About the in-hand salary calculator
The gap between the CTC on your offer letter and the amount that lands in your account each month is large, and it opens in two entirely different places. Understanding which is which is the difference between feeling cheated and reading a payslip.
The first gap is money you were never going to be paid. Your employer's provident fund contribution and the provision they set aside for your future gratuity are both counted inside CTC — they are costs of employing you — but neither appears on a payslip as earnings. Strip those out and what remains is your gross salary, which is the number your payslip actually starts from.
The second gap is deductions from that gross: your own provident fund contribution, professional tax, and income tax withheld as TDS. Only what survives both stages reaches your bank. On a typical structure the two gaps together account for roughly a fifth to a quarter of CTC.
How provident fund is calculated matters more than people expect. Most large employers contribute 12% of a statutory ceiling of ₹15,000 a month, which caps the contribution at ₹21,600 a year each side. Some contribute 12% of your whole basic instead, which on a large salary means far more going into PF and noticeably less in hand — better for retirement, worse for this month. The toggle here changes take-home by several thousand rupees a month at higher salaries, and it is the setting people most often have wrong.
Both tax regimes are computed, because for a salaried person with rent and a full 80C the answer genuinely goes either way. Your PF contribution is added to 80C automatically, since it is already an 80C investment. The HRA exemption is worked out from the rent you enter and is usually what tips the comparison, so put a real rent figure in rather than leaving it at zero.
Variable pay, joining bonuses and stock are deliberately excluded. They are real money but they are not monthly, and folding them into a take-home figure produces a number you will never actually see in any given month.