How to file your tax return as a freelancer in Pakistan
You do not need an accountant to file a return on freelance export income. You need your payment exports, your bank's withholding certificates, one clear evening, and an order to do things in. This is that order, for tax year 2026, from working out what you earned to watching your name land on the Active Taxpayer List.
Do you have to file at all?
If you were in Pakistan for 183 days or more between 1 July 2025 and 30 June 2026, you are a resident individual for tax year 2026, and income you earned from foreign clients belongs on a Pakistani return. That is true even though the tax has already been taken.
When an export remittance for IT or IT-enabled services lands in your account, the bank deducts tax on it under section 154A of the Income Tax Ordinance. That deduction is final tax: there is nothing more to pay on that income, and it is not adjusted against slab rates later. What it does not do is file anything for you. The return is a separate obligation, and so is the wealth statement under section 116.
The tax year runs 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026, and the return for it is due by 30 September 2026.
Get a chartered accountant instead if you were outside Pakistan for most of the year, you file for a company or an AOP, you disposed of shares, property or crypto, or you have rental or agricultural income. Those need treatment a self-serve route cannot give.
What to have on the table before you start
Gather all of it first. The commonest way an evening of filing becomes a week is starting without a document and then waiting on a bank.
- Your IRIS login and NTN. IRIS is FBR's filing portal at iris.fbr.gov.pk. Never registered? Register there first; it is free and quick.
- Your CNIC. The name on the return has to match it exactly.
- A full year of payment records. Your Payoneer or Wise export, your Upwork or Fiverr earnings report, or the PDF statements from the bank your remittances landed in. Jul 2025 through Jun 2026, nothing missing.
- Withholding certificates. The Proceeds Realisation Certificates, or PRCs, from every bank that received a remittance. They prove the tax already deducted.
- Your PSEB registration number and certificate, if you are registered.
- Your net wealth at 30 June 2026, and at 1 July 2025. If you filed last year, its closing figure is this year's opening one.
- An honest number for what you spent on yourself: rent, food, utilities, travel, education. Guessing low causes more trouble than guessing high.
Work out your gross foreign receipts
Build a month by month table, July to June: gross in dollars, the platform fee, the net that reached you, and the rupee value. Every payout in the year gets a row.
Convert each receipt at the State Bank rate for the date it was received, not at one year-end rate and not at an annual average. Where no rate is published for the exact day, use the nearest published rate on or before it. This is the step people get wrong most often, and the one that quietly moves the total by tens of thousands of rupees.
Section 154A is charged on what actually reached you, net of the platform's fee, because that is the figure the bank sees at credit and deducts on. If the same payment appears both in a platform export and in your bank statement, it is one receipt, not two. For a rough total in the meantime, the freelancer tax calculator takes one annual figure and shows both regimes side by side.
Section 154A final tax, or normal slabs?
Two ways to be taxed on this income, and they are nowhere near each other in cost. Under the final tax regime, section 154A charges a flat percentage of your export receipts: 1%, or 0.25% if you are PSEB registered. Under the normal regime, the same income goes through the progressive slabs for non-salaried individuals, after business expenses.
The slab table for tax year 2026:
| taxable income | tax |
|---|---|
| up to Rs 600,000 | nil |
| Rs 600,001 to 1,200,000 | 15% of the amount over 600,000 |
| Rs 1,200,001 to 1,600,000 | 90,000 + 20% of the amount over 1,200,000 |
| Rs 1,600,001 to 3,200,000 | 170,000 + 30% of the amount over 1,600,000 |
| Rs 3,200,001 to 5,600,000 | 650,000 + 40% of the amount over 3,200,000 |
| over Rs 5,600,000 | 1,610,000 + 45% of the amount over 5,600,000 |
What that difference looks like on three ordinary freelance incomes:
| export receipts | 154A at 1% | 154A at 0.25% | normal slabs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rs 1,000,000 | Rs 10,000 | Rs 2,500 | Rs 60,000 |
| Rs 2,500,000 | Rs 25,000 | Rs 6,250 | Rs 440,000 |
| Rs 4,000,000 | Rs 40,000 | Rs 10,000 | Rs 970,000 |
For a freelancer whose income is export receipts and nothing else, the final tax regime wins by a distance, and the tax has usually been paid at source already. Normal slabs are only worth checking when you have significant local or salary income alongside, or expenses large enough to matter. Run both: the cheaper one is arithmetic, not opinion. The section 154A page works the choice through in detail.
What PSEB registration changes
Registering with the Pakistan Software Export Board takes your section 154A rate from 1% to 0.25% on export remittances for IT and IT-enabled services. On Rs 4,000,000 of receipts that is Rs 10,000 instead of Rs 40,000, so you keep Rs 30,000.
The catch is timing. The reduced rate applies to remittances arriving after your registration is active, so money that already came in this year stays at 1%. Registering does not fix the return you are filing now. It fixes the next one. Give your registration number to the bank that receives your remittances, and diary the renewal date the day the certificate arrives. The PSEB guide is the twenty-minute walkthrough, free.
Credit the tax your bank already took
Your bank deducted under section 154A every time a remittance landed. That money is yours to credit against the charge on the return, and the PRC proves it. Ask each bank for certificates covering July 2025 to June 2026 and add the amounts up.
If the deductions come to more than your charge for the year, you are in refund territory. A month with no certificate cannot be claimed until you have the paper, so email the bank now rather than the night before the deadline. Banks are slow in September for exactly the reason you would expect.
The wealth statement under section 116
Every individual filer submits a wealth statement with the return. It is an inventory of what you own at 30 June 2026, and it is where most people filing on their own give up. List bank balances per account, cash in hand, vehicles, property, gold, listed shares, crypto declared as an other asset at cost, and loans you owe or are owed. Then it has to reconcile:
opening net wealth + income received − personal expenses − tax for the year = closing net wealth declared
The two sides should close within about 5%. When they do not, either an asset is missing or your personal expenses figure is lower than what you actually lived on. Neither is fixed by rounding. The wealth statement page goes through the reconciliation line by line.
Submitting on IRIS
With the numbers settled, the portal is short. For a freelancer on the final tax regime your figures go in five places:
-
01 · declaration > business
Your total receipts for export of IT services under section 154A, in rupees.
-
02 · declaration > tax chargeable
Check that the tax chargeable line agrees with the figure you worked out. If it does not, the receipts you entered are the thing to re-check first.
-
03 · adjustable tax
The tax deducted on export proceeds under section 154A: the total from your PRCs.
-
04 · wealth statement > assets
Each asset from your inventory, mapped to its matching row, valued at 30 June 2026.
-
05 · wealth statement > reconciliation
Your personal expenses for the year, with the unexplained gap staying within 5%.
Then submit, and pay anything outstanding through the payment slip IRIS generates. The IRIS guide takes those five tabs one at a time, including what to do when a label does not read the way you expect.
After you submit
Keep the acknowledgement number IRIS gives you. It is the only proof you filed, and you will want it the first time somebody asks whether you are a filer.
Your name reaches the Active Taxpayer List after the return is filed and processed, not at the moment you press submit, so do not panic if the list does not show you the same evening. Checking your ATL status a week or two later takes a minute, and being off that list is what quietly costs you money all year.
If your tax for the year comes to more than Rs 50,000, you also owe quarterly advance tax, on 25 September, 25 December, 25 March and 25 June. Keep every statement, certificate and invoice for six years. And hold on to one date above all others: 30 September 2026.
The detail behind each step
- Section 154A final tax regime The regime choice, with the arithmetic.
- PSEB registration guide Twenty minutes, and it takes your rate from 1% to 0.25%.
- IRIS tax return guide for freelancers The five tabs, one at a time.
- Wealth statement under section 116 The inventory and the reconciliation that has to close.
- ATL status check What it costs to be off the list, and how to get back on.
- Tax return deadline 2026 The date, and the other side of it.
- Freelancer tax calculator Both regimes on your own number, free, no signup.
You can do all of this for free
Nothing above needs a paid product. FBR charges nothing to file, IRIS is free, and every rule on this page is published. With twelve tidy payouts from one platform into one bank account, an evening and a spreadsheet is genuinely enough.
What costs you is the arithmetic in the middle: converting every receipt at the rate for its own date, spotting the payment that appears in both the platform export and the bank statement, comparing the two regimes, and getting the wealth statement to close. That is the part FilerKaro does. You upload the exports you already have, answer seven short steps of plain questions, and get a pack that names the tab, the field and the figure to type into IRIS, with the section cited on every line. Rs 2,500, one time, for tax year 2026. You still click submit yourself.