Meesho Payment Calculation: Commission, TCS, TDS and Your Payout

Your Meesho payment is the price buyers paid on delivered orders, less returns, Meesho's charges with GST on them, any penalties or recoveries, GST TCS at 0.5% of net taxable sales and income tax TDS at 0.1%. Only the charges and penalties are a real cost. TCS and TDS are taxes paid in your name.

Why is the payout smaller than your sales?

You listed a saree at Rs 525. The buyer paid Rs 525. Yet the amount that reached your bank for that order is lower, and for the month it is lower still. Is something wrong?

Usually not. Between the buyer's money and your bank account sit two kinds of deduction. The first kind is what Meesho keeps for its own services. The second kind is tax that the law tells Meesho to hold back and deposit with the government against your GSTIN and your PAN. Once you sort every line into one of these two heaps, the payment report stops looking like a puzzle.

What gets deducted, and do you get it back?

A word on Meesho's own charges. Commission, shipping and penalty rates differ by category and change often, and we could not open Meesho's pricing page today. So this article gives no rate for them. Read the current rate card and the penalty reasons in your supplier panel before you price a product.

How do TCS and TDS work?

TCS means tax collected at source. Section 52 of the CGST Act makes every marketplace collect it on the net value of taxable supplies: the taxable value of what you sold in the month less the taxable value of what was returned in that month. Notification 15/2024-Central Tax set the central half at 0.25% from 10 July 2024, which with the state half makes 0.5%. Meesho reports it in its monthly statement, Form GSTR-8. You accept the row on the GST portal and the money moves to your cash ledger. The steps are in how to claim TCS credit.

TDS means tax deducted at source. It belongs to income tax, not GST. Under section 194-O of the Income-tax Act, 1961 (section 393 of the Income-tax Act, 2025 from tax year 2026-27), a marketplace deducts 0.1% of the gross amount of your sales. An individual or HUF with sales up to Rs 5 lakh through that marketplace in the year, who has given PAN or Aadhaar, faces no deduction. Our note on TDS under section 194-O covers the details.

Selling without a GSTIN on an enrolment ID? Notification 37/2023-Central Tax tells the marketplace not to collect TCS from you. So your report will have no TCS line. TDS is a separate law and can still apply once you cross the Rs 5 lakh mark.

A worked example

Rekha sells sarees on Meesho from Surat with a regular GSTIN. Take the GST rate as 5%. Her numbers for one month:

The gap between net sales and payout is Rs 29,820. How much of it is truly gone?

• Rs 24,000 of charges and Rs 500 of penalties: gone. That is Rs 24,500.
• Rs 4,320 of GST on charges: back as input tax credit.
• Rs 800 of TCS: back through the cash ledger.
• Rs 200 of TDS: back against her income tax.

So Rs 5,320 of the gap is hers to recover. In her GSTR-3B, tax on sales is Rs 8,000. Input tax credit covers Rs 4,320, the cash ledger pays Rs 800, and she deposits Rs 2,880, assuming the credit is fully eligible. The TDS base in this example is an illustration: check which amount your report applies 0.1% to.

How to check your own payment, step by step

1. Download the payment report and the GST report for the same month. The click path is in our Meesho report guide.
2. From the GST report, total taxable sales and taxable returns. The difference is your GSTR-1 figure.
3. Multiply that net figure by 0.5%. It should be close to the TCS line.
4. Add up Meesho's charges and the GST on them. Match the GST with Meesho's invoices and your GSTR-2B.
5. List each penalty with its order number and reason. Raise a ticket for any you do not agree with.
6. Tick the payout total against your bank statement.

For the full month-end routine across marketplaces, see payment reconciliation for GST.

The mistake people usually make

The first mistake is to treat TCS and TDS as Meesho's fees and forget them. Rekha would leave Rs 1,000 unclaimed in one month, and Rs 12,000 in a year at the same pace.

The second is to subtract penalties from sales. A penalty is a charge on you. It is not a return by the buyer. Your GSTR-1 still shows Rs 1,60,000, not Rs 1,59,500.

The third is the costly one: filing GSTR-1 on the payout of Rs 1,38,180. Meesho has already reported Rs 1,60,000 against your GSTIN in GSTR-8, so the two records will not agree. For how the profit works out after all this, read profit after fees and GST.

Frequently asked questions

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