Provincial sales tax on services: PRA, SRB, KPRA, BRA and Islamabad, compared

Sales tax on services in Pakistan is not one tax. It is five, levied by five different authorities under five different statutes, with different rates, different schedules and different electronic invoicing regimes. If you provide services in more than one province, you are dealing with all of them at once, and they do not defer to each other.

We could not find a single Pakistani source covering all five in one place, which is why this page exists. Everything below is cited to the governing act, rule or notification. If you provide services in Punjab and need the operational side handled, that is our PRA digital invoicing service.

Five jurisdictions, five statutes

• Punjab: the Punjab Sales Tax on Services Act 2012, Act XLII of 2012, administered by the Punjab Revenue Authority.
• Sindh: the Sindh Sales Tax on Services Act 2011, Sindh Act No. XII of 2011, administered by the Sindh Revenue Board.
• Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Sales Tax on Services Act 2022, KP Act No. XIX of 2022, administered by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Revenue Authority.
• Balochistan: the Balochistan Sales Tax on Services Act 2015, Act No. VI of 2015, administered by the Balochistan Revenue Authority.
• Islamabad Capital Territory: the Islamabad Capital Territory (Tax on Services) Ordinance 2001, Ordinance No. XLII of 2001, administered by FBR.

The change almost nobody has written up: positive lists became negative lists

This is the most important development in provincial services tax in a decade, and if you take one thing from this page, take this.

Historically each province taxed a listed set of services. You looked up the Second Schedule, and if your service was not in it, you were outside the tax. Four of the five jurisdictions abandoned that approach with effect from 1 July 2025. They now tax all services except those specifically exempted.

• Punjab section 3(1): subject to section 3A, all services are taxable under the Act, including but not limited to the services listed in the Second Schedule. Exemptions are in the First Schedule.
• Sindh: the words "is listed in the Second Schedule" were omitted from section 3(1) by the Sindh Finance Act 2025. Exempt services are in the First Schedule.
• Khyber Pakhtunkhwa section 3(1): any provision of service is a taxable service except such services as are explicitly listed in the First Schedule.
• Balochistan section 3(1) and section 10A: every service is a taxable service, and all services not specified in the First Schedule are deemed taxable, effective from 1 July 2025.
• Islamabad Capital Territory is the exception. It still runs a positive list in Table 1 of the Schedule. Section 3(4), inserted by the Finance Act 2025, gives the Board power to specify a negative list in a Table 3, but we could not confirm that any Table 3 has been notified.

If a guide tells you to check whether your service appears in the Second Schedule, it is describing repealed law in four of five jurisdictions. The question is now the opposite one: is your service specifically exempted? For consultancies, agencies and technology firms that had comfortably concluded they were outside the net, this is a change of position rather than a change of detail.

The rates

• Punjab: 16 percent. Section 10 charges at the rates in the Second Schedule, and Part I, serial 1 of that Schedule sets sixteen percent for all services except those specified elsewhere in it.
• Sindh: 15 percent, under section 8(1), which expressly calls it the standard rate.
• Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: 15 percent, under section 9(1), described as the standard or general rate for all purposes of the Act.
• Balochistan: 15 percent, under section 10(1) as substituted by the Balochistan Finance Act 2025.
• Islamabad Capital Territory: 15 percent, under section 3(1) read with column 4 of Table 1. The previous sixteen percent figure was replaced by the Finance Act 2022.

Two things follow. Punjab is now the highest of the five, by a full percentage point, which matters when choosing where to locate a service delivery office. And Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan all moved the rate into the charging section in 2025, so each has a genuine statutory standard rate, while Punjab and Islamabad still set rates entry by entry and strictly have no statutory standard rate at all. That distinction matters when you are arguing about a service that does not fit an entry neatly.

There is no registration threshold

This is the single most common and most expensive misunderstanding, and it is worth being blunt about.

None of the four provinces operates a general turnover threshold for registration. Registration is triggered by providing a taxable service at all. Punjab section 25(1)(a) catches a person who provides any taxable service from his office or place of business in the Punjab. Sindh section 24(1)(b) catches a person who provides any taxable service, and rule 5(1) of the Sindh rules requires the application before providing any taxable service. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa section 29(1)(a) and Balochistan section 25(1)(b) are to the same effect. Islamabad has no registration provision of its own: section 3(3)(b) of the ICT Ordinance imports registration from the Sales Tax Act 1990, so you register federally under section 14 of that Act through IRIS.

Filing and payment dates

All five run monthly tax periods, and the pattern is a payment date followed by a filing date. Punjab, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa all pay by the 15th and file by the 18th, under rule 11(2) of the Punjab Filing of Returns Rules 2012, rule 14 of the Sindh rules which allows three days after the payment due date, and section 2(x) of the KP Act, which splits the two dates explicitly and is the clearest drafting on the point anywhere in the country. Sindh additionally requires Annex C by the 10th under rule 13A.

Balochistan uses the 15th for both, since section 2(56) sets a single date. For Islamabad, payment is due by the 15th under section 2(9) of the Sales Tax Act 1990, but we are not going to state a general filing date, because rule 18 of the Sales Tax Rules 2006 sets sector specific dates rather than a general one and we could not find a rule fixing one.

Electronic invoicing, province by province

Each jurisdiction has built its own, and they are at very different stages of maturity.

• Punjab, eIMS. The Electronic Invoice Monitoring System, under the Punjab Electronic Invoice Monitoring System Rules 2019, made under section 76. The turnover thresholds are six million rupees for restaurant services and ten million rupees for all other services, per the notification gazetted on 15 July 2024. This is the most developed provincial regime. We cover it in what is PRA eIMS and by business type in who has to integrate with PRA.
• Sindh. The Sindh Sales Tax Special Procedure (Online Integration of Business) Rules 2022, notification SRB-3-4/03/2022 of 21 February 2022. The scope is still narrow, reaching restaurants and beauty and physical well being services meeting conditions in the Schedule to those Rules.
• Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Two systems, both named in the penalty table at section 53 of the 2022 Act: RIMS, the Restaurant Invoice Management System, and IMRS, the Invoice Management and Reporting System. KPRA's own website calls RIMS a monitoring system; the statute says management.
• Balochistan. The Balochistan Sales Tax on Services Special Procedure (Online Integration of Business) Rules 2022, notification BRA/Rules/026/2022 of 12 September 2022. If you have read that Balochistan has no electronic invoicing regime, that is wrong.
• Islamabad. Services here fall within FBR's federal digital invoicing regime, both because Chapter XIV of the Sales Tax Rules 2006 is drafted around all registered persons and because the second proviso to section 3(1) of the ICT Ordinance, inserted by the Finance Act 2025, specifically requires service providers in Tables 1 and 2 to integrate for real time reporting. See the FBR digital invoicing guide.

There is no such thing as a "PRIMS", and Sindh's regime is not called "SRIS". Both acronyms circulate and neither corresponds to anything in provincial law.

The cross province problem: who gets the tax

Now the question that actually brings people to a page like this. You are in Lahore, your client is in Karachi. Who taxes it?

There is a partial answer and it is better than most people realise. On 13 April 2023, FBR and all four provinces simultaneously notified near identical Place of Provision of Services Rules 2023, effective 1 May 2023. In Punjab this was notification PRA/Orders.06/2021/293 under section 76; in Sindh SRB-3-4/21/2023 under section 72; in Balochistan BRA/22-23/127 under section 78(1); and federally SRO 494(I)/2023. All of them define "Province" to include the Islamabad Capital Territory, so ICT is treated as a sixth jurisdiction inside the allocation machinery.

The catch is scope. These rules cover only seven specified services: advertisement, advertising agents, insurance and reinsurance, insurance agents and brokers, franchise and intellectual property licensing, transportation or carriage of goods, and electric power transmission.

Where they do apply, the mechanism is genuinely sensible. Under rule 8, for transportation of goods the place of provision is both origin and destination, in a manner that the tax is shared equally between the two provinces, with provisos handling the cases where one end is untaxed, and a requirement that where rates differ the invoice must show the amount payable to each province on fifty percent of the value. Rule 7 allocates franchise and intellectual property to the location of the resident recipient.

For everything else, and that means most services, rule 11 throws you back on the Act. And the Acts are origin based with a destination overlay, in wording that is nearly verbatim identical across Punjab section 4, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa section 20 and Balochistan section 4. The origin province taxes because your office is there. The destination province then taxes under its own section 4(1) and 4(3) because the recipient is resident there or is otherwise availing the service there. Section 4(6) makes clear that a person liable under those provisions is liable to registration in that province even without a local office. And section 3(3) in Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan treats your office inside the province and your office outside it as separate legal persons.

Double taxation, and what actually mitigates it

Read the previous section again and the problem is obvious: both provisions are live at the same time, both are drafted in the same words, and each Act contains an overriding clause. Punjab section 4(8) provides that the section applies notwithstanding any other provision of the Act. Nothing yields to anything.

Three things genuinely mitigate it, and one widely repeated claim does not exist:

1. Statutory reciprocity on input tax, which is the most useful item here. Punjab section 16B(p) disallows input tax on sales tax paid to the Federal Government or another Provincial Government only if the law of that jurisdiction does not allow adjustment of tax paid under the Punjab Act. Read carefully, that is a conditional reciprocity rule: cross jurisdiction input tax is allowed unless the other side refuses to reciprocate. Sindh goes further and grants it outright, since section 2(52)(d) defines input tax to include provincial or ICT sales tax on services received, though this is conditioned by section 15A(1)(c), which denies credit where the tax has not been deposited in the other government's treasury.
2. The apportionment rule in rule 10 of the Place of Provision Rules, identical in every jurisdiction: where a transaction is provided in more than one province, input tax is claimed in the same proportion as the taxable value declared.
3. The National Tax Council, constituted by Finance Division notification No F.1(10)-NFC/2018(i) on 20 March 2020, expressly to resolve disputes over tax rates, origin of services and jurisdictional overlap. It is the body that produced the consensus behind the Place of Provision Rules.

What does not exist, so far as we can establish, is a signed reciprocal MOU between PRA and SRB. The claim circulates widely. We searched SRB's full notification index and found nothing. What does exist is the power to make such arrangements, in the proviso to Sindh section 73(4). Separately, the real MOU signed between FBR and the provincial authorities in April 2021 concerns the Single Sales Tax Return only, and its own guiding principle is expressly that no changes to existing legal frameworks were made. It unifies a return, not the law, and it covers listed sectors only.

So the practical answer to "do I have to register separately in each province" is yes, and it is affirmative in the statute rather than merely implied.

Exporting services: three different answers

If you export services, do not assume one province's treatment applies elsewhere. The three jurisdictions we were able to verify handle it in three genuinely different ways.

• Islamabad zero rates exports outright. Section 3(1A) of the ICT Ordinance provides that notwithstanding subsection (1), the export of services shall be charged at the rate of zero per cent.
• Sindh introduced a real export exemption seven weeks ago. By Sindh Act No. XX of 2026, dated 1 July 2026, entry 14 of the exemption schedule now covers the IT related CPC codes for software licensing, IT consulting and support, IT design and development, hosting and infrastructure provisioning, and network management, on condition that the services are exported and delivered outside Pakistan and the value is received in foreign exchange through banking channels into the registered person's business account and reported to the State Bank in the prescribed manner. The same condition was extended to call centre services.
• Punjab has no export exemption at all. This surprises people. Section 4(4) applies the origin principle expressly: where rendering of a taxable service originates in the Punjab but terminates outside Pakistan, the person is required to pay tax to the Government. What Punjab gives instead is a rate, through the Second Schedule entry for IT based services, which is charged at zero percent without input tax adjustment for software or IT based system development persons and five percent without input tax adjustment for others.

The distinction between Punjab and Sindh is not academic. In Punjab the relief attaches to what you do, so it applies whether the client is in Lahore or in London, and it does not depend on how the money arrives. In Sindh the relief attaches to export, and it is conditional on the foreign exchange arriving through banking channels and being reported to the State Bank. A Punjab business qualifies by activity; a Sindh business has to document the money. And a zero rated or exempt service is still a taxable service for registration purposes, so neither relief removes the registration question.

We were not able to verify the export position for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or Balochistan and are not going to guess at it.

Why Islamabad is federal

Entry 49 of the Federal Legislative List covers taxes on sales and purchases of goods, except sales tax on services. Those words were added by the Eighteenth Amendment in 2010, and they created the entire provincial architecture. Article 142(c) then provides that a Provincial Assembly shall, and Parliament shall not, make laws on matters not in the Federal Legislative List. But that vests the power in a Provincial Assembly, and Islamabad has none, because under Article 1(2)(b) it is the Federal Capital, listed separately from the four Provinces. Article 142(d) closes the gap by giving Parliament exclusive power over areas not included in any Province. Hence a federal statute, administered by FBR, with machinery imported wholesale from the Sales Tax Act 1990.

What to do

Establish where each of your service delivery offices sits, because that determines your origin province. List where your clients are resident, because that determines your destination exposure under section 4. Then assume you need to register in each province you touch, and work backwards from that rather than hoping a threshold saves you, because there is no general threshold. Check whether any of the seven specified services applies to you, since those are the only ones with a clean allocation rule. And if you are in Punjab, check the eIMS thresholds separately, because the invoicing obligation is a different question from the registration obligation. Our FBR, PRA, or both guide covers the case where you sell goods as well as services.

Last verified: 22 August 2026. Primary sources read directly for this page: the Punjab Sales Tax on Services Act 2012 (XLII of 2012), sections 3, 3A, 4, 10, 16, 16B and 25, the Second and First Schedules, the Punjab Sales Tax on Services (Filing of Returns) Rules 2012 rule 11(2), the Punjab Electronic Invoice Monitoring System Rules 2019 and the threshold notification gazetted 15 July 2024; the Sindh Sales Tax on Services Act 2011 (XII of 2011), sections 2(52)(d), 3, 8, 15A, 24, 26 and 73(4), and rules 5, 13A and 14 of the Sindh rules; the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Sales Tax on Services Act 2022 (XIX of 2022), sections 2(x), 3, 9, 20, 29 and 53; the Balochistan Sales Tax on Services Act 2015 (VI of 2015), sections 2(56), 3, 10, 10A and 25; the Islamabad Capital Territory (Tax on Services) Ordinance 2001 (XLII of 2001), section 3 and the Schedule; the Place of Provision of Services Rules 2023 as notified on 13 April 2023 by PRA (PRA/Orders.06/2021/293), SRB (SRB-3-4/21/2023), BRA (BRA/22-23/127) and FBR (SRO 494(I)/2023), in particular rules 2, 7, 8, 10 and 11; the Sindh and Balochistan Online Integration of Business Rules 2022; and Entry 49 of the Federal Legislative List with Articles 1(2) and 142 of the Constitution. We could not verify the existence of any reciprocal PRA and SRB memorandum of understanding, and none is asserted here. We could not verify that any negative list has been notified for the Islamabad Capital Territory under section 3(4). General information, not tax advice. Confirm your own position with your tax consultant.