The GST portal

The official GST portal is www.gst.gov.in, run by the Goods and Services Tax Network. It is where you register, file returns, pay tax, claim refunds and look up any taxpayer — and it is the authoritative record for all of it. This page covers what it does, what usually goes wrong at login, and the one job it was never designed for.

Open gst.gov.in

What the portal does

One front end sitting over both central and state GST administrations, which is why a single login covers every registration you hold across states.

Registration

New registration in Form REG-01, amendment of core and non-core fields, cancellation and revocation, and tracking any application by its ARN.

Returns

GSTR-1 and GSTR-1A, the auto-drafted GSTR-2B, GSTR-3B, the QRMP quarterly route, and the annual GSTR-9 and reconciliation statement GSTR-9C.

Payments and ledgers

Create a challan in Form PMT-06, pay by net banking, NEFT/RTGS or over the counter, and view the electronic cash, credit and liability ledgers.

Refunds

File refund applications in Form RFD-01 — exports, inverted duty structure, excess cash ledger balance — and track their status through to disbursement.

E-way bill and e-invoice

Both live on their own systems — the e-way bill portal and the Invoice Registration Portal — reached from the portal but with separate logins and credentials.

Search Taxpayer

Look up any GSTIN or UIN, search all registrations against a PAN, or check whether a taxpayer is under the composition scheme. Available before login.

New to the registration side of it? Start with our guide to GST registration, and keep the 2026 return due dates somewhere you will see them.

Logging in, and what usually breaks

Existing taxpayers sign in with a username and password created at first login; a first-time user signs in with the provisional ID or TRN and sets credentials then. Almost every support query we see falls into one of six buckets.

Symptom	What to do
Invalid username or password	The username is the one you created at first login, not your GSTIN or email. Use Forgot Username with your GSTIN and registered email to recover it.
OTP not received	OTPs go to the mobile and email recorded for the authorised signatory, which may not be yours. Check the signatory details before assuming a delivery failure.
Session expired mid-form	The portal times out on inactivity. Save long forms in parts rather than composing a full return in one sitting.
Captcha keeps failing	Captcha is case sensitive and refreshes on error. Clearing cache or trying a different browser resolves most persistent cases.
DSC not detected	The emSigner utility must be installed and running, with the browser allowed to reach its local port. Companies and LLPs cannot submit without it.
Portal slow or erroring	Load peaks around the 11th and 20th of each month and on annual return deadlines. Filing a day or two early is the only reliable mitigation.

Common GST portal login problems and what actually fixes them.

Search Taxpayer: what it gives you

Under Search Taxpayer, entering a GSTIN and solving the captcha returns the legal name, trade name, registration status, date of registration, constitution of business, taxpayer type and jurisdiction. There is also Search by PAN, which lists every registration held against that PAN across states, and a search for composition taxpayers. All of it is free and available without logging in, and for a single check it is the right tool — go and use it.

Where it stops being the right tool

One GSTIN at a time

Search Taxpayer accepts a single number per query. There is no CSV upload and no multi-GSTIN mode.

Captcha on every search

A human must solve a challenge for each lookup. That is deliberate — it is what keeps the public search a service for people rather than a free data feed.

No public API behind it

The public search has no documented API. Programmatic access to GST data runs through GSTN-licensed intermediaries, not through the portal UI.

No record of what you checked

Results are not stored, timestamped or exportable, so you cannot show an auditor what a vendor's status was on the day you paid them.

Slows under deadline load

The days you most need a quick check are the days the portal is busiest with returns being filed.

Lives outside your systems

A result in a browser tab still has to be keyed into your ERP or vendor master by hand, which is where copy errors enter.

None of these are faults. A public search with a captcha is exactly the right design for a government service that has to stay available to every taxpayer. They are simply the boundary of what a browser-based lookup can do, and past that boundary the answer is an interface built for machines.

Portal or API — how to choose

Job to be done	Use
Register, file, pay, claim a refund, reply to a notice	The portal. Nothing else is authoritative.
Check one GSTIN before signing a deal	The portal's Search Taxpayer, or our free GST number search.
Validate a GSTIN in a signup or onboarding form	An API call at the point of entry, so a bad number never gets saved.
Re-check 5,000 vendors every quarter	An API run from a queue. Manual checking is not a plan at that size.
Prove what a vendor's status was on a given date	An API, because the response can be stored with a timestamp against the transaction.

The two are complementary. The portal is the record; an API is the automation.

More on the trade-off in GST API versus scraping the GST portal, and on the mechanics in GSTIN verification and GST search.

GST portal — common questions

The official portal is www.gst.gov.in, operated by the Goods and Services Tax Network. It is the single front end for registration, returns, payments and refunds across central and state GST administrations. Notifications, circulars and rate information are published separately on cbic-gst.gov.in. Treat any other domain claiming to be the GST portal with suspicion.

Yes. Search Taxpayer is available pre-login under the Search Taxpayer menu, and returns the legal name, trade name, registration status, date of registration, constitution, jurisdiction and taxpayer type for any GSTIN. Logging in adds a little more, notably a return filing table for the taxpayer.

The captcha is what makes the public search a service for individual users rather than a bulk data source. It is the reason a business with hundreds of vendors cannot practically verify them all through the portal, and the reason scripted scraping of the portal is both fragile and inappropriate.

The username is the one you created when you first logged in with your provisional ID or TRN — it is neither your GSTIN nor your email address. If you have lost it, use Forgot Username on the login page with your GSTIN and registered email; the recovery goes to the authorised signatory on record, so make sure those contact details are current.

Both happen. The portal publishes scheduled maintenance notices on its home page, and it also genuinely slows around filing peaks — the 11th for GSTR-1, the 20th for GSTR-3B, and annual return deadlines. Before concluding it is an outage, try a different browser and a cleared cache, and check the portal's own notice board.

When verification needs to happen inside a system rather than in a browser: validating a GSTIN at the moment a vendor is onboarded, screening an invoice before it is booked, or re-checking a whole vendor master on a schedule. For a one-off check on a single number, the portal is the right tool and it is free.

No. The portal remains the authoritative system of record — it is where you register, file, pay and correspond with the department, and none of that is replaceable. A verification API reads the same public registration data programmatically so that routine lookups do not need a person and a browser.

It is a poor idea in practice and in principle. Captchas, session handling and markup changes make scrapers brittle, bulk automated access against a public service is not what it is provided for, and you inherit no service guarantees. A licensed data route gives you a stable contract and an audit trail instead.

Guides on e-way bill

Generating, cancelling and unblocking e-way bills, plus the thresholds, exemptions and penalties behind them.

All 299 GST guides

Need one quick lookup, without the captcha?

Our free GST number search reads the same registration records and returns the legal name, status and jurisdiction. For everything else — filing, payments, notices — go to gst.gov.in.

Try the free GST number search