Where is the PAN printed on a Form 16 PDF?

Your PAN appears in two places on Form 16. Part A, issued from the TRACES portal, shows the employee PAN and the employer TAN at the top of the certificate. Part B, prepared by the employer, repeats the PAN alongside salary computation. Both parts must show the same 10-character PAN — if they differ, raise it with payroll before filing your ITR.

Why do people extract just the PAN page from Form 16?

Three common reasons: sharing proof of PAN with a bank or KYC verifier without revealing salary; uploading a single-page PAN excerpt to a CA portal that has size limits; archiving the PAN page separately from sensitive salary breakdowns. Splitting the original PDF means you stop circulating salary data every time someone needs your PAN.

Is it safe to extract PAN data using an online tool?

Only if the tool processes the PDF in your browser. Any service that uploads the file gives a server-side party access to your salary, employer name, and full PAN. PDF Mavericks runs entirely on your device through WebAssembly — the bytes never leave the browser, and closing the tab clears the working copy.

Can I copy the PAN text directly from a Form 16 PDF?

If your Form 16 is a TRACES-issued PDF with selectable text, yes — open it in any PDF viewer, find the line labelled PAN of the Employee, and copy the 10 characters. If it is a scanned PDF or a printed-then-rescanned copy, the text layer is missing and you will need to either type the PAN manually or run OCR. Validate the result against the format AAAAA9999A before using it anywhere.

How do I share Form 16 with my CA without exposing PAN to other recipients?

Send the full Form 16 to your CA over an end-to-end encrypted channel, and for any other recipient — a landlord, a bank teller, an LIC agent — share only the page they need, or redact the PAN before sharing. Splitting the PAN page out and redacting the others is the simplest approach.

Does the ITR portal need me to upload Form 16 to pre-fill PAN data?

No. The Income Tax e-filing portal pre-fills your PAN, employer TAN, salary, and TDS automatically once you log in with your PAN as user ID — it pulls the same data from Annexure II your employer filed via TRACES. You only need Form 16 to cross-check the pre-filled values, not to upload anything.

What is the difference between Form 16 Part A and Part B?

Part A is the TDS certificate downloaded by the employer from the TRACES portal — it carries the digital signature, your PAN, the employer TAN, and the quarterly TDS deposit summary. Part B is prepared by the employer in-house and contains your salary breakdown, exemptions under Section 10, deductions under Chapter VI-A, and the final tax payable. Both arrive bundled as one PDF every June.

Extract PAN From Form 16 PDF: 2026 Guide for ITR Filing

Most people who search how to extract PAN from Form 16 are not trying to read it — they already see it. They want a clean, single-page copy of the PAN for ITR pre-fill verification, a bank KYC, or a landlord rent-receipt request, without handing over the full salary breakdown that lives inside the same PDF. Every June, salaried employees in India receive this Form 16 PDF from their employer, and within a fortnight the same PDF starts showing up in chat threads, email forwards, and CA portals.

This guide walks through how to extract PAN from Form 16 in a browser — first by isolating the page that contains the PAN, then by redacting the PAN when you must share the full PDF. Neither method uploads your Form 16 to a server. Both work on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iPhone because they run inside the browser tab.

Why extract PAN from Form 16

The PAN is the one detail on Form 16 that gets requested over and over — for ITR pre-fill verification, for landlord rent receipts, for company onboarding, for mutual fund KYC, for an LIC nominee update. The salary numbers are private; the PAN is identifying. Sending both together when only the PAN is needed is the equivalent of mailing your bank statement when someone asked for your account number.

Three workflows that benefit from a PAN-only extract:

Rent receipts for HRA claims. Section 10(13A) HRA exemption requires landlords with rent above ₹1 lakh per year to share their PAN, and many landlords ask tenants to verify the salaried tenant's PAN in return. The landlord only needs the PAN page, not the salary breakdown.
Bank loan applications. Banks asking for Form 16 typically need three things: the PAN, the TAN, and the gross salary on Part B. If the underwriter is only cross-checking your PAN against the CIBIL pull, send the PAN page first and the rest only if asked.
Insurance and investment KYC. Aadhaar plus PAN is the standard KYC packet. Most fund houses will accept the Part A page of Form 16 as PAN proof if the digital signature is intact — far less than the full Form 16.

Where PAN lives inside Form 16 (Part A vs Part B)

Form 16 is a two-part document bundled into a single PDF. Knowing which part holds what decides which page you extract.

Part A is downloaded by your employer from the TRACES portal, the TDS Reconciliation Analysis and Correction Enabling System maintained by the Income Tax Department. It carries:

Employee PAN — printed at the top right of the first Part A page
Employer TAN — printed alongside the PAN
Quarterly TDS deposit summary across all four quarters of the financial year
A TRACES digital signature that authenticates Part A

Part B is generated by the employer's payroll team and is not downloaded from TRACES. It carries:

The same employee PAN as Part A — reprinted for cross-reference
Gross salary breakdown by section: basic, HRA, special allowances
Exemptions under Section 10 (HRA, LTA, gratuity)
Deductions under Chapter VI-A (80C, 80D, 80CCD, etc.)
The final tax payable or refund computation

For most PAN-share requests, the first page of Part A is what you want — it has the PAN, the TAN, the digital signature, and nothing else identifying. That single page is what we extract below.

Method 1: Extract just the PAN page

Open your Form 16 PDF in any browser. The Part A first page is usually page 1 or 2 of the bundle, depending on whether your employer added a cover sheet. To pull that page out as a standalone PDF:

Open the Extract Pages tool. The page loads in your browser and the PDF.js library initializes locally.
Click Choose File and pick your Form 16 PDF. The file is read into browser memory — no upload request fires.
The tool shows a thumbnail grid of every page. Scroll until you spot the page with the PAN at the top right (Part A first page).
Click that thumbnail to select it. The selected page lights up in amber.
Click Extract. A new PDF containing only the selected page downloads to your device. Default name is form-16-pan-extract.pdf.

You now have a single-page PDF carrying your PAN, employer TAN, and the TRACES digital signature. Send that file when the request is for PAN proof. Keep the original Form 16 sealed for your own records.

Method 2: Share Form 16 with PAN redacted

The reverse situation also happens — you must send the full Form 16 because the recipient wants to verify gross salary, but the PAN should not be on the copy that travels. A bank officer who only needs to confirm income, a tenant verification agent, a finance team reviewing your loan eligibility against payslips. In all those cases, redact the PAN before sending.

Open the Redact PDF tool. PDF.js renders the document inside the browser.
Upload your Form 16. The file is parsed locally — no server call.
Navigate to the Part A page. Drag a redaction rectangle over the 10-character PAN string. Repeat on the Part B page where the PAN is reprinted.
Click Apply Redactions. The tool flattens the rectangle into the PDF, replacing the underlying text bytes with the redaction color — not just hiding them with an overlay.
Download the redacted file. The output PDF carries all of Form 16 except the PAN.

The distinction matters: a black rectangle drawn on top of the PAN in Acrobat's comment tool is not a redaction. The PAN text is still underneath, copy-pasteable, and visible to anyone who opens the file in a different viewer. A real redaction rewrites the page content stream so the PAN bytes are gone. The Redact PDF tool does the second.

Using the extracted PAN for ITR pre-fill

For ITR filing season, the extracted PAN is mostly for cross-verification, not data entry. The Income Tax e-filing portal at incometax.gov.in pre-fills your salary, TDS, and PAN automatically once you log in — it pulls the same numbers your employer filed via the quarterly Annexure II on TRACES. Your job is to compare the pre-filled PAN against the PAN printed on Part A of your Form 16.

The cross-check workflow:

Log in to the e-filing portal using your PAN as user ID.
Start a new ITR for the assessment year. The portal pre-fills employer name, TAN, gross salary, TDS, and PAN.
Open the PAN extract from Method 1 in another tab. Verify the PAN on screen matches the PAN on the portal character by character.
If the values differ, do not proceed with filing. Contact your payroll team and ask them to file a TDS correction statement on TRACES. A PAN mismatch in Form 26AS is the most common reason a TDS credit is denied during ITR processing.
If the values match, proceed with the ITR. Keep both the original Form 16 and the PAN extract in your tax archive for the year.

Validate the PAN format before relying on it

A PAN is a 10-character alphanumeric code with a fixed structure: five letters, four digits, one letter — pattern AAAAA9999A. The fourth letter encodes the PAN holder category: P for individual, C for company, H for HUF,F for firm, A for association of persons, T for trust,B for body of individuals, L for local authority, J for artificial juridical person, G for government.

For a salaried employee, the fourth character is always P. If your Form 16 shows a PAN where the fourth character is not P, the PAN belongs to a different category and the document was issued against the wrong identifier. This is rare but happens in payroll data migrations — flag it with HR immediately.

The fifth character of the PAN is the first letter of the surname. If the surname on your Form 16 starts with R, the fifth PAN character should be R. A mismatch means the employer recorded a different name than what is on your PAN card, and the TDS credits may not flow through correctly. Easy to verify, cheap to fix, painful if missed.