What is AIS?

Also called: Annual Information Statement

The AIS is the Income Tax Department's record of your financial transactions for a year — interest, dividends, share sales, property deals and large cash movements — assembled from reports filed by banks and other institutions.

It is broader than Form 26AS, which only covers tax deducted. The AIS includes income on which no tax was deducted at all, which is precisely what taxpayers most often forget to declare — savings account interest, small dividend receipts, and gains from mutual fund redemptions.

Each entry can be marked as correct, duplicated, or belonging to someone else, and that feedback goes back to the department.

Why it matters

The department compares your return against the AIS automatically. An omission that would once have gone unnoticed now produces a notice within months.

The statutory position

Each figure with the provision it comes from, so it can be checked.
What	Position	Source
Introduced	November 2021, replacing the earlier Form 26AS annual information	CBDT press release, 1 November 2021
What it covers	Salary, interest, dividend, securities and mutual fund transactions, foreign remittances, property purchase and sale	Section 285BB read with Rule 114-I
Feedback mechanism	Each entry can be marked correct, duplicate, or belonging to someone else	AIS user guide, Income Tax Department

Not to be confused with

These get used interchangeably, including by tools that should know better. They are different things.

Form 26AS

26AS is limited to tax credited. The AIS reports transactions whether or not any tax was deducted on them — which is why an entry can appear in the AIS and nowhere in 26AS.

TIS

The Taxpayer Information Summary is the AIS aggregated by category, with your feedback applied. It is the summary; the AIS is the detail behind it.

Questions people ask

An entry in my AIS is wrong. Does that matter?

Yes, and it is worth correcting before filing. Submit feedback marking it duplicate or not yours; the entry stays visible with your response attached, which is what an officer sees. An unexplained mismatch between the AIS and the return is the commonest trigger for a query.

Does the AIS decide my income?

No. It is information the department has gathered, not an assessment. Sale proceeds of shares appear as a transaction value, not as gain — the taxable amount is computed by you, and the two are rarely the same number.

What usually goes wrong

Treating an AIS transaction value as taxable income, particularly for securities sales
Ignoring a duplicate entry instead of submitting feedback, and leaving the mismatch unexplained
Filing without opening the AIS at all, which is where the interest and dividend income nobody remembers is listed