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10 characters · no checksum

PAN format validator

Check the ten characters, read the holder type, and know exactly how far the answer goes.

Five letters, four digits, one letter. Lower case is accepted.

The check runs in this tab. A PAN identifies a person or a business, so nothing is uploaded or stored.

Short answer: paste the PAN. A green verdict means the shape is right and the fourth character is a known holder type. Nothing more can be checked offline.

The structure

AAACR5055K is five letters, four digits and a letter. The first three letters are an alphabetic series, the fourth is the holder type, the fifth is a name initial, and the last four digits distinguish holders within that series. There is no checksum, so a single wrong character produces another perfectly well-formed string.

What to check instead

A GSTIN contains this PAN in characters 3-12 — theGSTIN validator checks the whole number including its real check digit.

PAN questions

Can a PAN be verified offline?

Only its shape. A PAN is five letters, four digits and one letter, with no check digit, so there is nothing to compute. Whether the number was issued, and to whom, is held by the Income Tax Department and is not publicly queryable.

What does the fourth character mean?

It is the holder type: P individual, C company, F firm or LLP, H HUF, A association of persons, T trust, B body of individuals, L local authority, J artificial juridical person, G government. A PAN with anything else in that position is malformed.

What is the fifth character?

Usually the first letter of the surname for an individual, or of the entity name for an organisation. It is a convention in the numbering scheme, not a rule you can rely on to confirm identity.

Why does the tool say “format only” so often?

Because overselling is the usual failure of tools like this. A green tick that means “this string has the right shape” is easy to misread as “this PAN is real”, and the difference matters when the number is going into an invoice or a KYC form.

Related tools

GSTIN validatorA GSTIN embeds this PAN and checks it.Aadhaar validatorThe one ID here with a real checksum.All lookupsReference data and ID checks.IFSC finderBank branch details, offline.