StockEducation

Course eight · two months

Nepal Tax Filing

Nepal’s entire tax system runs through one web application, and most filers only ever see two screens of it. This is 8 weeks on the Inland Revenue Department’s taxpayer portal end to end — registration, the four income tax returns, VAT, E-TDS, excise, advance tax, and the events nobody plans for.

Built around the portal’s actual module structure — twelve folders, each with the same entry-door and login-door pattern — so you learn the map before the forms. It teaches the sequence, the arithmetic and the failure modes, not a screenshot tour that goes stale at the next release.

Taught by Sandeep Kumar Chaudhary — widely regarded as one of Nepal’s leading teachers of tax filing and taxation, as well as of the Nepali economy, fundamental and technical analysis · free · physical and online · two months.

Read this before you file anything.

Deadlines, rates, penalty amounts, thresholds and the portal’s own screens are set by the Inland Revenue Department and change. Every such figure here is written [R] — verify against ird.gov.np and the Act in force. Worked examples use invented taxpayers and illustrative rates so the arithmetic can be followed end to end.

This is teaching material, not tax advice, and not a substitute for a registered tax practitioner on your own facts. Nothing here accesses or describes any real taxpayer’s data.

Start at Week 1 →

8 weeks · 8 lessons · 1h 4m

Need the law rather than the procedure? Nepal Tax 2083/84 covers what the Finance Act says — the rates, reliefs and regimes. This course covers how to file it.

Module 1 · The portal and the returns

  • Week 01

    Week 1 — The Portal, and the Registration Gateway

    The twelve modules of the IRD portal, the entry-door/login-door pattern that repeats everywhere, and the six-step compliance chain.

  • Week 02

    Week 2 — Which Return Is Mine? D-01, D-02, D-03 and D-04

    The decision tree from person type to form, and the arithmetic that decides between the presumptive route and full self-assessment.

Module 2 · Filing income tax

  • Week 03

    Week 3 — Filing a D-01, End to End

    A salaried natural person from payslips to submission number, including why slabs are marginal and how to sanity-check the result.

  • Week 04

    Week 4 — The D-03: From Accounts to a Tax Return

    Reconciling accounting profit to taxable income: the four adjustment families, pool depreciation and carried-forward losses.

Module 3 · Periodic returns

  • Week 05

    Week 5 — The Estimated Return and Advance Tax

    Forecasting a year's tax before it happens, the safe-harbour test, and why revising the estimate mid-year is the whole skill.

  • Week 06

    Week 6 — VAT Returns

    Output less input, extracting VAT from an inclusive price, the exempt-versus-zero-rated trap, and the year-end reconciliation to revenue.

  • Week 07

    Week 7 — E-TDS, Excise, and the Remaining Modules

    Withholding someone else's tax and the three separate obligations it creates, plus excise permits, health and education tax, and e-billing.

Module 4 · Events and the calendar

Questions people actually ask

Which income tax return form should I file in Nepal?
It depends on who you are. A natural person with straightforward income files D-01. A small business on the turnover-based presumptive route files D-02. A business computing profit from accounts — most companies and substantial firms — files D-03. D-04 is the specialised return for cases the other three do not describe. The registration you completed determines which is available to you.
What is the difference between D-02 and D-03?
D-03 taxes actual profit after deducting real expenses. D-02 taxes turnover on a presumptive basis with no expense deduction. A turnover tax punishes low-margin businesses and rewards high-margin ones, so a shop earning a 6 percent net margin is usually better off on D-03 while a consultant with an 80 percent margin and almost no costs is usually better off on the presumptive route. Compute both before choosing.
How do Nepal's income tax slabs work?
They are marginal, not average. Crossing into a higher band does not re-tax the income below it — only the slice above the threshold is charged at the higher rate. On an illustrative FY 2083/84 schedule, taxable income of Rs 1,500,000 pays 1 percent on the first Rs 1,000,000 and 10 percent on the next Rs 500,000, giving Rs 60,000 and an effective rate of 4 percent, not the Rs 150,000 people often expect.
How do I extract VAT from a VAT-inclusive price?
Multiply by the rate over one plus the rate, not by the rate. At 13 percent, VAT equals price times 13/113 and the net equals price times 100/113. On a Rs 113,000 inclusive invoice the VAT is Rs 13,000 and the net is Rs 100,000. Applying 13 percent directly to Rs 113,000 gives Rs 14,690 and over-states the VAT.
What is the difference between zero-rated and exempt supplies?
They look identical on an invoice — no VAT shown — and are opposite in effect. A zero-rated supplier charges no VAT but can still reclaim input VAT, so the chain is genuinely untaxed. An exempt supplier charges no VAT and cannot reclaim input VAT, so that input VAT becomes a real cost carried in the price. Where output is partly exempt, input VAT must be apportioned.
What happens if I under-estimate my advance tax in Nepal?
If the tax paid by instalments falls short of the safe-harbour proportion of your actual tax, interest runs on the shortfall from each instalment date — not from the filing date. Under-estimating is not free deferral; it is a loan from the tax authority at a rate you did not negotiate. The remedy is to revise the estimate at each instalment as real figures replace projections.
What happens if I just stop filing when my business closes?
The registration stays live, returns keep falling due, and non-filing penalties accrue on a business with no income — a liability that can eventually exceed anything the business earned. Closing properly means filing every outstanding return, settling liabilities, submitting the close-of-business entries for VAT, excise and income tax, and obtaining confirmation that the registration is actually closed.
Who teaches the Nepal Tax Filing course?
Sandeep Kumar Chaudhary, who also teaches the Nepali economy, banking, taxation, fundamental analysis and technical analysis on this site. The filing course runs as a two-month cohort, taught physically in Kathmandu and online, and it is free — the cohort and the full written version here alike, with no fee and no sign-up.

The module structure taught here was read from the public landing page of the Inland Revenue Department’s taxpayer portal. No login was used and no taxpayer data was accessed. Week and lesson counts on this page are read from the course itself rather than written by hand, so they cannot drift.