PAN — the Permanent Account Number issued by the Income Tax Department — is the most widely used identifier for individuals and businesses in financial contexts in India. Verifying a PAN confirms that it is valid and shows the name registered against it, which makes it a natural first step in most onboarding and payout processes.
Common use cases
- Onboarding customers, sellers, agents, distributors and members.
- Before payouts of commissions, refunds or vendor payments.
- Lending and credit decisions.
- TDS — deducting tax at the correct rate requires a valid PAN.
- B2B onboarding, alongside GST verification.
What the API returns
A basic check returns the registered name, status (for example, valid or inactive) and holder type (individual, company and so on). Extended checks such as PAN 360 can include additional details like Aadhaar-link status, where available. A DigiLocker-based PAN check fetches a verified document with the holder's consent.
Name matching
Names rarely match perfectly across documents. Initials, middle names, spelling variations and order differ between PAN, bank records and what users type. Best practice:
- Normalise names — remove titles, punctuation and extra spaces, ignore case.
- Use a similarity score rather than exact matching.
- Approve automatically above a threshold, reject clearly mismatched names, and send borderline cases to manual review.
- Tell users exactly what did not match and how to fix it.
Handling inactive PANs
An inactive or invalid PAN should block actions that legally require a valid one, with a clear explanation to the user.
Consent and storage
Tell users why you verify their PAN, store the verification result and timestamp, and protect the data. Do not collect PAN where you do not need it.
Cost control
Verify each PAN once and reuse the result, rather than calling the API repeatedly for the same user.
See our PAN verification API.
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