GST Challan PMT-06: Paying Tax the Right Way

A GST challan payment is made in Form GST PMT-06, and it does exactly one thing: it moves money from your bank account into your electronic cash ledger. That is a holding account, not a payment of tax. The liability in your electronic liability register is discharged only later, when you file the return and the portal debits the ledger against it. Almost every confused call to a helpdesk about GST payments comes from collapsing those two steps into one.

What Form GST PMT-06 is, and what it is not

The GST payment architecture has three registers behind it, and PMT-06 touches only one of them. The electronic liability register records what you owe. The electronic credit ledger holds input tax credit. The electronic cash ledger holds money you have actually deposited. A challan is the doorway into the third of those, and nothing more. Our guide to the electronic credit and cash ledgers sets out how the three interact; what matters here is the ordering.

The sequence runs: generate a challan, pay it, watch the cash ledger balance rise, then file GSTR-3B, at which point the portal offsets the declared liability against the credit ledger first and the cash ledger for whatever remains. Only that last step discharges the liability. If you deposit the money on the twentieth and file on the twenty-eighth, the tax was paid on the twenty-eighth for the purpose of the liability register, and interest runs in between — even though the money was sitting in the government system the whole time. Depositing early is prudent for cash management; it is not a substitute for filing.

The opposite mistake is just as common. Filing a return without sufficient cash-ledger balance does not create a debt that quietly accrues: the portal simply will not let you complete the offset, so the return stays unfiled and late fee and interest begin to build. The challan has to be paid and credited before the filing button becomes available.

Generating a GST challan, with or without logging in

On the portal the route is Services, then Payments, then Create Challan. Logged in, your GSTIN is prefilled, you enter the amounts head by head, choose a payment mode, and generate. Logged-in challans are saved to your dashboard, so a challan created and abandoned can be picked up later from the saved list rather than rebuilt from scratch, and paid challans stay in your challan history as a permanent record.

You can also create a challan without logging in, from the same Services menu on the public portal, by entering the GSTIN or other identifier and re-entering it for confirmation. This is genuinely useful when somebody else is making the payment on your behalf — an accounts clerk without portal credentials, or a client paying against a challan a consultant prepared. The trade-off is that a pre-login challan is not saved to any dashboard, so if you lose the CPIN before paying it, you generate a new one. The payment itself credits the same ledger either way, because the challan is bound to the GSTIN, not to the person who created it.

The fifteen-day validity window

A generated challan is valid for fifteen days from the date of generation. Within that window the CPIN is live and the challan can be paid through whichever mode you selected. After fifteen days the CPIN expires and the challan is dead — the portal will not accept payment against it, and banks will reject a mandate quoting an expired CPIN.

An expired challan costs you nothing but a minute, because an unpaid challan never moved any money. You regenerate it with the same amounts and get a new CPIN. The one place the window bites is NEFT and RTGS, where the mandate form carries the same fifteen-day life and the transfer has to be processed by the bank inside it. A mandate handed to a branch on day fourteen, over a weekend, can lapse before the funds move.

CPIN, CIN and BRN: three numbers doing three jobs

These three identifiers get used interchangeably in conversation, which is unhelpful, because they mark three different points in the payment and only one of them proves anything.

The practical rule: quote the CIN when you need to show that tax was deposited — to an officer, an auditor, or in a reply to a notice. Quote the BRN together with the CPIN when money has been debited from your account and the ledger has not been credited, because that is the pair the bank needs to trace the transaction at their end. The CPIN on its own is only ever a lookup key.

Payment modes and the over-the-counter limit

You choose the mode when you generate the challan, and the choice determines what the portal produces alongside the CPIN.

• Net banking through an authorised bank. The portal hands you off to the bank, and on success the CIN comes back immediately, so the cash ledger usually reflects the credit within minutes.
• Over the counter at a branch of an authorised bank, by cash, cheque or demand draft. The portal prints a challan you carry to the branch. Cash deposits are subject to a prescribed per-challan cap per tax period — confirm the current figure on the portal before assuming it, as it has been revised and is enforced by the portal itself when you select the mode. Payment by cheque credits the ledger only on realisation, not on presentation.
• NEFT or RTGS through any bank, including one that is not an authorised GST collecting bank. The portal generates a mandate form alongside the challan, which you present to your bank or use to populate an online transfer. This is the usual route for large payments and for businesses banking with an institution outside the authorised list.
• UPI and debit or credit card, added to the portal more recently and rolled out state by state, which makes them the quickest route for small deposits. UPI carries its own per-transaction ceiling set by the payment system rather than by GST law, so a large liability will still need net banking or RTGS.

The over-the-counter cash restriction has carve-outs that matter in practice. It does not apply to deposits made by a government department or by any other person notified by the Commissioner, nor to amounts collected by a proper officer or an authorised officer by way of recovery of dues, or deposited in the course of an investigation or other enforcement activity. In those situations the cap is simply not applied, which is why a recovery challan can be far larger than an ordinary self-service one.

One detail that decides interest computations: the date of deposit in your cash ledger is the date the amount is credited to the government account, not the date you initiated the transfer. An RTGS instruction given on the due date that settles the next morning is a next-day deposit.

Major heads, minor heads and why the choice sticks

The challan is not one box for a total. It is a grid. Four columns, one for each major head — IGST, CGST, SGST/UTGST and cess — each split into five minor heads: tax, interest, penalty, fee and others. Twenty cells in all, and the amount you type into each one is tagged with that pair for as long as it sits in the ledger.

The tagging is the whole point. A balance sitting under CGST-tax cannot be used to discharge an IGST liability, and a balance under IGST-tax cannot pay an IGST interest demand. The offset engine that runs when you file matches head to head. So a business that types its entire monthly payment into the CGST column because that is where the cursor landed will find, at filing time, that it apparently has no money for SGST at all — while a large idle balance sits one column over. The money is not lost, but it is stuck until it is moved, and moving it takes a separate form and a separate filing.

Moving money that landed in the wrong place: Form GST PMT-09

Form GST PMT-09 is the correction mechanism for the cash ledger. It sits on the portal under Services, then Ledgers, then Electronic Cash Ledger, and it transfers an unutilised balance from one head to another. Both directions of movement are allowed:

• Intra-head — between minor heads under the same major head, for instance moving an amount from CGST-interest to CGST-tax.
• Inter-head — between major heads, for instance moving a balance from CGST-tax to IGST-tax.

Filing it is quick. You pick the head the money is currently under, the head you want it moved to, and the amount; the form validates the amount against the available balance and files with DSC or EVC. There is no fee and no officer approval, and the transfer reflects in the cash ledger immediately. There is also no limit on how many times you file it.

The constraints are worth knowing before you rely on it. Only an unutilised balance can be moved — an amount already debited to discharge a liability is gone from the ledger and cannot be pulled back through PMT-09. And the form operates within one GSTIN. The amendment to section 49 made by the Finance Act 2021 widened this slightly, allowing a transfer to the integrated tax or central tax ledger of a distinct person holding the same PAN, but only where the transferor has no unpaid liability in its own liability register. Where money was deposited against a GSTIN that is not a distinct person of yours — a genuine wrong-GSTIN payment — PMT-09 cannot help at all. The only route is a refund of the excess balance in the cash ledger, claimed by the registration that actually received the money.

PMT-06 under the QRMP scheme

Under the QRMP scheme, GSTR-3B is filed once a quarter, but tax is still deposited monthly. For the first two months of each quarter there is no return at all — the payment is the compliance, made in PMT-06 by the twenty-fifth of the following month. The deposits are then adjusted in the quarterly GSTR-3B.

The portal offers two ways to arrive at the monthly figure. Under the fixed sum method it prefills a challan for you: broadly 35% of the tax paid in cash in the preceding quarter if you were a quarterly filer, or 100% of the tax paid in cash in the last month of the preceding quarter if you were filing monthly. Under the self-assessment method you work out the actual liability for the month, set off the input tax credit available in GSTR-2B, and deposit the balance.

The fixed sum method is the safer of the two in a month with an unusual spike, because depositing the prefilled amount by the due date protects you from interest on the first two months even if the eventual quarterly liability turns out higher — provided the quarterly return itself is filed on time. The self-assessment method suits a business whose turnover is falling or whose credit position is strong, since paying the fixed sum in that situation just parks cash in the ledger. Note too that an amount deposited in PMT-06 for the first two months cannot be used for any other purpose, or refunded, until the return for that quarter has been filed. Our GST return due dates guide sets out how the monthly deposit dates sit against the quarterly filing dates.

Bank debited, ledger not credited

The failure mode everyone eventually meets: your account is debited, the portal shows the challan as not paid, and the cash ledger balance has not moved. What has happened is that the money reached the bank but no CIN was generated, or a CIN was generated and not communicated to the common portal.

Do not regenerate and pay a second challan on the same day. Most of these resolve themselves once the bank reconciliation cycle runs, which is why the standard advice is to wait roughly twenty-four hours before treating it as a genuine failure. In the meantime, check Services, then Payments, then Track Payment Status, using the CPIN. A status of "Paid" with the ledger not yet updated is a reconciliation lag. A status of "Failed" or "Not Paid" against a real bank debit is the case that needs raising.

The formal route is a grievance in Form GST PMT-07, filed on the portal under Services, then Payments, then Grievance against Payment. You quote the CPIN, the bank, the date, the amount and the BRN or UTR from your bank statement, and the grievance goes to the bank or gateway through which the deposit was initiated. Keep the bank statement line and the transaction receipt: the BRN is what lets the bank match the debit to a challan at their end, and without it the trace is much slower. If a duplicate payment did go through in the meantime, the excess ends up as a cash-ledger balance you can either carry forward against future liabilities or claim back as a refund of excess cash balance.

Frequently asked questions