Current professional tax slabs in Maharashtra
| Monthly gross salary | Professional tax |
|---|---|
| Up to ₹7,500 | Nil |
| ₹7,501 – ₹10,000 | ₹175 / month |
| Above ₹10,000 | ₹200 / month |
The February instalment: employees with monthly gross above ₹10,000 pay ₹300 in February instead of the usual ₹200 — eleven months at ₹200 plus one February at ₹300 brings the year to exactly ₹2,500.
Maximum annual professional tax in Maharashtra: ₹2,500 for anyone in the top slab.
Maharashtra’s professional tax is the version of this levy most Indians actually experience — Mumbai and Pune payslips both carry it — and it has one famous quirk: February is different. The state collects it under the Maharashtra State Tax on Professions, Trades, Callings and Employments Act, 1975, the oldest of the major state PT laws and the template several other states copied. The current slabs, and the February figure, are rendered above from the same rate data this site’s calculators use.
The February instalment, explained
Article 276 of the Constitution allows a state to collect at most ₹2,500 per person per year in professional tax. Maharashtra chose to charge the maximum — but a round monthly figure multiplied by twelve cannot hit ₹2,500 exactly. The legislature’s fix was structural: employees in the top slab pay a standard amount for eleven months and a larger instalment in February, the last month of the tax year, bringing the annual total precisely to the cap. Karnataka, by contrast, keeps a flat twelve-month schedule and simply collects a little less over the year (see the Karnataka professional tax page for its table). The practical upshot: a Mumbai or Pune employee’s February take-home dips by a small, predictable amount, and every year a wave of “payroll made a mistake” questions proves how few people know the rule.
Who pays, and through what machinery
For salaried employees the tax is deducted at source by the employer, slab by slab, on each month’s gross salary. The compliance framework behind it runs on two certificates with confusingly similar names. The PTRC (registration certificate) authorises the employer to deduct and remit employees’ professional tax — monthly returns if the annual liability is large, annual returns if small. The PTEC (enrolment certificate) covers the entity’s own liability and that of self-employed professionals — company directors, partners, consultants, doctors, architects — who pay a fixed annual amount directly, typically by 30 June. A working professional switching from employment to consulting in Maharashtra therefore moves from PTRC-world (employer handles everything) to PTEC-world (register and pay yourself).
Exemptions and edge cases worth knowing
Maharashtra’s law carries more exemptions than most states: senior citizens above 65, persons with a permanent disability over 40%, parents of children with permanent disabilities, members of the armed forces, and — under the state’s 2023 budget amendment — women below a notified salary threshold. None of these appear in the generic slab table above, which models the default salaried case; anyone in an exempt category sees the line vanish from the payslip after submitting proof to payroll.
Because the levy is monthly-gross-based, part-year Maharashtra employment is clean: months worked in the state are deducted per its schedule, months worked elsewhere follow the other state’s rules, and no reconciliation connects them. Under the old income-tax regime the amounts deducted are allowed as a deduction from salary under §16(iii) — the in-hand salary calculator applies that automatically, and the old-vs-new regime tool shows how little it moves the needle either way.