How your income tax is calculated and where it goes
Income tax is one of the largest single sources the union government has, and yours goes into one pot with everything else it collects and borrows. Here is what is in that pot, then how we get from your number to the breakdown.
Where the government's money comes from
One pot: the union budget
Not to scale
Corporate tax
What companies pay on their profits.
Income tax
What individuals pay on what they earn. The one you file.
GST
Charged on nearly everything you buy, collected by the seller.
Customs and excise
Duties on imports, and on fuel.
Non-tax income
Dividends from state-owned companies, the Reserve Bank's surplus, spectrum auctions, fees.
Borrowing
It spends more than it takes in every year and borrows the difference.
All of it is pooled before anything is spent. No rupee is tagged with who paid it, which is why this site shows you a proportion rather than tracing your actual money.
How your tax gets distributed
Your income tax is not one thing. There is the base tax, a 4% health and education cess added on top of it, and above ₹50 lakh of income a surcharge as well. The three are treated differently once they reach the pot.
Base tax
Cess, and surcharge if you pay one
Only the base part is shared with states, at the 41% rate the Fifteenth Finance Commission sets. Cess is locked by law to health and education schemes, and neither cess nor surcharge is shared.
What stays with the union is then divided across ministries and purposes in the proportions of the real 2025–26 budget. That division is the list you see on your result.
What is not counted
- GST. There is no single "GST you paid this year" figure to enter, because it sits inside the price of everything you buy rather than being filed as one number. It is also divided between the centre and the states by the GST Council, a different mechanism from the Finance Commission split shown above.
- State taxes. Property tax, stamp duty, state excise. Only money that reaches the union government is shown.
Figures: Ministry of Finance, 2025–26 budget papers (revised estimate, not yet final).
Then what?
The union's share is divided across ministries and purposes in the proportions of the real budget. You can read those proportions directly, by what the money paid for, by the ministry that spent it, or year by year, or put in what you paid and see your own share of each.
Every figure on this site is read from a published Ministry of Finance document and carries a citation to it, down to the statement and column. The full list of documents is public, and each one is identified by the SHA-256 checksum of the file it was read from.
Work out your own share