Professional tax in Rajasthan: what businesses actually owe
If you run a business in Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur or anywhere else in Rajasthan, you do not deduct professional tax from salaries and you do not file a professional tax return. There is no professional tax registration number to obtain and no monthly challan to pay. This page explains why so much online content says otherwise, and what a Rajasthan employer genuinely has to pay instead.
The short answer
Rajasthan does not levy or collect a tax on professions, trades, callings and employments. There is no PTRC (employer) or PTEC (enrolment) registration in Rajasthan, no slab table, no monthly or annual professional tax return, and no professional tax wing at the Rajasthan Commercial Taxes Department.
We say this plainly because the alternative — a business owner deducting ₹200 a month from thirty salaries and then hunting for a department to pay it to — happens more often than it should. It is caused entirely by content that treats "professional tax" as a uniform national obligation. It is not. It is a state tax under Entry 60 of the State List, capped by Article 276 of the Constitution at ₹2,500 per person per year, and roughly half of India's states have simply never operated it.
Why the confusion exists: the Act of 2000
This is the part that almost no one explains, and it is the reason the question keeps resurfacing.
There is a statute called the Rajasthan Tax on Professions, Trades, Callings and Employments Act, 2000. It received the Governor's assent on 9 May 2000 and it sits on the India Code database today. Anyone searching for "Rajasthan professional tax Act" will find it, conclude the tax exists, and start looking for slabs.
But read Section 3, the charging section. It says tax shall be levied "at such rates not exceeding rupees two thousand five hundred per annum per individual person, as may be notified by the State Government in the official Gazette." The Act is an enabling framework. It confers a power to notify rates. It does not itself fix a single rupee of liability.
We could not locate any rate notification in force under that Act, and the Commercial Taxes Department's own systems carry no professional tax module, registration form or return. The practical consequence is the one that matters to you: with no notified rate, there is nothing to compute, nothing to deduct and nothing to remit. This is why practitioners, the state's own tax administration and the payroll industry all treat Rajasthan as a nil-professional-tax state.
If your consultant or payroll vendor tells you Rajasthan professional tax is due, the correct response is one sentence: please send me the gazette notification fixing the rate. There isn't one.
The wrong figures circulating online
This deserves calling out specifically, because the same numbers appear on dozens of sites.
A large number of "Professional tax in Rajasthan" pages publish this slab: nil up to ₹7,500 per month, ₹175 from ₹7,501 to ₹10,000, and ₹200 above ₹10,000 with ₹300 in February. Those are the Maharashtra slabs. They have been copy-pasted onto a Rajasthan page and left there. Some of those same pages also give a filing due date of "31 June", a date that does not exist.
A second widely-circulated list — a legal blog ranking well for "states where professional tax is applicable" — manages to list Rajasthan in both the applicable and the not-applicable column on the same page. That is the state of the published record, and it is why we have written this page.
What Rajasthan businesses do pay instead
The absence of professional tax does not mean an absence of state-level cost. Here is the honest list of what actually lands on a Rajasthan employer or business.
| Obligation | Who it applies to | Rough cost |
|---|---|---|
| GST registration, returns and tax | Turnover above threshold, or compulsory categories | Tax on value added; compliance cost is the real burden |
| EPF (employer share) | 20 or more employees | 12% of wages plus admin charges |
| ESI (employer share) | 10 or more employees, in notified areas | 3.25% of wages |
| Shops and Commercial Establishments registration | Nearly every shop and commercial establishment | One-time fee, ₹5,000 to ₹1.5 lakh by headcount |
| Stamp duty and registration fee | Property, leases, certain agreements | Rate varies by instrument |
| Urban Development Tax / house tax | Commercial and larger residential properties in urban local bodies | Set by the ULB |
| Electricity duty | Commercial and industrial connections | Levied on the bill |
| BOCW cess | Construction work | 1% of cost of construction |
There is one further point worth settling, because it is the natural follow-up question. Rajasthan also does not operate a Labour Welfare Fund of the kind that Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Punjab, Haryana, Delhi and several other states run, where small sums are deducted half-yearly or annually from each employee and matched by the employer. We could not locate any Rajasthan Labour Welfare Fund statute or contribution notification, and no such deduction appears on Rajasthan payrolls in practice. Again: if you are told to deduct it, ask for the notification.
If you employ people in more than one state
This is where Rajasthan businesses actually get caught. Professional tax follows the place of work, not the place where your company is registered or where payroll is processed. A Jaipur-headquartered company with a sales office in Bengaluru, a warehouse in Ahmedabad and a plant in Indore owes professional tax in Karnataka, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh for those employees, even though its own state charges nothing.
The states and union territories that levied professional tax as at July 2026 include Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, Punjab and Puducherry. Rajasthan, Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa, Arunachal Pradesh, Chandigarh and the smaller UTs do not.
Three of the larger states, as a working reference for payroll setup:
| State | Monthly deduction | Annual cap |
|---|---|---|
| Maharashtra | Nil up to ₹7,500; ₹175 from ₹7,501–₹10,000; ₹200 above ₹10,000 (₹300 in February) | ₹2,500 |
| Karnataka | Nil up to ₹25,000; ₹200 above ₹25,000 | ₹2,400 |
| Gujarat | Nil up to ₹5,999; ₹80, ₹150 and ₹200 in rising bands from ₹6,000 | ₹2,500 |
Treat these as a starting point and confirm the current slab with the relevant state before running payroll — states revise them, and one has now removed the tax entirely. Odisha repealed its professional tax Act by Ordinance 02 of 2026, promulgated on 21 April 2026 with effect from 1 April 2026. That is the direction of travel, and it makes Rajasthan's position look less like an anomaly than it did ten years ago.
Flagging a common misconception about the Labour Codes
The four Labour Codes came into force on 21 November 2025 and there is a widespread assumption that they have reorganised every payroll deduction in the country. They have not touched professional tax. It is a state tax under Article 276, not a labour levy, and it sits entirely outside the Code on Wages and the Code on Social Security. Nothing in the Codes creates a professional tax liability in Rajasthan.
What to do if you have been deducting it anyway
Occasionally we see a Rajasthan business that has been deducting "professional tax" from staff salaries for years, usually because a payroll template from another state was copied. The money has typically been sitting in a liability ledger with nowhere to go, or worse, has been quietly absorbed.
Stop the deduction from the next cycle. Reverse the accumulated balance and refund it to the affected employees, treating it as an excess recovery — an unauthorised deduction from wages is itself a problem under the Code on Wages, and refunding it promptly is the clean way to close the exposure. Then correct the Form 16 workings, because any professional tax you had claimed as a Section 16(iii) deduction against salary income was never actually paid to a state government and is not allowable.
Sources and last verified
Verified on 27 July 2026.
- The Rajasthan Tax on Professions, Trades, Callings and Employments Act, 2000 (full text, India Code): https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/18855/1/rtptce,_2000.pdf
- India Code record for the Act: https://www.indiacode.nic.in/handle/123456789/18855
- Rajasthan Commercial Taxes Department: http://rajtax.gov.in/vatweb/
- CAclubindia expert thread confirming non-applicability in Rajasthan: https://www.caclubindia.com/experts/professional-tax-in-rajasthan-540055.asp
- Odisha professional tax repeal, Ordinance 02 of 2026: https://futurexsolutions.com/odisha-professional-tax-abolished-2026/
- State-wise applicability (cross-checked, internally inconsistent — see our note above): https://www.vidhikarya.com/legal-blog/the-states-in-which-the-professional-tax-is-applicable-and-the-states-in-which-it-is-not
- Example of the incorrect Rajasthan slab table discussed above: https://factohr.com/professional-tax/rajasthan/
Common questions
Is professional tax applicable in Rajasthan in 2026?
No. Rajasthan does not collect professional tax from employers, employees, professionals or businesses. There is no registration, no slab and no return. The Rajasthan Tax on Professions, Trades, Callings and Employments Act, 2000 exists on the statute book, but its charging section requires the State Government to notify rates and no rate notification is in force.
Why do so many websites publish Rajasthan professional tax slabs then?
Because they have copied the Maharashtra slab table onto a Rajasthan page. The give-away is the ₹175 band between ₹7,501 and ₹10,000 and the ₹300 February deduction, both of which are distinctively Maharashtrian. Some of the same pages also quote a due date of "31 June", which is not a real date. Treat any Rajasthan slab table as wrong unless it is accompanied by a gazette notification number.
My company is registered in Jaipur but I have staff in Bengaluru and Pune. What do I do?
Professional tax follows the place of employment, not the place of incorporation. You need a professional tax registration in Karnataka for the Bengaluru staff and in Maharashtra for the Pune staff, and you must deduct and remit at those states' rates and deadlines. Your Rajasthan-based employees remain outside professional tax entirely.
Does the Rajasthan Act being on the books mean the government could start charging tomorrow?
In principle the State Government could issue a rate notification under Section 3 without fresh legislation, subject to the Article 276 ceiling of ₹2,500 per person per year. In practice there has been no move in that direction, and the national trend is the opposite — Odisha repealed its professional tax Act with effect from 1 April 2026. We monitor the Rajasthan gazette and will update this page if the position changes.
I have been deducting professional tax from my Rajasthan staff by mistake. How do I fix it?
Stop the deduction immediately and refund the accumulated amount to the employees concerned, since it was never payable to any government. Reverse the liability in your books and correct the Section 16(iii) deduction claimed in each employee's Form 16, because professional tax is only deductible from salary income when it has actually been paid to a state. Doing this proactively is far cheaper than having it surface in an audit or an employee complaint.
Stay ahead of the dates
Every GST, TDS, income-tax, ROC and LLP date for FY 2026-27, with Rajasthan's Group Y GST dates applied — plus free WhatsApp reminders.
See the Rajasthan calendar Ask us about thisTalk to someone about this
Tell us what you are looking at. We will come back with a straight answer on what it means and what it costs to deal with.