A bank officer asks whether you are a filer before opening a deposit. A property dealer quotes two figures for the tax at the registrar’s office, one for filers and one for everyone else. Or a profit statement arrives with twice the deduction you expected. Each time the question is the same, and it is not really about whether you have ever filed a return. It is whether your CNIC is on one list, FBR’s income tax Active Taxpayers’ List, on the day the deduction is made.
The short answer. FBR gives three ways to check: send an SMS to 9966 with ATL, a space and your 13-digit CNIC; look yourself up in the online verification on FBR’s portals; or download the list itself. Your name is on it if you filed the return for the latest tax year by its due date, or filed late and paid the section 182A surcharge, now Rs 25,000 for an individual. No calculator, ours included, can tell you whether you are on it; only FBR’s own channels can.
What the list is, in law
Section 181A of the Income Tax Ordinance gives FBR the power to institute an active taxpayers’ list and leaves the detail to the Income Tax Rules. Section 2(1A) defines it as that list, and includes the lists issued by the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Central Board of Revenue and the Gilgit-Baltistan Council Board of Revenue. The Ordinance no longer uses the word “filer” at all: its definition, a taxpayer whose name appears on the list, was omitted by the Finance Act 2019, and every provision now speaks of a person “appearing” or “not appearing” on the active taxpayers’ list. “Filer” survives in everyday speech, and that is all it means.
There are two such lists, and they are easy to confuse. The one that decides your withholding rates on bank profit, cash, property and dividends is the income tax list. FBR publishes a separate sales tax list under the Sales Tax Act 1990, and the Ordinance treats them as two different things: one of its provisions gives a lower rate only to a buyer who appears on both. If someone tells you that you are “on the ATL”, make sure it is the income tax one.
How to check whether you are on the list
FBR’s own page on checking active taxpayer status lists three ways.
By SMS. For an individual, type ATL, a space and the 13 digits of your CNIC, and send it to 9966. For a company or an association of persons, type ATL, a space and the 7-digit NTN. For the Azad Kashmir list FBR gives AJKATL, a space and the CNIC without dashes, or AJKATL and an 11-digit NTN, to the same number.
Online. FBR’s page links an ATL status check on e.fbr.gov.pk. When we opened it on 5 November 2026, the online verification page there sent income tax checks to IRIS, whose public pages carry an Online Verification section with an “Active Taxpayer List (Income Tax)” tab: you choose CNIC or NTN, type the number and a date, and answer the captcha.
By downloading the list. The ATL download page offers the whole list as a file to search. When we read it, the page said “Updated on 05 Nov 2026”, and it asks you to clear your browser’s cache before downloading so that you get the latest copy rather than an old one.
One warning on the same verification page is worth repeating: FBR names e.fbr.gov.pk and its Tax Asaan mobile app as the only official resources for verification. A website or app calling itself an ATL checker is neither, and you have no way of knowing how old its copy of the list is.
What puts a name on the list
Rule 81B of the Income Tax Rules sets the test. A name is included if the person files the return for the latest tax year by the due date in section 118, or by a date extended by the Commissioner under section 119 or by FBR under section 214A. For an individual the section 118 date is 30 September after the tax year ends. “Latest tax year” is the tax year last completed before the return is filed, and it also takes in the year before that while the due date for the last completed year has not yet passed.
In practice that works like a relay. The tax year last completed is Tax Year 2025-2026 (1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026, which FBR calls Tax Year 2026). Until its due date passed, a return for Tax Year 2024-2025 filed in time was enough. Rule 81B(3) makes a published list valid only until the day after the due date, so once the Tax Year 2025-2026 date has gone by, it takes a return for Tax Year 2025-2026 to stay on. That is our reading of the two sub-rules together, and it is the reason to check now rather than assume: a return filed on time last year does not keep you on the list for ever. The dates for this year, and what happens to a late return, are in our guide to the 2025-26 return.
The rule also says the list is updated daily, and that a person who meets the test is included at the next update. Neither matches FBR’s own explainer page, which still says the list is published on 1 March, valid to the end of the following February and updated every Monday. That is close to the rule as it stood before an amendment of 18 October 2024 (S.R.O. 1638(I)/2024), which had the list published by 1 March, valid to the end of the next February and updated weekly; the amendment replaced all three, and the page has not caught up.
A few cases the rule settles that people often ask about. A joint bank account counts as on the list if any one holder is on it. An account in a minor’s name counts if a parent, guardian, or whoever deposited the money is on it. A company or association of persons formed after 30 June of the latest tax year, which has no return due yet, is included anyway. Someone on the Azad Kashmir or Gilgit-Baltistan list is included on the federal list where the conditions of rule 81B(9) about their address and employment are met.
Filed late? The surcharge, and the undertaking
Section 182A is blunt: a person who misses the due date is not included in the list for that year. The proviso is the way back. A late filer is included on paying a surcharge of Rs 100,000 for a company, Rs 50,000 for an association of persons and Rs 25,000 for an individual. Those are the Finance Act 2026 figures; until then they were Rs 20,000, Rs 10,000 and Rs 1,000, and FBR’s page on inclusion in the ATL still shows the old amounts. The same page says the surcharge is paid through a payment slip (PSID) under the “Misc” payment nature, as “Surcharge for ATL”, and that the name joins the list only after it is paid.
The Finance Act 2026 also added an exit for individuals. Under section 182A(3) an individual does not have to pay the surcharge after giving the Commissioner an undertaking not to purchase, acquire or otherwise obtain ownership or a beneficial interest in any property for six months from the date of the undertaking, in a form to be prescribed. We could not find that form: the Income Tax Rules as FBR publishes them to 15 September 2026 contain none. If you plan to buy property in the next six months, the undertaking is not for you in any case.
A late return costs more than the list. For the year concerned, section 182A also takes away the right to carry forward any loss, stops refunds while the person is off the list, and leaves that period out when compensation for a delayed refund is worked out. The late filing penalty under section 182 comes on top; the late filing penalty calculator works out both it and the surcharge.
What being off the list costs
The Tenth Schedule to the Ordinance raises, by a hundred per cent, the rate of tax deducted or collected from a person not on the list, with its own figures for some sections. These are the rates the filer vs non-filer calculator uses for Tax Year 2026-2027.
| Transaction | Section | Withheld if on the list | Withheld if not on the list |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cash withdrawals, above Rs 50,000 in a day | 231AB | Nothing | 0.8% |
| Profit on bank deposits | 151 | 20% | 40% |
| Profit on savings certificates, bonds and other debt | 151 | 15% | 30% |
| Dividends | 150 | 15% | 30% |
| Prize bonds and cross-word puzzles | 156 | 15% | 30% |
| Raffle, lottery, quiz or sales-promotion prize | 156 | 20% | 40% |
| Property purchase, value up to Rs 50,000,000 | 236K | 1.25% | 10.5% |
| Property purchase, value above Rs 50,000,000 up to Rs 100,000,000 | 236K | 1.25% | 14.5% |
| Property purchase, value above Rs 100,000,000 | 236K | 1.25% | 18.5% |
In rupees: on Rs 100,000 of profit on a bank deposit, the bank deducts Rs 20,000 from someone on the list and Rs 40,000 from someone who is not. On a house bought for Rs 30,000,000, the advance tax under section 236K is Rs 375,000 on the list and Rs 3,150,000 off it, a difference of Rs 2,775,000. Set that beside the Rs 25,000 surcharge and the arithmetic for a late filer about to buy property does itself.
The higher figure is withholding, though, not a higher tax. The tax charged on bank profit, dividends and prizes is still the rate for a person on the list; what a non-filer loses is the use of the extra until it is adjusted. Rule 4(3) of the Tenth Schedule makes the tax deducted at the higher rate adjustable against the tax payable in the return for that same year, where the return is filed before the Commissioner makes a provisional assessment, or within 45 days of that order together with the returns and wealth statements for that year and the one before. A person who does not file at all gets the provisional assessment instead, which imputes income from the tax deducted and treats it as concealed. The cash withdrawal tax sits outside the Tenth Schedule: it is charged only on someone not on the list, and section 231AB makes it adjustable on its own terms.
If the check says you are not on it
First make sure you checked the right thing: the income tax list, not the sales tax one, with the CNIC of the person who holds the account or is buying the property. Then look at which return you filed and when. If the return for the latest tax year has not been filed, filing it on IRIS is the only route back, with the surcharge (or, for an individual, the undertaking) if the due date has passed. If you filed in time, or paid the surcharge, and the list does not show you yet, rule 81B(8) puts a name on the list at the next update after the person qualifies, so check again after a day. And for any rate you were charged while off the list, the bank profit tax calculator, the cash withdrawal tax calculator and the property purchase tax calculator show both figures, so you know how much there is to adjust in the return.
Sources
Read for this guide on 5 November 2026:
- Income Tax Ordinance 2001, amended up to 30 June 2026 (FBR): section 2(1A) and the omitted clause (23A), section 118, section 181A, section 182A, and the Tenth Schedule, rules 1 to 4.
- Income Tax Rules 2002, as published by FBR to 15 September 2026: rule 81B and its footnotes recording S.R.O. 1638(I)/2024 of 18 October 2024.
- FBR, Active Taxpayer List (Income Tax) pages: Active Taxpayer List (ATL), Inclusion in ATL, Check Active Taxpayer Status and Active Taxpayer benefits.
- FBR, Download Active Taxpayer List (ATL).
- FBR, Online Verification Services on e.fbr.gov.pk, and the Online Verification section of IRIS, read from the site’s own page code because it would not load in our browser.
Withholding rates and rupee figures on this page are computed from the site’s data files: the rates from the file the filer vs non-filer calculator reads, which cites FBR’s Withholding Tax Rates Card for Tax Year 2027 and the Ordinance as amended by the Finance Act 2026, and the section 182A surcharge from the file the late filing penalty calculator reads. We could not confirm the wording of the SMS reply or of the online result, so this guide does not describe them.