What do you put in Form 10F if your country has no tax identification number?
Your government-issued identification number, because the form says so itself.
Field (iv) does not simply demand a tax ID. It reads: your tax identification number in the country of residence "and if there is no such number, then, a unique number on the basis of which the person is identified by the Government" of that country. The fallback is part of the field, not a concession someone grants you.
So the entry is the ordinary national identity number you already carry.
| Where you live | What goes in field (iv) |
|---|---|
| UAE | Emirates ID number |
| Bahrain | CPR number |
| Kuwait | Civil ID number |
| Qatar | Residence permit number, or PIN for a citizen |
| Oman | Civil ID number |
| Saudi Arabia | Iqama number, or National ID for a citizen |
The one entry to avoid is a VAT or corporate tax registration number. It identifies a business, not you.
The Gulf governments say the same thing from their side
This is not an Indian workaround being read into a foreign system. Each of these states publishes its position through the OECD's automatic exchange framework, and they line up with what the form asks for.
Kuwait is the most direct. For individuals a TIN is not issued by the Tax Department, but the Civil ID number issued by the Public Authority for Civil Information is used as their TIN on request. Qatar issues a TIN only to a natural person carrying on an industrial, commercial, craft or professional activity, and says anyone else is identified by the residence permit number if they are a foreign resident.
Bahrain says there is no general taxation on personal income, so no TINs are issued for these purposes. Oman and Saudi Arabia both answer no to whether individuals are automatically issued a TIN.
The UAE goes furthest: it does not issue TINs at all, its TRCs do not carry one, and it states that a VAT number may not be used in lieu of a TIN. If you have been putting a company TRN on your Form 10F, that is the line that says not to.
When the answer is N.A. instead
There is a second route on the form and it is worth knowing before you type anything.
Note 2 on Form 10F says to write N.A. where the relevant information already forms part of the tax residency certificate. If your TRC carries the identifier, the form does not need you to repeat it.
For most Gulf readers this will not apply. The UAE says plainly that its TRCs do not carry a TIN, so a UAE reader is back to field (iv) and the national ID. But if your certificate does show an identifying number, N.A. is a permitted answer rather than an evasion, and it avoids the mismatch problem that gets claims rejected when the form and the certificate disagree.
Check the certificate first. It takes a minute and it decides which of the two answers you are giving.
Does this change under Form 41?
Form 10F becomes Form 41 under the Income-tax Act 2025, filed under section 159(8) with rule 75 in place of rule 21AB.
The no-tax-ID fallback carries over: Form 41 likewise takes a unique number by which the government of your country identifies you where no tax identification number exists. We have not reproduced the Form 41 field here word for word, because the official versions we could reach are image-only, so treat the verbatim quote above as the Form 10F text.
The transition is a year split rather than a switch. Income for FY 2025-26 is assessed under the old Act on the old form, so you may well file Form 10F and Form 41 in consecutive years. Our Form 10F and Form 41 generator picks the right form for the year you choose.
Do not confuse this with your bank's CRS self-certification
This is where most of the contradictory advice online comes from, and it is worth separating cleanly.
Your Indian bank or fund house will also ask you to sign a FATCA and CRS self-certification. That is a different regime with a different rulebook, and it has its own machinery for a missing tax ID, including reason codes for why none is held. Guidance written for that form does not transfer to Form 10F.
We have seen sources say a Gulf resident should give a standard absence code rather than an improvised number, and say that quoting a national ID gets a filing rejected. Read carefully, those are describing the self-certification, not Form 10F. Form 10F has its own answer printed in field (iv), and that answer is the government identification number.
Two forms, two regimes, two correct answers. Applying one to the other is what leaves people stuck.