AIS Password Format, and the 26AS Rule Most Pages Get Wrong

Most guides to the AIS rush you to a download button. The more useful thing to understand is what the statement actually is: the tax department's own running record of your financial year, built from what your bank, employer, broker, and registrar quietly report against your PAN. Get that, and the password, the TIS, and the feedback button all make sense. This guide leads with the concept, then the password everyone searches for, what the statement shows, and how it feeds your return.

One point up front, because it changes how you read everything else: the AIS is a reference, not the last word. If something is missing or wrong, you're still responsible for declaring your actual income. This is a definitional explainer, not tax-filing advice. Reconciling entries, responding to a mismatch notice, and choosing what to report all depend on your situation, so consult a Chartered Accountant before you file.

What is the AIS (Annual Information Statement)?

The Annual Information Statement (AIS) is the Income Tax Department's comprehensive record of a taxpayer's financial information for a year, compiled against their PAN from data reported by banks, employers, and other institutions. The department's own description calls it a "comprehensive view of information for a taxpayer," and that breadth is the whole point.

The CBDT launched the AIS on 1 November 2021. It operates within the Section 285BB framework introduced by the Finance Act 2020, and the transactions inside it are furnished by reporting entities under Section 285BA read with Rule 114E. You don't need the section numbers to use it, but they explain why it exists: the law obliges banks, sub-registrars, mutual funds, and others to report your high-value dealings, and the AIS is where that reported data surfaces for you to see.

Three jobs sit behind it. The AIS lets you see what the department already knows before you file, it gives you a way to flag anything wrong through online feedback, and it feeds a prefilled version of your return. What it is not is conclusive. If a bank forgot to report your interest, that income is still taxable and still yours to declare, so the AIS is a cross-check, never a substitute for your own records.

What's the password to open the AIS PDF?

The password to open the AIS PDF is your PAN in lowercase, immediately followed by your date of birth in DDMMYYYY format, with no space. For a PAN of ABCDE1234F and a date of birth of 21 January 1985, the password is abcde1234f21011985.

For a company or other non-individual, the date of incorporation replaces the date of birth, in the same DDMMYYYY form.

Document	Password format	Example
AIS PDF	PAN (lowercase) + DOB (DDMMYYYY)	abcde1234f21011985
Non-individual AIS PDF	PAN (lowercase) + date of incorporation	abcde1234f15062010
TIS PDF	Same as the AIS PDF	abcde1234f21011985
Form 26AS PDF	Date of birth alone (DDMMYYYY)	21011985

The last row is where most pages go wrong, and it is worth being careful about.

Why does Form 26AS use a different password?

Form 26AS comes from a different system, TRACES, and TRACES publishes its own rule: the password is the taxpayer's date of birth in DDMMYYYY format, with no PAN at all. That is stated in the TRACES taxpayer FAQ, which makes it the only password rule in this whole area with an official source behind it.

Plenty of well-ranked pages tell you to use PAN plus date of birth for 26AS. On the government's own answer, that is wrong, and it is why the file keeps refusing a password that works perfectly on the AIS.

Is there an official source for the AIS password?

No, and that absence explains why the answers you find contradict each other. I went looking, and the result is worth reporting precisely.

The Income Tax Department's official AIS Handbook, published by Project Insight, does not contain the word "password" anywhere in its text. Its AIS FAQ page runs to sixteen questions, including one specifically on download formats, and none of them mentions a password. The AIS help page on the portal says only that you can download in PDF, JSON and CSV.

So every page telling you the AIS password, including this one, is reporting what works rather than citing a rule. The lowercase PAN plus DDMMYYYY format is what the field agrees on and what opens the file. It just has no published authority underneath it, and anyone claiming otherwise is citing a document that does not say it.

That vacuum has consequences you can hit. Two pages currently ranking at or near the top for password searches give a format that will not open the file: one says PAN in capitals followed by the birth year alone, so ABCDE1234F1985, and another prints its example with an uppercase PAN. Try those and you will conclude your own details are wrong when the instructions were.

If a password fails, the usual causes are ordinary. Capitals left on for the PAN. Slashes or dashes typed into the date. A company using a director's date of birth instead of the date of incorporation. And if none of that clears it, the AIS also downloads as JSON and as CSV, so the password-protected PDF is not the only way in.

What does the AIS show? Part A and Part B

The AIS is organised into Part A, which holds your identity details, and Part B, which holds the financial information reported against your PAN. Part A is the header: PAN, masked Aadhaar number, name, date of birth or incorporation, mobile number, email, and address. Part B is where the money lives.

Part B is grouped into blocks:

Part B block	What it covers
TDS/TCS Information	Tax deducted or collected on your income, with information codes and values
SFT Information	High-value transactions reported by banks, registrars, and others under the SFT rules
Payment of Taxes	Advance tax and self-assessment tax you paid
Demand and Refund	Demand raised, refund issued, and interest on refund
Other Information	Salary annexures, foreign remittances, interest on refund, and more

Across those blocks, the AIS surfaces a wide sweep of income and dealings: salary, savings-account interest, interest on fixed and recurring deposits, dividends, rent received, the purchase and sale of shares, bonds, and mutual fund units, property transactions, foreign remittances, and even your GST turnover, which appears under the information code EXC-GSTR3B.

A specific gotcha worth knowing, because it causes real panic every July. The value the AIS shows for your securities may not match your broker's profit-and-loss statement. Zerodha, for one, explains that reporting entities use best-available or closing prices for cost of acquisition, which need not match what you actually paid, so the AIS figure and your real gain can diverge. That's a reporting quirk, and the number to trust for your return is your own computed capital gain.

How do you download the AIS and TIS?

You download the AIS by logging in to the income tax e-filing portal and letting it hand you off to the AIS (Compliance) portal, where both the AIS and the TIS are available. There's no shortcut around the login: unlike Form 26AS, which you can reach through net banking, the AIS is available only after you sign in to the tax portal.

The route, by its current labels:

1. Log in at incometax.gov.in with your PAN and password.
2. Either click Annual Information Statement (AIS) on the dashboard, or go to e-File, then Income Tax Return, then View AIS.
3. Click Proceed to be redirected to the AIS (Compliance) portal.
4. Select the financial year, then open the AIS or TIS tile.
5. Use the download icon: AIS as a password-protected PDF or as JSON, and the TIS as a PDF.

One quirk to flag for anyone abroad: the AIS portal is firewalled against access from outside India, so NRIs often cannot open it without a workaround. And you pick the statement by financial year on that homepage, so choose the right year before expecting the tiles to show data.

What is the TIS, and how is it different from the AIS?

The Taxpayer Information Summary (TIS) is a category-wise aggregated summary derived from the AIS, and it is the version that prefills your income tax return. Where the AIS is the raw ledger, listing every transaction from every source separately, the TIS de-duplicates and totals those entries into clean categories like total salary or total interest.

The distinction that almost no page explains cleanly is the two values the TIS carries:

Value in the TIS	What it means
Processed value	The figure after the system removes duplicates using its own rules, before you do anything
Derived value	The figure after your feedback is taken into account, on top of the processed value

The derived value is the one that matters, because the portal uses it to prefill your return. Submit feedback on a wrong AIS entry and the TIS updates in real time, moving the derived value to what you say it should be. So the AIS is what was reported, and the TIS is what that reduces to once duplicates are stripped and your corrections are applied.

How do you give feedback to correct the AIS?

You correct the AIS by opening a transaction, clicking Optional in the feedback column, choosing the option that fits, and submitting, which updates your TIS in real time. This is the AIS's real superpower, and the sharpest line between it and Form 26AS: a wrong AIS entry you can dispute yourself online, whereas a wrong Form 26AS entry can only be fixed by the deductor filing a revised TDS return.

The feedback screen offers six options, from the official AIS user guide:

Feedback option	When you'd use it
Information is correct	The entry is yours and every detail is right
Information is not fully correct	It's yours but a figure is off; you enter the right value
The information relates to other PAN or year	Joint ownership, or the amount belongs to a different year
Information is duplicate or included in other information	Already counted elsewhere
Information is denied	You do not recognize the transaction at all
Customized feedback	Category-specific options for particular kinds of entries

After you submit, the AIS shows your modified figure alongside the reported one, an acknowledgement receipt becomes available, and email and SMS confirmations follow. The modified figure then updates the derived value in your TIS. The reporting source may be asked to confirm your correction, so feedback is a request backed by verification, not a silent override.

AIS vs Form 26AS

The AIS is your detailed financial statement, while Form 26AS is your narrower tax-credit statement. Since AY 2023-24, Form 26AS on the TRACES portal shows mainly TDS and TCS data, and the wider financial information moved into the AIS.

The cleanest way to hold the difference: Form 26AS shows only transactions where tax was actually deducted or collected, while the AIS shows your dealings whether or not any tax was cut. Fixed-deposit interest below the TDS threshold, for example, appears in the AIS but never in Form 26AS. There's also a practical tie-breaker most guides skip: where the TDS or tax-payment figures in the two disagree, the convention is to go by Form 26AS for those specific numbers. The full 26AS side of this, including its parts and download route, sits in what Form 26AS is, and how the underlying withholding works is in what TDS is.

What do the SFT codes in the AIS mean?

An SFT code in the AIS flags a high-value transaction that a bank or institution reported about you under the Statement of Financial Transactions rules. Each entry shows the SFT code, a description, and the value, and this is now the main home for such data after it moved out of Form 26AS.

The codes most salaried taxpayers run into:

SFT code	Transaction	Threshold in a financial year
SFT-005	Time deposits (fixed deposits)	₹10 lakh or more
SFT-006	Credit-card bill payments	₹1 lakh in cash, or ₹10 lakh by other modes
SFT-007	Purchase of bonds or debentures	₹10 lakh or more
SFT-008	Purchase of shares	₹10 lakh or more

A quiet trap lives in SFT-005. Sweep-in and sweep-out fixed deposits each count as a fresh time deposit, so the ₹10 lakh total can be crossed without any single big deposit, and the code shows up even though nothing felt like a large investment.

What happens if the AIS doesn't match your return?

A gap between what your return declares and what the AIS holds can trigger a mismatch notice, so the two are worth reconciling before you file. The department compares your ITR against the AIS, Form 26AS, and the TIS, and a difference it can't square is what prompts the notice.

Ignoring one carries real cost: penalties, interest, and in some cases scrutiny, where the assessing officer can estimate income from the data on hand. When the AIS shows a transaction you don't recognize or a figure that looks inflated, the descriptive fix is the feedback flow above, choosing the option that fits with a genuine reason. What that resolves and what it doesn't depends heavily on the specific entry, so a Chartered Accountant is the right person to advise on your actual mismatch or any notice you receive. For the return the AIS feeds into, the full walkthrough is in the Indian income tax guide for salaried employees.

What this post deliberately does not cover

To keep the scope honest on a tax topic:

• The full ITR-filing walkthrough, reconciling in context, and ITR-form selection are in the Indian income tax guide for salaried employees.
• Form 26AS in full, its parts, download route, and password, is in what Form 26AS is.
• How TDS works and the individual sections behind the TDS/TCS block are in what TDS is.
• Form 16, the salary certificate you'd also use to reconcile, is in what Form 16 is.
• This is general education, not filing advice. For an entry you can't explain, a mismatch notice, or any unusual transaction, consult a Chartered Accountant before you file.

Frequently asked questions

What is the AIS in income tax? The Annual Information Statement (AIS) is a comprehensive statement of a taxpayer's financial information that the Income Tax Department compiles against their PAN for a financial year. Launched in November 2021, it pulls together income and high-value transactions reported by banks, employers, mutual funds, registrars, and other institutions: salary, interest, dividends, securities and property dealings, foreign remittances, GST turnover, and the tax deducted or paid. It exists so you can see what the department already knows before you file, correct anything wrong through online feedback, and have your return partly prefilled from it.

What is the password to open the AIS PDF? The password to open the AIS PDF is your PAN in lowercase, immediately followed by your date of birth in DDMMYYYY format, with no space. For a PAN of ABCDE1234F and a date of birth of 21 January 1985, the password is abcde1234f21011985. For a company or other non-individual, the date of incorporation replaces the date of birth, and the TIS PDF uses the same format as the AIS. Form 26AS is the exception: TRACES states its password is the date of birth alone in DDMMYYYY, with no PAN. Worth knowing that no Income Tax Department document states the AIS password at all, so every source giving it, this one included, is reporting what works rather than citing a rule.

How do I download the AIS? Log in to the income tax e-filing portal at incometax.gov.in with your PAN and password, then either click the Annual Information Statement (AIS) option on the dashboard or go to e-File, then Income Tax Return, then View AIS. Click Proceed to be taken to the AIS (Compliance) portal, select the financial year, and open the AIS tile. Use the download icon to save it as a password-protected PDF, or as JSON for the offline utility. The TIS can be downloaded from the same screen as a PDF.

What is the difference between the AIS and the TIS? The AIS is the full, transaction-level list of everything reported against your PAN, so a single income type can appear as many separate entries from different sources. The TIS (Taxpayer Information Summary) is derived from the AIS: it de-duplicates and adds up those entries into category totals, such as total salary or total interest. The TIS shows a processed value (after the system de-duplicates) and a derived value (after your feedback is applied), and it is the derived value that prefills your income tax return.

How do I correct a wrong entry in my AIS? Open the AIS on the income tax portal, click the transaction, click Optional in the feedback column, choose the option that fits (such as Information is not fully correct, Information relates to other PAN or year, Information is duplicate, or Information is denied), enter the details, and submit. You get an acknowledgement, and the corrected figure updates the derived value in your TIS, which then feeds your prefilled return. The reporting source may be asked to confirm your correction. For a mismatch you cannot explain or a notice, consult a Chartered Accountant.

The thing worth carrying away is to read the AIS as a conversation, not a verdict. If an entry is wrong, the feedback button is yours to use, and the correction flows straight through to your TIS. If an entry is missing, the income is still yours to declare. That two-way nature, correctable by you and never final on its own, is what separates the AIS from every static statement that came before it.

Sources

• Income Tax Department of India, Annual Information Statement (AIS) FAQ, including Part A/B structure, TIS definition, and GST turnover under EXC-GSTR3B: incometax.gov.in
• Income Tax Department of India, AIS user guide, feedback options: reproduced via TaxGuru
• TaxGuru, Form 26AS and Section 285BB (Finance Act 2020) framework: taxguru.in
• TDS Reconciliation Analysis and Correction Enabling System (TRACES), Taxpayer FAQ on Form 26AS (the only official statement of a password rule in this area, giving date of birth alone in DDMMYYYY with no PAN) tdscpc.gov.in
• Income Tax Department, AIS FAQ (sixteen questions, including one on download formats, none of which states a password) incometax.gov.in
• ClearTax, AIS password format, download steps, and TIS processed vs derived value: cleartax.in
• ClearTax, Statement of Financial Transactions (SFT) codes: cleartax.in/s/sft
• Zerodha, Why AIS securities values can differ from your actual trades: support.zerodha.com