether the employee has opted for the old regime or the default new regime;
• their investment and rent declarations under Chapter VI-A, and later, actual proofs;
• any loss from house property they have declared;
• income and TDS from a previous employer in the same financial year, via Form 12B;
• TDS already deducted in earlier months, so the balance can be spread over the months remaining.

Change any one of those in month seven and every remaining month's TDS changes. A tool that showed a confident TDS figure from one month's numbers would be wrong most of the time, and it would be wrong on a document that goes into a tax file. So we ask you to enter it. If you want to sanity-check an annual liability before you enter a monthly figure, our Income Tax Calculator will run the slabs for you under both regimes — but the authoritative figure is the one from your payroll computation sheet.

How LOP and attendance affect your salary

Loss of pay is unpaid absence: leave taken with no balance left, or absence outside policy. The standard Indian formula is:

Component for the month = Full monthly component × (paid days ÷ total working days)

where paid days = working days − LOP days. On a 26-day base with 2 LOP days, every prorated component is multiplied by 24 ÷ 26.

Three details matter and are usually got wrong:

• Not everything prorates. Fixed reimbursements, arrears, a one-off bonus and settled dues are typically paid in full regardless of attendance. In this tool each earning row has its own prorate switch.
• Deductions mostly do not prorate directly. EPF recalculates because PF wages fell; professional tax may drop a slab because gross fell; a loan EMI does not change at all just because someone was absent.
• Rounding must not create a mismatch. Prorate ₹47,238 by 24/26 and you get ₹43,604.31. Round each of the five component rows individually and they add up to ₹43,605. Print the first as the total and your payslip contradicts itself by a rupee — which is exactly what happens in most Excel templates. This generator always prints the sum of the rounded rows as the gross, so the arithmetic on the page is always internally consistent.

Salary slip format for small businesses and startups

If you employ fewer than twenty people you are probably outside mandatory EPF coverage, and possibly outside ESI, but you are almost certainly inside your state's Shops & Establishments Act — which means you still owe your staff wage slips. A five-person design studio, a two-outlet café, a clinic with three assistants: all of them need payslips, and none of them needs a ₹3,000-a-month payroll subscription to produce fifteen documents a year.

A workable minimal structure for a small establishment: Basic at 50% of gross, HRA at 40% of Basic, the rest as special allowance, professional tax if your state levies it, and nothing else. Switch off the PF and ESI helpers, delete the rows you do not use, save the company details, and each month becomes a two-minute job. When you cross the coverage thresholds, switch the helpers back on. If you also issue rent receipts for employees claiming HRA exemption, our Rent Receipt Generator produces those in the same format and with the same privacy model.

Payslips for contractors, consultants and freelancers

This is where good intentions create real liability. A payslip is a document of employment. If you engage someone on a contract for services, they invoice you, you pay a professional fee and deduct TDS under Section 194J — you do not issue them a payslip.

Issuing a payslip to a consultant, especially one carrying PF and professional tax lines, hands a labour authority or a tax officer one of the strongest single pieces of evidence that the relationship was really employment. That reclassification brings PF, ESI, gratuity, bonus and Section 192 TDS exposure with it, backdated. If the person is genuinely an employee — part-time, fixed-term, probationary, hourly — then a payslip is not just appropriate, it is required, and this tool handles them identically to full-time staff. The test is the nature of the relationship, not the label on the contract.

Common salary slip mistakes employers make

• Showing employer PF as an employee deduction. It understates net pay and confuses everyone reading the slip.
• Rows that don't add up to the total. Almost always a rounding artefact from a spreadsheet. It destroys credibility instantly with a bank.
• Continuing to deduct ESI above ₹21,000 with no continuation period to justify it — or worse, stopping it mid-period when the continuation rule required it to carry on.
• A single "deductions" line with no breakdown. The Payment of Wages Act permits only authorised deductions; an unnamed lump sum cannot be shown to be one.
• Basic set at 20–25% of CTC to suppress PF. Post-Vivekananda Vidyamandir, universally-paid allowances are treated as PF wages regardless of naming.
• No wage period on the slip, making it impossible to tie to the wage register.
• Full bank account numbers printed on slips that get emailed around. Mask them.
• Issuing slips only on request. The obligation is to issue them, and Rule 26(2) says before disbursement, not afterwards.

How to read and verify your own salary slip

If you are an employee rather than an employer, here is the five-minute check worth doing every month:

1. Do the rows add up? Sum the earnings column and compare it to the printed gross. Sum the deductions and compare to the printed total. Gross minus deductions must equal net, and net must match your bank credit to the rupee.
2. Is EPF 12% of Basic + DA — or 12% of ₹15,000 if the ceiling is applied? If it is neither, ask why.
3. Does the EPF deduction show up in your EPFO passbook? Log in with your UAN. Deducted-but-not-deposited PF is a real and reasonably common problem, and the passbook is the only proof.
4. Is professional tax right for the state you actually work in? Not the state your head office is in.
5. Does the year's TDS match Form 26AS and the AIS? Check before you file your return, not after.
6. Are LOP days correct? Cross-check against your leave record; wrong LOP is the most common cause of an unexpectedly small credit.

Any mismatch is worth a written query to HR the same month. Payroll corrections are easy in the same financial year and painful after it closes.

Salary slip vs salary certificate vs Form 16

Form 16 is a statutory TDS certificate generated from the TRACES portal, so it cannot be created with a generator — it must be downloaded by the deductor. A salary certificate is a free-format letter. A payslip is the monthly document this tool produces.

Digital payslips, record-keeping and retention

Nothing in Indian law requires payslips to be paper. Emailing a PDF, or publishing to a self-service portal, satisfies the issuing obligation, and the ubiquitous line "this is a computer-generated payslip and does not require a signature" reflects settled practice. What you must keep is the underlying wage register — the record required by Section 13A and the corresponding state rules — and retention periods vary by statute and state, commonly three to eight years. Keep the registers, keep a copy of every slip issued, and keep them in a form you can produce during an inspection.

Two practical notes. If you email payslips, send the PDF as an attachment to the employee's own address, not to a group; consider password-protecting sensitive batches; and if you need to bundle a year's slips into a single file for an audit, our PDF Merge tool will do it in the browser, and PDF Compress will shrink the result for email. Both are client-side, like this one.

Privacy — your salary data never leaves your device

Every other tool on the first page of results for this search is a payroll SaaS product. Their business model requires your data on their servers — that is not a criticism, it is simply what a payroll platform is. But it means that to generate one payslip, you create an account, verify an email, and hand over your employees' names, PANs, bank accounts and salaries to a third party.

This tool works the other way round. It is a single HTML page. The calculation engine and the PDF writer are JavaScript that runs inside your browser. There is no account system, no database and no analytics event carrying form data, because there is no backend for any of that to talk to. When you press Download, the PDF is assembled in your device's memory and handed to your own downloads folder.

The three things that do touch storage, stated plainly: localStorage holds your company details and draft if you opt in, on your own device, and clearing your browser data removes it; the PDF engine script is fetched from a CDN the first time you click Download, and that request contains no form data; and a service worker caches the page so it works offline afterwards. That is the complete list. The privacy policy covers the site as a whole.

Why choose this salary slip generator?

Who should use this tool — and responsible use

This tool is for: employers and business owners issuing payslips to their own staff; HR and admin teams in small and mid-sized companies; accountants and consultants preparing payroll for clients; and employees who want to understand the structure of their own pay.

What it is: a formatting and calculation aid. It arranges the figures you supply into a compliant-looking payslip layout and applies commonly-used statutory formulas. What it is not: legal, tax or payroll-compliance advice. The employer remains responsible for the accuracy of every figure and for meeting statutory obligations. Statutory rates and thresholds change and vary by state and by establishment — verify current rates before issuing.

And plainly: a payslip must reflect wages actually paid. Creating a payslip for yourself showing income you did not receive, or inflating figures on a genuine one, in order to obtain a loan, a visa, a rental agreement or credit, is misrepresentation. Depending on the circumstances it can amount to forgery and cheating under Indian criminal law, and the practical consequences — a recalled loan, a refused visa, a terminated tenancy — arrive long before any prosecution does. We built this so that a fifteen-person company could issue proper payslips without buying payroll software. Please use it for that.

Frequently asked questions