Why your CTC is never your take-home
Cost to Company is what your employer spends on you in a year, not what lands in your bank account. A large slice of CTC is money the company sets aside on your behalf rather than pays you in cash: its own 12% Provident Fund contribution and a yearly gratuity provision both sit inside the CTC figure but never appear on a monthly payslip. Strip those out and you are left with your gross salary.
From that gross salary a second round of subtractions applies — your own 12% PF, professional tax and the income tax deducted at source — before the balance reaches you. Every rupee of CTC therefore passes through a waterfall, and the take-home at the bottom is typically 70 to 85 percent of the headline number.
| CTC per month | ₹1,00,000 |
| − Employer PF (12% of basic) | − ₹4,800 |
| − Gratuity provision | − ₹1,924 |
| − Employee PF (12% of basic) | − ₹4,800 |
| − Professional tax | − ₹200 |
| − Income tax (new regime) | − ₹0 |
| In-hand salary | ₹88,276 |
How basic salary drives PF, gratuity and HRA
Basic pay is the engine of your salary structure because so many other figures are pegged to it. Provident Fund is 12% of basic from you and another 12% from your employer; gratuity accrues at about 4.81% of basic each year; and House Rent Allowance is usually set at 50% of basic in the metro cities and 40% elsewhere. Lifting the basic share of your CTC therefore boosts both your retirement savings and your HRA, but it also raises the PF locked away each month, trimming immediate cash.
This calculator lets you set basic anywhere between 20% and 60% of CTC. A higher basic is not automatically better or worse; it shifts money between today take-home and tomorrow PF corpus, and it changes how much HRA exemption you can claim if you rent.
What actually leaves your monthly payslip
Three deductions shrink your gross into net pay. The first is your own Provident Fund contribution of 12% of basic, which is not really lost: it moves into your EPF (Employees Provident Fund) account and earns interest, so treat it as forced saving rather than an expense. The second is professional tax, a small state levy that tops out at ₹200 a month in Karnataka, Maharashtra and Telangana, ₹208 in Tamil Nadu and ₹110 in West Bengal, and does not exist in states such as Delhi or Haryana.
The third and usually largest is TDS — the income tax your employer withholds each month based on your projected annual salary and chosen regime. Unlike PF, this money is gone from your pocket, though you can shrink it by picking the regime that suits your deductions or by declaring eligible investments under the old regime.
How to grow your take-home
The fastest lever is the regime toggle. If you claim little in the way of deductions, the new regime usually leaves more in hand because its ₹75,000 standard deduction and ₹12,00,000 rebate outweigh the write-offs of the old regime. If you pay heavy metro rent or a large home-loan interest bill, switch to the old regime and watch whether the HRA and 80C exemptions pull your tax, and so your monthly deduction, further down.
Beyond tax, ask your employer how flexible your basic-pay share is: a lower basic frees up cash now at the cost of a smaller PF and gratuity later. There is no single right answer, which is why the sliders above let you test each combination against your own rent and city before you sit down to negotiate.