How to register a cash bill at prize.ird.gov.np and enter Nepal's Rs 1 lakh daily draw

The bill at a stationery shop in Putalisadak came to Rs 340, and the man ahead of me in the queue did something I had not seen before. He photographed the receipt, then stood to one side of the counter typing the shop's PAN into his phone. Took him about forty seconds.

He is one of about three thousand people in the country who have bothered. The draw he was entering already held roughly a million QR payments, filed automatically by the banks on behalf of people who did nothing at all.

Where things stand as of today

The scheme itself, the prize amounts and the 25% windfall tax are covered in the clause-by-clause walkthrough of the taxpayer gift programme. This post is about the machine you have to use.

The delay is IRD's own account: the first announcement was promised for Shrawan 16, and the department said technical preparation was not complete. Department technicians ran a sample draw in front of Finance Minister Dr Swarnim Wagle on Thursday, and Director General Dr Bhishma Kumar Bhusal confirmed a Friday announcement.

One piece of misinformation is circulating and worth killing here. Several sites say the programme "starts from Shrawan 21". It does not. Shrawan 21 is the date NRB gave payment service providers to make their apps interoperable with IRD's system and add a programme FAQ inside the app. Eligible purchases run from Shrawan 1.

The eight fields, and the one that is not in the rulebook

Clause 5(2) of the करदाता प्रोत्साहन उपहार कार्यक्रम सञ्चालन कार्यविधि, २०८३ lists seven fields. The live form asks for eight.

Address is the addition. It appears nowhere in clause 5(2) and no IRD notice explains why the portal collects it. Not a reason to avoid the form, just worth knowing that you are handing over one more identifier than the procedure asked for.

Two details will save you a wasted trip. The seller's PAN is validated against IRD's register, so a shop that quotes you a made-up nine-digit number gets rejected on the spot. And the amount rule has a small inconsistency: the procedure and IRD's notice both say the purchase must be more than Rs 100, while the portal's own validator accepts a bill of exactly Rs 100.00 and tells you the minimum is "at least" Rs 100. The signed procedure is what governs at claim time. Treat Rs 101 as the real floor.

Registering a cash bill, start to finish

1. Take the original bill. Not a photo, not a delivery slip. The paper is what you produce at the office if you win, and there is no substitute for it.
2. Open prize.ird.gov.np and pick दर्ता, then बिल दर्ता. Switch to English at the top right if you prefer. There is no signup step.
3. Type in the eight fields. Copy the seller's PAN off the bill itself rather than from a signboard.
4. Clear the security check (सुरक्षा प्रमाणीकरण). It is a Cloudflare widget, usually a single click.
5. Save your 12-digit prize coupon. The portal renders it as a downloadable coupon image and tells you to keep it together with the bill.
6. Store the paper and the coupon in the same place. A single envelope in a drawer beats a photo lost in a camera roll of 4,000 pictures.

Step 5 matters more than it looks, because of how the portal remembers you. Your registration history lives in your browser's local storage on that one device, capped at 100 records, labelled स्थानीय दाबी अभिलेख. There is no account behind it. Clear your browsing data, switch phones, or register from a friend's laptop, and your list of coupon numbers is gone. The entry survives on IRD's side. Your ability to find your own coupon number does not.

There is also no way to look up an entry after the fact. The portal has a public winner archive you can filter by fiscal year and date range, and nothing that accepts a coupon number and tells you its status. Which is why the downloaded coupon image is the whole of your record.

If you paid by QR, the instruction is to do nothing

IRD's Shrawan 16 notice is explicit that electronic payments made through a payment service provider from Shrawan 1 onward are entered automatically, and that those bills should not be keyed into the portal. Entering one manually risks tripping the duplicate check rather than doubling your odds.

Your coupon for a QR payment sits inside your own app. The portal's instruction is to look in the transaction detail, the notifications, or the coupon and rewards section of your banking or wallet app. NRB's circular is what obliges the providers to surface it there.

The paper bill is still not optional. IRD has repeatedly warned that the original invoice is mandatory to collect a prize even when the entry was automatic. A QR payment with the receipt left on the counter is an entry you cannot cash.

The deadline the software will not enforce for you

Clause 6 runs two draws a month. The 16th draws the 1st-to-15th window; the 1st draws the 16th-to-month-end window. Clause 5(2) requires a manual entry to land inside the window its bill belongs to.

The portal does not check this. Its only date rule is that the bill must fall inside the active fiscal year, which right now means anything dated 17 July 2026 or later. So the form will accept a three-week-old bill, congratulate you, and hand over a coupon for a draw that already happened. Whether a late entry gets pooled anywhere useful is decided server-side, invisibly.

Set your own rule instead: register on the day, or at the latest on the 15th and the last day of each Nepali month.

The one exception is running out right now. Because the portal opened after the first window had already closed, IRD invited consumers to enter cash bills dated from Shrawan 1, and asked for them "by the day before the first gift announcement". With the announcement on Friday 7 August, that made Thursday 6 August the effective cutoff for the whole first fortnight. No notice ever fixed that as a calendar date; it follows from the draw date.

What gets rejected

Four categories are excluded, and the portal reproduces the procedure's list without additions:

• Purchases made for business purposes
• Invoices issued in the name of a government body or public institution
• Telephone, internet and electricity bills, vehicles and transport or freight services, and air tickets
• Anything bought from a seller who does not hold a PAN

A fifth exclusion exists that is not in the procedure at all. The portal carries a rejection message telling you the seller's merchant category is on an excluded list. That list is published nowhere, so there is a set of shops whose bills will bounce for reasons neither the buyer nor the seller can look up in advance.

Duplicate handling is strict by design. One invoice is good for one entry, and the system matches on seller PAN, bill date, bill number and amount together. On fabricated entries the portal's warning is unusually direct: rejection of the entry, cancellation of the coupon, recovery of a prize already paid out, and referral under prevailing law. Clause 9(3) says the same thing about forged claim documents. This is not a scheme to game with a stack of invented bills.

Claiming, if your name comes up

Winners are published on IRD's website and social media under clause 7, and notified by mobile and email under clause 6(7). Then the 15-day clock starts.

The official ID can be a national ID card, citizenship certificate, passport or driving licence. The PAN requirement is the one that catches people, because nothing in the entry flow ever asked for it. You can play this scheme with no PAN and no ID whatsoever, and then discover at the counter that you cannot be paid.

The portal also ships an online claim form the procedure never mentions. It asks for your coupon number, the seller's PAN, the amount, your name and address, your phone, your bank name, branch and account number, and a photo of the bill in JPG, PNG or WebP under 5 MB. It has no PAN field and no ID upload, and it warns that submitted details are valid only after checking. IRD has published nothing on how this form relates to clause 9's in-person requirement. Until it does, read the online form as a pre-submission and still plan the office visit with the paper in hand.

What comes off the top is unchanged: 25% under Section 88A of the Income Tax Act 2058, which is why Rs 1,33,334 lands as Rs 1,00,000.50. The same windfall rate applies to lottery and prize winnings generally.

Almost nobody is doing this

Here is the number that describes the first fortnight, from IRD information officer Keshav Raghuvanshi, as of midday on Shrawan 19 (3 August 2026):

Cash entries were about three in every thousand. Two days after a nationally publicised portal launch, roughly three and a half thousand people in a country of three crore had keyed in a paper bill. IRD expected the figure to rise before the draw, and it presumably did.

A note on the arithmetic, since four outlets carried it. The reported grand total of 10,82,622 does not equal the sum of its two published components, which come to 10,78,223. Nobody has explained the residual of about 4,400. The two component figures are the ones to trust.

Read the gap for what it says about who this scheme reaches. The automatic path enters the digitally banked without asking, at CBMS-connected sellers. The manual path is the only route for cash purchases at small shops, which is exactly where the untaxed transactions the programme was designed to surface actually happen, and it is being used by almost no one. IRD has started pushing from the other end, with a notice on 4 August telling unregistered businesses to obtain a PAN, telling all businesses to issue sales invoices, and asking consumers to report shops that refuse a bill.

What is still unclear

• Draw dates. The procedure fixes the 1st and 16th of each Nepali month. Ratopati's report of the Friday announcement describes the schedule as the 16th and the last day of the month. Go by the procedure until IRD says otherwise.
• Whether a late manual entry counts at all. The software accepts it. The procedure implies it should not.
• The merchant category blocklist. Real, enforced, unpublished.
• The online claim form's legal status. Shipped and working, unexplained.
• Why the portal collects your address. Not in clause 5(2).

What you actually need to know

• Entry costs nothing and asks for nothing. No account, no PAN, forty seconds and eight fields at prize.ird.gov.np. The reason to do it is that it is free, not that you will win.
• Collection is where the requirements hide. Original paper bill, PAN, official ID, bank details, at an Inland Revenue Office, within 15 days of the announcement. Sort the PAN before you need it, not after.
• Your own deadline is the fortnight, not the fiscal year. The portal will not warn you, and a coupon from a closed window is a piece of paper.

Registered a bill and hit an error the portal would not explain, or made it through a claim at the Inland Revenue Office? Email parjanya57@gmail.com with what happened and I will fold it into this post.

This post is part of the Nepal Money Basics guide — the earn-and-reconcile section.