Your client deducted 10% before paying. That is TDS, and you get it back.

You invoiced ₹60,000. ₹54,000 landed. The client messaged "TDS deducted" and moved on.

Nothing was stolen. ₹6,000 went to the government with your PAN attached to it, and it counts as tax you have already paid. Most first-year editors get all of it back.

Every guide about this is written for the person doing the deducting, which is why it reads like a wall when you are the one holding the invoice. None of what follows is tax advice, and if the amounts get large you want an accountant rather than a blog.

What happened to your ₹6,000

Your client is required by law to hold back a slice of certain payments and deposit it with the government instead of paying it to you. That is tax deducted at source.

The amount is tagged to your PAN. It is not a fee, not a commission, and not the client's money. It sits in the government's records as tax paid by you, and it is a payment on account rather than a final tax. Your liability gets worked out when you file, and if the total deducted across the year is more than you owe, the difference comes back as a refund.

Which rate should have applied to you

This is where editors get confused, because the same invoice can attract three different rates depending on how the work was classified and who the payer is.

The current table sits under Section 393 of the Income-tax Act, 2025. TaxGuru's rate table, published 17 March 2026, lists the relevant rows:

A 10% deduction means you were treated as a professional. A 1% or 2% deduction means you were treated as a contractor, or that the person paying you was an individual rather than a business.

That last row matters more than it looks here. Plenty of Indian editing clients are individual creators rather than companies, and the rate on that limb is 2% rather than 10%.

You do not get to pick the classification, and arguing about it is usually not worth the hour. It changes the size of the refund, not whether you get one.

Whether they should have deducted at all

The thresholds are per client, per financial year, and cumulative.

On professional fees the threshold is ₹50,000. A single ₹60,000 invoice clears it. Four ₹15,000 invoices to the same client also clear it, at the fourth one. Whether that client then deducts against the whole ₹60,000 or only the part above ₹50,000 is a question to put to them in writing rather than assume, because it changes the figure you should expect to see in your 26AS.

So the answer to "why did they deduct this time and not last time" is almost always that you crossed the line with that client this year. A new client in April starts your counter at zero again.

Googling "194J" now gets you last year's law

Here is the trap that costs people an afternoon.

Section 194J is the number every guide, forum post and accountant used for professional fees, and it is the number you will type into Google. It belongs to the Income-tax Act, 1961.

From 1 April 2026 the operative provision is Section 393 of the Income-tax Act, 2025. India Briefing states the commencement rule precisely: Section 393 applies to transactions "where the earlier of credit or payment occurs on or after 1 April 2026." ClearTax puts it as "Section 393 is applicable from 01st April, 2026."

India Briefing describes what changed structurally: where Section 194 "functioned within a fragmented ecosystem of over 40 independent TDS provisions," Section 393 folds them into one table-driven section.

The rates and thresholds themselves mostly carried over. What changed is the label. So when a client's advice note says 393(6)(iii)(b) and you were expecting 194J, nothing is wrong, and when an older guide sounds confident about 194J, check it against the new table first.

The deduction is credited to you, not taken from you

The legal basis for "you get it back" is worth knowing, because it is what lets you treat ₹54,000 as a ₹60,000 payment in your own books.

Section 396 of the new Act is titled tax deducted is income received. TaxGuru's explainer, published 8 August 2026, quotes it: "The following sums shall be deemed as income received for the purposes of computing the income of an assessee—(a) sums deducted under THIS CHAPTER."

Deemed received. The ₹6,000 is your income and your tax payment at once, not a loss you absorb.

On the refund side, ClearTax puts the eligibility plainly: a refund arises where "the income tax paid through TDS, TCS, advance tax or self-assessment tax is greater than the actual tax liability." Filing an ITR is mandatory to claim it, and failing to file an original or belated return forfeits the refund. E-verify within 30 days of filing. Where a refund is due, Section 244A adds interest, which ClearTax puts at 0.5% per month and describes as running from the date the tax was paid or the start of the assessment year until the refund is issued.

For an editor in their first or second year, with a modest income and a small liability, "greater than the actual tax liability" usually describes the whole deducted amount.

Check it landed against your PAN

The deduction only helps you if it reached your PAN in the government's records. Verifying that takes five minutes and is the single most useful habit in this whole post.

ClearTax describes Form 26AS as "an annual tax credit statement issued by the Income Tax Department against your PAN," recording TDS, TCS, advance tax, self-assessment tax, refunds and major transactions for a financial year. You reach it through the income tax e-filing portal under e-file, then Income Tax Returns, then View Form 26AS.

If what your client deducted is not showing there, ClearTax's guidance is that the deductor may not have filed the TDS return or deposited the amount, and that you should contact them to get it rectified.

The Annual Information Statement sits alongside it with a wider set of reported transactions, and where the two disagree, ClearTax notes that Form 26AS prevails.

Check in the quarter, not in July. A client who deducted in May and forgot to file is easy to nudge in June and unpleasant to chase ten months later.

The one mistake that does cost you money

Everything above assumes your PAN is on the invoice. If it is not, the arithmetic gets worse.

Sections 206AA and 206CC of the old Act, the provisions that penalised a missing PAN, are now merged into Section 397(2) with effect from 1 April 2026, per TDSMan on 27 May 2026. Where the recipient does not furnish a PAN, deduction happens at the higher of the rate specified in the relevant provision, the rates in force, 5% in the two narrow cases TDSMan lists under Section 393(1) (Table serial 8(ii) or 8(v)), or 20% in any other case. Professional fees are not one of those two cases, so on a 10% invoice the no-PAN rate is 20%.

And the deeper problem is not the rate. A deduction made without your PAN has nothing to attach itself to, so it does not appear in your 26AS, so you cannot claim credit for it. That is the version where the money genuinely goes missing.

Put your PAN on the invoice. Every invoice, Indian client, every time, next to the amount rather than buried in a footer.

If you are not going to owe tax this year

You cannot ask a client to skip the deduction as a favour. There is a formal route and it is prospective only.

Section 395 covers lower and nil withholding, applied for on Form No. 128, which replaced Section 197 and Form 13. TaxGuru's guide from 2 July 2026 notes the timing constraint that makes or breaks it: an application can be filed any time during the year, but "a certificate cannot reverse tax already deducted." Your client needs it in hand before they pay you.

The simpler-looking route does not apply to you. The Section 393(6) self-declaration, now consolidated into Form No. 121 in place of 15G and 15H, requires tax on estimated total income to be nil and covers mainly interest, EPF and similar passive income. Fees for editing work are not on that list.

For most editors the honest answer is to let the deduction happen and file for the refund. The certificate is worth the effort once you carry several large clients and a year of held cash becomes a real number.

What to do on the next invoice

1. PAN on the invoice, every time.
2. Track cumulative billing per client per financial year, so ₹50,000 does not arrive as a surprise.
3. When a payment lands short, ask for the deduction amount, the rate and the clause in writing. One message, kept.
4. Open Form 26AS once a quarter and match it against those messages.
5. Anything missing, chase the client that quarter.
6. File. The refund does not arrive on its own, and not filing forfeits it.

This is the domestic mirror of a problem we wrote up from the other direction. Foreign campaign money coming into an Indian account has its own rails, fees and paperwork, covered in getting clipping money into an Indian bank account. Most working editors meet both in the same year.

And if the client short-paid and deducted nothing, that is not a tax problem. That is a scope and payment problem, and the fix is upstream: six lines in a DM before the work starts.