Paying Income Tax by Cheque in India — The Challan 280 Walkthrough (2026)

Every March, somewhere in India, a business owner walks into a bank branch on the 15th with a cheque for the final advance-tax instalment, hands it over with an hour to spare, and drives home certain the deadline is met.

The cheque clears on the 18th. And in the department's books, the 18th is when the tax was paid.

That three-day gap — invisible on the day, expensive at assessment — is the reason this guide exists. What follows is the corner of income-tax payment where cheques still live in 2026: Challan ITNS 280, the counter at the authorised bank, the four advance-tax dates, and the one rule that decides whether your carefully written cheque landed on time or three days late.

Challan 280 — One Form, Three Taxes

Challan ITNS 280 is the income-tax deposit form: the document that tells the government whose money is arriving, for which year, and why. Whether you pay online or over a counter, the payment routes through its fields, and three kinds of tax travel on it:

• Advance tax — instalments paid during the financial year against that same year's income.
• Self-assessment tax — the balance you settle just before filing the return, after TDS and advance tax are counted.
• Tax on regular assessment — a demand the department raises after processing or assessing your return.

Each has its own minor head on the challan (advance tax, self-assessment, and regular assessment are separate codes), and a major head above them says who is paying — one code for companies, another for everyone else. None of this is trivia. Tick the wrong head or the wrong assessment year and the money reaches the government but sits in the wrong bucket: recoverable, yes, but only through a challan-correction request that costs weeks of follow-up. The heads are stable from year to year, but confirm them on the portal screen at payment time rather than from memory — including this article's.

How Tax Is Actually Paid in 2026 — and Where the Cheque Fits

Truth first: most income-tax payment today happens online. The e-filing portal's e-Pay Tax service takes net banking, UPI, debit cards, RTGS/NEFT, and payment-gateway routes, and if you have working net banking on a listed bank, that is the fastest path — this article won't pretend otherwise.

But the counter hasn't closed. Inside e-Pay Tax sits a "Pay at Bank Counter" option: you generate the challan on the portal — it issues a CRN, a Challan Reference Number — print it, and carry it with a cheque or demand draft to an authorised branch of the bank you selected. The generated challan stays valid for a limited window (around fifteen days — check the expiry printed on it), after which the CRN lapses and you start again.

Two caveats keep this route honest. First, not every bank offers the counter option, and the portal's list of authorised banks shifts — verify your bank appears and accepts cheques over the counter before you plan a branch trip. Second, some taxpayers can't use it at all: companies and businesses subject to tax audit have been required to pay electronically since 2008, so the counter is effectively the territory of individuals, proprietors, and smaller firms outside the audit net. If that's you, the cheque's role here will feel familiar — it's the same shrinking-but-real role it plays in GST payment over the counter, and roughly the same population keeps both alive: proprietors who run the business on cheques anyway, taxpayers whose net-banking transaction limits won't cover a large instalment, and anyone paying from an account that isn't wired into the portal's payment rails.

The Realisation-Date Rule — Why Tax Cheques Go In Early

Here is the cheque-specific heart of the matter. When you pay over the counter by cheque, the bank does not credit the government the moment you hand over the leaf. The challan is realised when the cheque clears — and the payment date the system records rides on that realisation, not on your visit to the branch.

A tax cheque handed over on the 15th and cleared on the 18th was — in the only calendar that matters — paid on the 18th.

For self-assessment tax with a comfortable gap before the filing date, a few days of clearing float is an annoyance. For an advance-tax instalment due on the 15th, it's the whole game: a cheque that realises after the due date makes the instalment late, and lateness here isn't a warning letter — it's interest, computed mechanically, no discretion involved.

The operating rule, then, is a buffer. Deposit the cheque at least three to four working days before the due date — longer if a weekend or holiday sits in between, shorter only if you're paying by a cheque drawn on the same bank that's receiving it, which typically realises faster. It's the same clearing-buffer discipline that keeps an EMI cheque from slipping past its presentation date: the instrument goes in early, and the deadline you plan against is the clearing date, not the handover date. (The legal history of tender-date versus realisation-date has its nuances — courts have sometimes related an honoured cheque back to its tender — but the safe operating assumption, and the one your challan stamp will reflect, is that realisation governs. The fact-check block below pins this down before publish.)

Advance Tax — The Four Dates the Cheque Must Beat

If your total tax liability for the year, after TDS, crosses ₹10,000, advance tax applies — salaried or not, business or profession. The instalments are cumulative percentages of the year's estimated tax:

• 15 June — 15% paid
• 15 September — 45% paid
• 15 December — 75% paid
• 15 March — 100% paid

Presumptive-scheme taxpayers (Sections 44AD and 44ADA) get a concession: a single instalment, the whole amount, by 15 March. Miss or short-pay an instalment and interest under Sections 234B and 234C starts accruing — modest per month, relentless in aggregate, and calculated by software that has never once been talked out of it.

For a cheque payer, each of those four dates is really a date minus clearing time. The 15th of June is, for planning purposes, the 10th or 11th. Write that arithmetic into your calendar once and the realisation-date rule stops being a trap and becomes a habit.

The Counter Walkthrough — Five Steps, One Stamped Counterfoil

The full over-the-counter run, from estimate to proof:

1. Compute and classify. Estimate the instalment (or the self-assessment balance), and note the assessment year and the correct heads — advance tax versus self-assessment versus regular assessment. Five minutes of care here saves a challan-correction saga later.
2. Generate the challan on e-Pay Tax. Log in to the e-filing portal, choose "Pay at Bank Counter" as the mode, select cheque, pick your authorised bank, and print the challan form the portal issues — CRN and all. Note the validity window printed on it.
3. Write — or print — the cheque exactly. Payee precisely as the challan or the receiving bank directs (banks generally want the cheque drawn in their own favour for credit to the government account — follow the printed instruction, not folklore), account-payee crossed, amount in words matching the figure to the rupee, dated the day of submission. A tax cheque returned for a correctable error is a deadline lost to penmanship.
4. Submit early, at the right branch. The authorised branch of the bank you selected, with the clearing buffer already built in — three to four working days before the due date at minimum.
5. Collect the acknowledgment, then the counterfoil. The counter gives you a stamped acknowledgment on the spot; the challan is realised when the cheque clears, and that's when the CIN exists. Verify it on the portal and in your Form 26AS/AIS within a week.

The Counterfoil and the CIN — Your Only Proof

The CIN — Challan Identification Number — is three facts fused together: the BSR code of the receiving branch, the date of deposit, and the challan serial number. It is the government's receipt, the number your return quotes against the tax paid, and the single identifier that lets a payment be traced years later.

So the paper discipline is short and absolute. Keep the stamped counterfoil until the assessment for that year is closed — not until filing, until closure. Verify the CIN appears in your Form 26AS or AIS within a few days of realisation; a payment that cleared your bank but hasn't surfaced in 26AS is a follow-up you want to start immediately, not discover at filing time. And when you file, quote the CIN exactly — a challan the return can't point to is, procedurally, tax the department hasn't seen.

When the Cheque Bounces or a Detail Is Wrong

Two failure modes, two different clean-ups.

The cheque bounces. Then no payment happened — not late payment, no payment. The challan is never realised, the CRN eventually lapses, interest keeps running against the instalment as if you'd never visited the branch, and your bank adds a return charge for the insult. The prevention is the same standing rule every serious cheque payer already runs: a tax cheque is written only against funds already sitting in the account, never against a receivable that's "definitely coming Tuesday."

A detail is wrong. Wrong assessment year, wrong major or minor head — the money arrived but landed in the wrong bucket. There's a correction mechanism: banks can fix certain fields within a short window after deposit, and beyond that the request goes to your jurisdictional assessing officer or through the portal's challan-correction service. It works, but it's measured in weeks, which returns us to step one of the walkthrough: the cheapest challan correction is the one you never file.

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