Form 16 Password: What is Form 16 and How to Open Form 16 Password?

It is that time of year when you have to calculate and pay taxes on your income. You may file your taxes using Cleartax or seek the help of a CA or file it yourself. If you are a salaried individual, you may have heard that Form 16, is a certificate issued by the employer to their employees, which has information regarding tax deducted at source (TDS) by the employer. Form 16 is a password-protected file.  

You might be interested to know what password to use and whether you can change or remove it. Let us dive into this article to get answers to the above questions.  

What is Form 16?

Form 16 is a password-protected file that contains all the information regarding your income, such as salary, tax deductions based on investment declaration made to the employer, and tax deducted (TDS) on it. It is required when filing an income tax return and has two components: Part A and Part B.

What is the Password of Form 16 and How to Open It?

Form 16 password is configured by your employer. You can refer to the email sent by your employer to check the format of the password.

Form 16 password is usually configured in the below combination.

• Your PAN (Lower or uppercase).
• Your Date of birth in DDMMYYYY format or DD/MM/YYY format.
• Combination of your PAN (Lowercase or uppercase) and Date of birth.

Form 16 Password Example

Let's say your PAN is AAAAA0000A and your date of birth is February 9, 1990, then, your password will be AAAAA09021990.

How to Remove the Form 16 Password?

Since Form 16 is password protected, you need to enter a password each time you open it, to avoid that, you can follow these steps-

• Right-click on the PDF file and open the file with Google Chrome.
• Enter the password in the above-specified format and click on the submit button.
• The screen printer option will appear in the upper right corner; click on it or press Ctrl + P. 
• Now, the print window will appear with an option to change the destination
• Change the destination to Save as PDF.
• Click on the Save button below and choose the desired location to save the PDF
• The password is now removed from Form 16.

However, please note that removing the password in the above steps might change the file format, and pdf might not be readable for other software.

Related Articles

1. Difference between Form 16 and Form 16A
2. How to File ITR without Form 16?