Withholding & Advance Tax · Prepaid recharge · Tax Year 2026-2027
Mobile Balance Calculator
Load Rs 100, get considerably less. Work out what will actually land in your balance — or go the other way and see what to recharge to end up with the amount you need.
At a glance
Common recharge amounts
| You load | Deducted | Balance | You keep |
|---|
If these figures do not match your last recharge, tick Calibrate from a real recharge and the whole table re-derives from your own receipt.
Step by step
Where the money goes
Advance income tax
Collected on the recharge under Section 236. This one is adjustable — file a return and you can claim it against your liability for the year.
Sales tax on services
Provincial, charged on the telecom service. It follows where your connection is registered, and you do not get it back.
Operator service charge
Not a tax. It varies by network and by how you top up, and it is the piece most calculators leave out entirely.
What is left
Your usable balance — the only part you can actually spend on calls, SMS and data.
Reading the result
Calibrate against a real recharge
The most reliable way to get this exact is to stop guessing rates and work backwards from a recharge you actually made. Load a round amount, check the balance, and adjust until the calculator reproduces it. After that every other amount will be right for your operator and your province.
That is more dependable than any published rate, because what lands in your balance also reflects how your operator sequences the deductions.
Only part of it is recoverable
The advance income tax portion counts against your annual liability and comes back if you file. The sales tax on the service does not. Two deductions that look alike on the balance message behave completely differently at year end.
Provincial rate, not federal
Sales tax on telecommunication services is charged by the province, and the rate is not uniform across Sindh, Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. A SIM used in one province may be taxed differently from one registered in another, which is why the rate is yours to set.
Where this stops
This models a straightforward prepaid recharge. Bundles, promotional load and package activations are often priced and taxed differently at the point of purchase, so the arithmetic that works for a plain top-up will not always reproduce a bundle.
FAQs
Prepaid balance FAQs
Why does Rs 100 of load not give Rs 100 of balance?
Three separate things come off the same recharge. Advance income tax under Section 236 is collected on the amount you load, and it is adjustable — you can claim it back against your annual tax if you file a return. Sales tax on telecom services is charged on the service itself, at provincial rates or the federal rate for Islamabad. On top of both, most operators apply their own service or maintenance charge, which is not a tax at all and does not come back to you in any form.
My operator deducts a different amount from the one shown here. Why?
Because the order of the deductions is not the same everywhere, and the operator charge differs by network and sometimes by recharge method. Applying both taxes to the full face value and applying them to what is left after the operator charge produce noticeably different answers. That is exactly why this page has a calibrate option: enter one real recharge and what actually landed in your balance, and it will use your own effective rate rather than any assumption.
What is the calibrate option doing?
Dividing what you received by what you loaded, and using that ratio for every other amount. It is the most reliable setting on the page, because it does not care what the current rates are, how your operator sequences them, or whether something changed last month. One receipt and the arithmetic is yours.
Can I get the advance income tax back?
The income tax portion is adjustable against your tax liability for the year, so filing a return is how you recover it. Being on the Active Taxpayers List matters for the rate you are charged in the first place. The sales tax portion and the operator service charge are not recoverable.
Which sales tax rate applies to me?
Sales tax on services is provincial, so the rate follows where your connection is registered rather than where you are standing. The federal rate applies in Islamabad Capital Territory. Rates get revised in provincial budgets — put the one from your own deduction message into the field rather than trusting a number on any website, including this one.
Does this work for card load, easy load and app top-ups?
The tax treatment is the same, but the operator service charge sometimes is not — some methods carry a charge and others do not. If you use more than one method, calibrate with a receipt from the one you use most.
How do I see the real breakdown for my own number?
Most operators send a deduction message immediately after a recharge, and all of them show it in the app. That message is the authority on what happened; every rate on this page is editable so you can make it match.
Related tools
Want the tax breakdown on its own?
See just the advance tax and GST taken off a recharge, without the operator charge and the reverse calculation.
Open Mobile Load Tax Calculator