Form 26AS is the tax department's consolidated record of TDS and TCS credited against your PAN — in effect, a receipt showing what deductors (banks, tenants, property buyers, employers) have actually reported and deposited on your behalf, as distinct from what they told you they deducted. Since 2020, its scope has been split: the broader Annual Information Statement (AIS) now carries most of the other financial-transaction detail that used to sit inside Form 26AS, while Form 26AS itself (viewable via TRACES) has, from Assessment Year 2023-24 onward, been described as narrowing back to essentially TDS/TCS credit data. NRIs filing a return should generally check both, but 26AS is specifically the one that matters for confirming TDS credit.
Why this matters more for NRIs than residents
An NRI's India-sourced income — NRO interest, rent, property-sale proceeds — is almost always taxed at source by someone else: a bank, a tenant, a property buyer. The NRI has no independent way to confirm that deduction actually reached the government and got attributed to the right PAN, except by checking Form 26AS. If a credit doesn't show up there, the return generally can't claim it as tax already paid — meaning tax genuinely withheld from your income can still result in a demand notice or a stuck refund, through no fault of your own filing.
Common mismatch scenarios
A few patterns come up repeatedly. One is the wrong form: property buyers are supposed to use Form 26QB for a resident seller and Form 27Q for an NRI seller, and using 26QB by mistake for an NRI seller has been reported to pass through only a small fraction of the actual TDS credit, because the two forms feed different downstream systems. Another is simple PAN error: a bank teller or first-time NRI-landlord tenant misquoting or mistyping the PAN on the TDS filing, which orphans the credit under a PAN that isn't yours. A third is timing: TDS deposited late by the deductor, or deposited on time but not yet reflected because the deductor hasn't filed their quarterly TDS return (26Q/27Q) — the money can genuinely be with the government while your 26AS still shows nothing, until that return is filed.
What to do about a mismatch
The fix, in nearly every case, has to come from the deductor's side, not yours directly — a 26QB correction request on TRACES for a property transaction, or a request to the bank/tenant to revise their TDS return, is the standard route. Where the deductor is slow or unresponsive, escalating to your jurisdictional Assessing Officer, supported by your TDS certificate and bank/transaction records showing the deduction actually happened, is the fallback, though there's no reliable, consistently-cited timeline for how long that process typically takes — treat it as open-ended rather than a quick fix. The practical takeaway is timing: check Form 26AS well before your filing deadline, not the week of, since a correction request itself takes processing time you don't want to be racing against.