Crop your PAN card photo. Pick your portal, NSDL or UTIITSL.

PAN cards are issued through two separate agencies, each running its own online application portal with its own photo spec: NSDL (now rebranded Protean) and UTIITSL. Neither is more "official" than the other, they are just two different systems the Income Tax Department authorizes, so the size that matters is whichever portal your application form actually goes through.

NSDL / Protean: 3.5x2.5cm print, exported as 197x276px at 200 DPI, plain white or off-white background, JPEG under 20KB.

UTIITSL: a 213x213px square image at 300 DPI, plain white background, JPEG under 30KB.

The 3.5x2.5cm physical size is confirmed against an official NSDL correction-form page; the exact pixel, DPI, and file-size figures for both portals are cross-checked third-party consensus rather than an independently re-parsed primary source in this session, since tin-nsdl.com now redirects to a page with no extractable spec text and utiitsl.com's own PAN subpage returns a 404. Always confirm against whichever portal you're actually applying through before submitting.

Pick NSDL/Protean or UTIITSL from the size selector above the upload box, drop in a clear, front-facing photo, and drag it until your head lines up with the guide. Because the two portals use genuinely different pixel dimensions and aspect ratios, not just different crops of the same image, re-select and re-export if you end up needing both. Under the hood this is a full photo editor for the job: it crops, resizes, and compresses to the right file size in one pass, so you are not juggling a separate resizer for the pixels and another tool for the KB limit.

If you landed here searching for the PAN card photo size in cm, in pixels, or in KB specifically, here is the short version for both portals side by side, so you do not have to piece it together from three different pages.

NSDL (Protean): 3.5x2.5cm print, which works out to 197x276 pixels at 200 DPI, saved as a JPEG under 20KB.

UTIITSL: no separate cm measurement is published for this one, it is a straightforward 213x213 pixel square at 300 DPI, saved as a JPEG under 30KB.

The file-size caps trip up more people than the pixel dimensions do. Most phone photos come out well north of 1 to 2MB straight from the camera, so getting under 20KB or 30KB usually means exporting at noticeably lower JPEG quality than feels comfortable to look at up close. The tool above handles that compression automatically once you have cropped and aligned the photo, so you are not stuck guessing at a quality slider yourself.

Most PAN applications, whether you are filing directly through NSDL or UTIITSL, or resizing photo and signature at a CSC (Common Service Centre) counter on someone else's behalf, ask for a signature image alongside the photo. The signature is not held to the same spec as the photo. NSDL generally expects a signature scan around 2x4.5cm, exported at roughly 140x60 pixels and kept under 10 to 20KB, signed in black or dark blue ink on plain white paper. UTIITSL's form asks for a similarly small, compressed signature image, without a fixed pixel figure published on its own site.

If you are at a CSC helping someone through the form, or doing your own application, resize the photo and the signature as two separate files rather than trying to crop one out of the other. They have different aspect ratios and different size caps, and both portals validate them independently. This tool handles the photo half of that pair. For the signature, scan it against a plain white background, crop tightly to the ink itself, and compress it until it sits under the portal's KB limit, our free signature resizer does exactly that in one step, no separate editor needed.

A common misconception is that once a PAN card is issued, its photo cannot be changed. It can. Both NSDL/Protean and UTIITSL offer a "Change/Correction in PAN Data" application for exactly this, sitting alongside address and name corrections on the same form. You fill in the usual online application, tick the field you want corrected, in this case the photo, and upload a new image that meets the same portal-specific spec covered above. There is no separate, looser standard for a correction request, the photo you upload still needs to hit the exact pixel and file-size numbers for whichever portal you originally applied through, or are applying through now.

If you are instead filing a brand-new PAN application rather than a correction, the photo requirement is identical, pick your portal above, crop, and upload.

One more thing worth knowing: an e-PAN, the PDF version emailed to you once processing is done, does carry your photo, just printed at a lower resolution than the physical card. If your photo looks slightly soft or pixelated on a printed e-PAN, that is normal PDF compression at work, not a sign that your original upload was rejected or wrong.

A PAN card is a small laminated card, roughly the size of a debit card. Your photo sits on the front, left side, with your name, your father's or mother's name, date of birth, and the ten-character PAN number printed alongside it, and your signature directly beneath the photo. The back carries the Income Tax Department's address and a QR code, no second photo appears there. If you are comparing your printed card against a sample to check whether your own photo placement looks right, this front-left layout with the signature underneath is the standard format both agencies use, and it has not changed with the newer QR-code cards issued in recent years.