Brands often deduct TDS before paying you, and it's easy to assume that money is just gone, part of your tax bill for the year. It isn't. It's an advance sitting with the tax department under your PAN. If you actually owe less tax than what got deducted, which happens to a lot of creators, you get the difference back.
The cut a brand takes isn't your final tax number. It's a running credit against whatever you actually owe once you file. Most brand deals get taxed as professional fees, so the deduction is 10%. Occasionally it's lower, 1% or 2%, if the brand treats the deal as a contract for delivering a video rather than paying for your professional judgement. You don't get to pick which one applies, that's the brand's call based on how they've structured the deal.
If you want the legal citation: both rates sit inside the same Section 393(1) now, just different rows in its table. Before the 2025 renumbering, they were two separate sections, 194J for the 10% rate and 194C for the 1 to 2% one.
This depends on how much was withheld and what you actually owe once it's calculated. At the standard 10% rate, a refund is common: if you're on presumptive taxation under Section 44ADA (only half your gross receipts count as taxable income) and you're not deep into the higher tax slabs, 10% withheld is often more than your real liability. Business expenses work the same way under actual-income filing, lowering what you owe below what was withheld.
At the lower 1% or 2% rate, the one that applies when a deal gets classified as a contract rather than a professional fee, it usually runs the other way. That amount is already small enough that your real tax liability, even after presumptive taxation or expense deductions, is likely to be more than what was withheld, not less. So at that rate, filing more often means paying the difference, not claiming it back.
Either way, filing is what actually settles it. You can't tell just by looking at the deduction on your invoice which direction it'll go.
Pull your Form 26AS and Annual Information Statement (AIS) from the income tax portal and add up every TDS entry against your PAN. Compare that to your own invoices. Two things go wrong often enough to be worth checking specifically: a brand deducted TDS but hasn't deposited or filed it yet, so it's simply missing from your 26AS even though it left your payment; or you never shared your PAN with a brand, which quietly bumps the deduction to 20% instead of 10%.
File ITR-4 if you're on presumptive taxation, ITR-3 if you're declaring actual income and expenses. The TDS you claim has to match your 26AS and AIS exactly, and your bank account needs to be pre-validated and linked to your PAN before you file, not after, since that's the single most common reason a refund quietly stalls. E-verify the return as soon as you submit it, Aadhaar OTP is the fastest way. After that it's mostly waiting: a few weeks for processing, then a few more days for the money to actually land. Filing early in the season helps too, since returns get handled roughly in the order they arrive.
The government pays interest on a delayed refund. 6% a year, simple interest, counted from when you filed to when you got paid. The one exception is if the refund itself is small, under 10% of your total assessed tax, in which case no interest applies at all.
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