Form 26AS, AIS and TIS for NRIs: Reconcile Before You File, or the Notice Finds You

You filed ITR-2 in good faith last July, claimed Rs 31,200 of TDS your bank deducted on your NRO fixed deposit, and a few weeks later a refund landed. Then in November an intimation arrived under Section 143(1)(a) saying your declared interest income was lower than what the department holds on file, and giving you 30 days to explain the difference. You had not under-declared anything. The bank had reported the interest twice, once correctly and once duplicated, and the system added both. The mismatch was not yours. The work of fixing it, and the clock running on it from another time zone, were.

That sequence, file first and reconcile later, is the wrong order, and it is the order most NRIs follow because they never look at what the department already knows about them before they file. Form 26AS and the Annual Information Statement exist precisely so you can look first. They are the department's own record of your India footprint, assembled from your banks, your company registrars, your depository and the sub-registrar. Read them before you file and almost every mismatch notice becomes avoidable.

The 30-second answer: Form 26AS is your tax-credit statement. Since AY 2023-24 it shows only TDS (Part A), TCS (Part B), advance and self-assessment tax you paid (Part C) and refunds (Part D). The Annual Information Statement (AIS) is wider: it adds interest, dividends, securities and mutual fund trades, property transactions and other items reported under the Statement of Financial Transactions (SFT), with no minimum threshold on dividends or interest. The Taxpayer Information Summary (TIS) is the AIS boiled down to category totals. All live on incometax.gov.in. Use Form 26AS to confirm the exact TDS credit you claim in ITR-2 by July 31, 2026; the Centralised Processing Centre matches your claim against it. Use the AIS to catch anything you forgot to declare, because a gap between your return and the AIS triggers a Section 143(1)(a) notice with a 30-day clock. From 1 April 2026, Form 26AS is renamed Form 168 under the Income-tax Act 2025, but the mechanics are unchanged.

This guide is part of our NRI tax-filing series. For the full picture on assembling and filing the return, start with the NRI ITR filing guide for AY 2026-27, then come back here for the reconciliation detail.

This guide explains what each of the three statements actually shows an NRI, why mismatches generate notices and what the 30-day clock means, how to reach all three from abroad, how to reconcile your TDS credit so you claim the full refund, how to give feedback on a wrong AIS entry and track whether the source accepted it, and the SFT plumbing that feeds the AIS in the first place. Worked numbers run through every section, there is an Edge cases section, and an honest read at the end on how much of this you genuinely need to do.

Three statements doing three different jobs, and the boundary that moved

Stop thinking of these as three versions of one document. They serve different jobs, and the boundaries shifted in AY 2023-24, so old advice you find online often describes a Form 26AS that no longer exists. Get the division of labour right and the whole reconciliation collapses into a checklist.

Form 26AS is the ledger of what you can claim, nothing more

Form 26AS is now a focused statement of tax either withheld on your behalf or paid by you. After the revamp that took effect from AY 2023-24, it contains four parts and little else. Part A is TDS, tax deducted at source on income paid to you, listed by deductor: the bank that deducted on your NRO interest, the tenant or company that deducted on rent or dividends, the buyer that deducted on a property sale. Each entry carries the deductor's TAN, the amount paid, the tax deducted and the amount actually deposited. Part B is TCS under Section 206C, for example on foreign remittances under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme. Part C is advance tax and self-assessment tax you deposited by challan. Part D is refunds the department paid you.

Everything that used to clutter the old Form 26AS, the high-value transactions, the SFT data, the foreign remittances, the GST turnover, has been moved out to the AIS. So treat Form 26AS as one thing only: the authoritative ledger of TDS credit you are entitled to claim. The reason this matters is mechanical. When the Centralised Processing Centre processes your ITR-2, it matches the TDS you claimed against Part A of Form 26AS line by line. Claim a credit that is not sitting in Form 26AS and it gets disallowed under Section 143(1)(a)(vi), and your refund shrinks to whatever the matched credit supports.

One housekeeping note for the 2026 season and beyond. The Income-tax Act 2025 takes effect on 1 April 2026, and under it the document you know as Form 26AS is formally renamed Form 168, governed by Section 510 (replacing the old Section 285BB) and Rule 245 of the Income-tax Rules 2026 (replacing Rule 114-I). The name is new; the structure, the four parts, the TRACES hosting and the reconciliation discipline are not. Practitioners and the portal itself will keep calling it Form 26AS for a while, so do not be thrown when you see either label. For AY 2026-27 returns filed during 2026 you are still working with the familiar statement.

The AIS is the list of what you must explain

The Annual Information Statement is the wide-angle view, and it is the one that actually catches NRIs out. It pulls together every piece of financial information that reporting entities have filed against your PAN. Part A holds your identifiers, PAN, masked Aadhaar, name, date of birth, contact details. Part B holds the data: TDS and TCS (the same feed as Form 26AS), SFT information reported in Form 61A, taxes paid, demand and refund, and an "other information" bucket that catches things like interest on income tax refunds and outward foreign remittances.

For an NRI, the AIS is where you find the items a bank or registrar reported but that never showed up as TDS: savings interest below the deduction threshold, dividends that arrived in small tranches, the sale of listed shares your depository reported, a mutual fund redemption, the flat you sold that the sub-registrar reported. The detail almost nobody states plainly: dividends and interest are reported with no minimum threshold at all, every rupee, while the SFT high-value thresholds (Rs 10 lakh deposits, Rs 30 lakh property) apply only to the bulk-aggregate categories. So the assumption that small amounts slip under the radar is simply wrong for the two income types NRIs most often forget.

Crucially, the AIS shows two values for each line: the reported value, which is what the source filed, and the modified value, the figure after your feedback or the source's confirmation. That dual display is the entire mechanism for correcting errors, which we come to below.

The TIS is the gut-check you reconcile against

The Taxpayer Information Summary is the AIS condensed into category totals: total interest, total dividend, total capital gain, and so on. It shows, per category, the value as processed by the system and the value after your feedback. The TIS is what the portal draws on to pre-fill parts of your return, so it is the quickest gut-check during reconciliation. Does the interest total here match what you are about to declare? If yes, you are broadly safe. If not, you drill into the underlying AIS lines to find why.

Hold this one sentence and the rest of the guide is detail: Form 26AS decides what credit you can claim; the AIS and TIS decide what income you must declare. Get both right and the return processes clean.

Reaching all three from abroad, without an Indian SIM

Everything runs through the income tax e-filing portal at incometax.gov.in. You do not need to be in India and you do not strictly need an Indian mobile number, though OTP login is smoother with one; an Aadhaar-linked Indian number gives you the cleanest OTP path, and without it you fall back to email OTP or net-banking login. If you do not have a PAN yet, that is the prerequisite for all of this, covered in our PAN for NRIs guide.

To open the AIS and TIS, log in with your PAN and password and click the AIS menu item (on some layouts it sits under Services, then Annual Information Statement). Click Proceed to reach the compliance dashboard, where the AIS and the TIS sit as separate tiles. You can read each on screen or download it as PDF or JSON. The downloaded PDF is password protected, and the password is your PAN in lower case followed by your date of birth in DDMMYYYY format, no space. For PAN AAAAA1234A and a date of birth of 28 July 1990, the password is aaaaa1234a28071990.

To open Form 26AS, from the same login go to e-File, then Income Tax Returns, then View Form 26AS. You accept a short disclaimer and the portal redirects you to the TRACES site (the TDS Reconciliation Analysis and Correction Enabling System), where you select the assessment year and view or download as HTML, text or PDF. NRIs also have a dedicated route at nriservices.tdscpc.gov.in, the NRI TRACES portal, built for non-resident access and often easier if the main TRACES redirect misbehaves from outside India. From the 2026-27 cycle the same path lands you on what is now labelled Form 168 in some views; the navigation is identical.

Pull all three for the financial year you are filing. For AY 2026-27 that is the year ending 31 March 2026. Then reconcile.

How a mismatch becomes a notice, and the clock it starts

The department does not read your return by hand. It runs an automated comparison between what you declared and what the AIS already holds. The logic is blunt: if your declared income in a category is lower than the AIS figure for that category, or if a high-value transaction sits in the AIS with no corresponding entry in your return, the system flags it. The first contact is usually a proposed adjustment under Section 143(1)(a), or an e-campaign or compliance message on the portal asking you to confirm or revise. It is not a scrutiny notice under 143(2) and it is not an accusation.

What it is, is a clock. A 143(1)(a) intimation gives you 30 days from the date of the intimation to respond on the portal, agreeing or disagreeing with the proposed adjustment. Miss that window and the consequence is automatic: the adjustment is treated as accepted, the recomputed figure stands, and any extra tax is raised as a demand or netted against the refund you were expecting, with interest. For an NRI managing this from the UK or Canada, 30 days is tight once you factor in pulling documents, looping in a CA in India and the portal's own quirks. That asymmetry, an evening of reconciliation up front versus a deadline-bound reply from abroad later, is the whole argument for doing this before you file. The full playbook for a notice that does land is in responding to NRI tax notices.

For NRIs the recurring triggers are predictable. NRO interest the bank reported and deducted TDS on, that you forgot or under-declared. Dividends from Indian shares, reported by the company or registrar with no threshold, easy to miss because they arrive in small amounts across the year; the tax detail is in our NRI dividend tax guide. A property sale the sub-registrar reported, which is almost never missed by the system because property is high value and heavily reported. And securities or mutual fund transactions your depository or fund house reported, where the sale value lands in the AIS but you never worked out and declared the capital gain; the mechanics are in capital gains tax for NRIs on shares and mutual funds.

There is a subtler trap specific to NRIs. The AIS does not know your residential status and does not know whether a treaty exempts an item. NRE and FCNR interest is exempt and should not be reported at all, but if a bank misclassifies an account you can see exempt interest surface, and the AIS will never apply DTAA relief for you. So a clean reconciliation is not "make my return match the AIS exactly". It is "account for every AIS line", either declaring it or explaining through feedback why it is wrong or exempt.

A side-by-side, so you stop mixing them up

	Form 26AS (Form 168 from 1 Apr 2026)	AIS	TIS
What it is	Tax-credit ledger	Full transaction record	Category-wise summary of the AIS
Hosted on	TRACES (via e-filing portal)	e-filing portal, AIS dashboard	e-filing portal, beside the AIS
Covers	TDS, TCS, advance/self-assessment tax, refunds	TDS/TCS plus interest, dividends, securities, MF, property, SFT, remittances	Totals per income category, reported and modified
Feedback possible	No	Yes, line by line	Reflects AIS feedback automatically
You use it to	Confirm the TDS credit you can claim	Account for every income line	Quick reconciliation against your declared totals
The NRI rule	Claim only what sits in Part A	Declare it or explain it; nothing slips under a threshold	If interest/dividend totals match, you are broadly clean

The split is the point. Form 26AS limits what you may claim. The AIS sets what you must explain. The TIS is the thirty-second check that the two agree.

Reconciling your TDS so the full refund actually lands

This is the part that puts money back in your pocket. NRIs are over-withheld as a structural matter, because the payer deducts at conservative rates with no knowledge of your full position; the why and the levers are in TDS for NRIs and refunds. The refund is real, but you only collect the full amount if the TDS you claim matches Form 26AS exactly.

The discipline is short. Open Form 26AS Part A and list every TDS entry by deductor, amount paid and tax deducted. Against each, find your own record: the bank interest certificate, the dividend advice, the property TDS in Form 16A or 16B. Claim in ITR-2 only the TDS that appears in Form 26AS. If your bank statement shows tax taken but Form 26AS does not list it, the deductor has not yet deposited or filed it; claiming it anyway gets it disallowed, so chase the deductor to file a correction first. Then cross-check the income side against the AIS and TIS so the income you declare is consistent with the credit you claim.

Put real numbers on it. Anaya is a UK-based NRI. For the year ending 31 March 2026 her India income is NRO fixed deposit interest of Rs 4,00,000, on which her bank deducted TDS at 31.2% (30% plus 4% cess) under Section 195, that is Rs 1,24,800; and dividends from Indian listed shares of Rs 1,20,000, on which the company deducted TDS at 20% plus cess, that is Rs 24,960. She has no other India income, and her NRE interest of Rs 90,000 is exempt and ignored.

She opens Form 26AS. Part A shows two deductors: the bank, with Rs 4,00,000 paid and Rs 1,24,800 deducted, and the company registrar, with Rs 1,20,000 paid and Rs 24,960 deducted, both deposited in full. Her TIS confirms interest of Rs 4,00,000 and dividend of Rs 1,20,000. Everything ties. Her total India income is Rs 5,20,000, and on a conservative reading where some tax applies, take her computed liability at, say, Rs 14,500 including cess for the illustration. Total TDS already deducted is Rs 1,24,800 plus Rs 24,960, or Rs 1,49,760. Against a Rs 14,500 liability the refund due is Rs 1,35,260, credited to her pre-validated bank account with interest under Section 244A from the start of the assessment year.

Now the counterfactual that shows what reconciliation actually buys. Suppose the bank had filed her TDS under a wrong or old PAN, so the Rs 1,24,800 never appeared in Form 26AS Part A. Had she claimed it anyway, the CPC would have disallowed it under 143(1)(a)(vi), and her refund would have collapsed from Rs 1,35,260 to roughly Rs 10,300 (the Rs 24,960 dividend TDS less her Rs 14,500 liability), with the missing Rs 1,24,800 recoverable only after she got the bank to file a correction and then filed a rectification. Same income, same tax, a Rs 1.25 lakh swing in what she actually receives, decided entirely by whether she checked Form 26AS before claiming. The reconciliation is the refund.

Filing feedback on a wrong AIS line, and watching the source respond

The AIS is assembled from third-party reporting, and third parties make mistakes: they duplicate an entry, tag it to the wrong PAN, report a gross figure where a net one was due, or classify a gift or a transfer between your own accounts as a sale. The portal gives you a structured way to push back, and since May 2024 a way to see whether it worked.

Every AIS line has a feedback button. Open the entry, click Submit Feedback, and choose from a fixed set of reasons: information is correct; information is not fully correct (you supply the right figure); information relates to other PAN or year; information is duplicate or included in other information; information is denied (the transaction did not happen); or transfer not in the nature of sale (for a property or securities line that was a gift or an internal transfer, not a disposal). Add the corrected value where relevant and a short remark.

Once submitted, three things happen. The TIS updates, showing the modified value alongside the reported value, typically within 24 hours; if it has not moved in 48 hours, raise a grievance through the portal rather than assume it failed. The feedback is sent to the source for confirmation, and the source gets 30 days to respond. And under the real-time status functionality CBDT released in May 2024, you can watch the confirmation: the AIS now shows whether the feedback was shared for confirmation, the date it was shared, whether the source accepted it fully or partially or rejected it, and the date the source responded. For an NRI who cannot walk into a branch, that visibility is the difference between knowing your correction landed and hoping it did.

Two things to be clear about. First, feedback corrects the record and creates a documented trail, but it does not by itself change your tax. You still file on the correct numbers, and you keep the feedback acknowledgement as proof of why your return differs from the originally reported figure. Second, the source can reject your feedback if its records say otherwise. If they reject and you are still right, the resolution moves to documentary evidence and, if it comes to it, a reply to any resulting notice.

The mechanics are easiest to see on a duplicate. Vikram, an NRI in the UAE, opens his AIS and finds the interest section overstated. His NRO fixed deposit genuinely earned Rs 3,00,000, but the AIS shows two lines from the same bank, one for Rs 3,00,000 and a duplicate for another Rs 3,00,000, so the TIS reads total interest of Rs 6,00,000, double the truth. If he files matching the TIS he over-declares Rs 3,00,000 and over-pays. If he files the correct Rs 3,00,000 and ignores the AIS, the automated comparison sees declared interest of Rs 3,00,000 against an AIS figure of Rs 6,00,000, flags a Rs 3,00,000 shortfall, and a 143(1)(a) notice issues with its 30-day clock. Neither outcome is acceptable.

The fix takes ten minutes. He opens the duplicate line, selects information is duplicate or included in other information, identifies the genuine line it duplicates, and submits. The TIS modified value for interest drops from Rs 6,00,000 to Rs 3,00,000, matching reality. The feedback goes to the bank, and Vikram notes the acknowledgement and watches the real-time status until the bank confirms. He then files ITR-2 declaring interest of Rs 3,00,000, which now agrees with the corrected TIS, so the automated comparison comes back clean and no notice generates. Had the bank later rejected the feedback in error, he holds the deposit certificate showing a single Rs 3,00,000 deposit and his feedback trail, which is exactly what he would attach to a reply.

Where the AIS data comes from, and what that tells you

To trust the AIS, know the pipe that feeds it. The Statement of Financial Transactions (SFT), filed by reporting entities in Form 61A on or before 31 May following the financial year, is the main source. Banks, companies, registrars, depositories, mutual funds and sub-registrars must report specified transactions against your PAN. The thresholds split into two camps, and the distinction matters more than most guides admit.

For the bulk-aggregate categories there are genuine floors. Immovable property of Rs 30 lakh or more, reported by the sub-registrar, so a flat sale will almost always be in your AIS. Time deposits aggregating Rs 10 lakh or more in a year, excluding renewals, reported by the bank. Cash deposits or withdrawals aggregating Rs 10 lakh or more in savings accounts. Credit card spends of Rs 10 lakh or more, or Rs 1 lakh in cash. For dividends and interest, there is no threshold at all: every rupee is reported, dividends by the company or registrar, interest account by account. Listed-share and mutual fund transactions are reported by depositories and fund houses. So if your mental model is that small dividends and modest interest stay invisible, drop it; those are exactly the items reported in full, and exactly the items NRIs most often forget.

Interest carries one statutory exemption that works in your favour. Interest that is exempt from tax, including interest on FCNR accounts, is not required to be reported. That is the legal reason your tax-free NRE and FCNR interest should not be cluttering your AIS, and if it appears it is a misclassification worth correcting via feedback. The account types and why NRE and FCNR sit outside the Indian tax net are in NRE, NRO and FCNR accounts, and the NRO interest treatment in tax on NRO interest.

The practical takeaway: the AIS is comprehensive but not infallible, because it is only as accurate as the SFT filings behind it. A reporting entity that mis-tags, duplicates or files late shows up as an AIS error, and the burden of correcting it sits with you through feedback. The flip side is that the same reporting net means there is almost nothing about your India transactions the department does not see. The right strategy is never to hope something stays invisible. It will not. The right strategy is to declare it correctly and reconcile.

Edge cases

A handful of situations trip NRIs up more than the general rule suggests.

TDS deducted but not in Form 26AS. Your bank statement shows tax taken, but Form 26AS does not list it. The deductor has not deposited or filed the TDS return, or filed it under the wrong PAN. You cannot claim what is not there, so chase the deductor to file a correction; the credit appears only after they do. Filing-season pressure is real, so check this in April, not July, when there is still time for a deductor to revise before your return is due.

Property TDS at 1% versus the NRI rate. When an NRI sells property, the buyer should deduct under Section 195 at the rate applicable to the capital gain, not the 1% under Section 194-IA that applies to resident sellers. If your AIS or Form 26AS shows property TDS at 1%, the buyer treated you as a resident, which creates a short-deduction problem that can land on the buyer and complicate your file. Resolve it at the transaction stage; a lower deduction certificate under Form 13 is the clean route, covered in the lower TDS certificate guide.

Exempt income appearing in the AIS. NRE or FCNR interest, or a transfer between your own accounts, can surface through misclassification. Use feedback to mark it correctly (information is not fully correct, or transfer not in the nature of sale) and do not declare exempt income as taxable just because the AIS lists it.

Joint holdings. Interest or a property transaction on a jointly held account or asset can be reported in full against your PAN even though your share is partial. Use the "information relates to other PAN" feedback to apportion it, and declare only your share.

RNOR transition years. In the year you return to India or during your RNOR window, your residential status changes what is taxable, but the AIS does not track status. Read it through the lens of your actual residency, set out in NRI residency and RNOR rules, rather than declaring everything it lists.

Timing lag near the deadline. SFT filings are due by 31 May, so the AIS can keep updating into June. File in early April and an entry can appear afterwards. Either wait until late June for the AIS to settle, or file early and be ready to revise if a genuine new item shows up.

The Form 168 changeover. From 1 April 2026 the renaming to Form 168 takes effect alongside the Income-tax Act 2025. For now the content and access path are unchanged, but if your software or a portal screen shows "Form 168" where you expected "Form 26AS", it is the same statement. Watch for transitional glitches in the first cycle and keep your own downloaded copies dated.

The closing read

The honest read is that Form 26AS and the AIS are not optional reading for an NRI, they are the cheapest insurance you will ever buy against a tax notice. The asymmetry is stark. Reconciling takes an evening: log in, pull three statements, tick every TDS line against Form 26AS, every income line against the TIS, and file feedback on anything wrong. A 143(1)(a) notice, by contrast, costs you a 30-day reply window run from another time zone, and often a professional's fee to handle it.

So commit to this order, every year, before you file. First, claim TDS in ITR-2 only when it sits in Form 26AS Part A, because that is the single most common reason an NRI refund gets cut, and as Anaya's case showed it can swing the refund by more than a lakh on identical income. Second, account for every AIS line, declaring it or filing feedback that explains why it is wrong or exempt, then watch the real-time status until the source confirms, because an unexplained gap is exactly what the automated comparison is built to catch.

The one place to be genuinely careful rather than mechanical is exempt and treaty-relieved income. The AIS does not know you are an NRI, does not know NRE and FCNR interest is exempt, and does not apply your DTAA rate. Reconcile against the truth of your residency and your treaty position, not against the AIS as if it were gospel. Treat Form 26AS as the ledger of what you can claim, the AIS as the list of what you must explain, and your own residential status as the lens over both. File in that order and the notice does not find you.

Related guides

• NRI ITR filing guide for AY 2026-27
• TDS for NRIs, and how to cut it or claim it back
• Responding to NRI tax notices
• NRI residency and RNOR rules
• Tax on NRO interest
• NRI dividend tax in India
• Advance tax for NRIs
• Lower TDS certificate (Form 13)
• PAN for NRIs
• Capital gains tax for NRIs on shares and mutual funds
• NRE, NRO and FCNR accounts
• Taxation guides hub
• Banking guides hub

Disclaimer

This guide is general information for NRIs on reading and reconciling Form 26AS, the AIS and the TIS, current to February 2026 and reflecting the income tax e-filing portal and rules as they stood then. Portal layouts, SFT thresholds, feedback options and statutory provisions change, and the Income-tax Act 2025 takes effect from 1 April 2026, renaming Form 26AS as Form 168 under Section 510 and Rule 245, so verify the current position on incometax.gov.in before you act. Nothing here is tax advice for your specific situation. Your residential status, treaty position and the facts of each transaction determine the correct treatment, and the consequences of an error sit with you. For a return involving capital gains, property, multiple income sources or a disputed AIS entry, consult a qualified chartered accountant or tax adviser before filing.