Abstract The Parton Branching (PB) method describes the evolution of transverse momentum dependent (TMD) parton distributions, covering all kinematic regions from small to large transverse momenta $$k_{\textrm{T}}$$ k T . The small $$k_{\textrm{T}}$$ k T -region is very sensitive both to the contribution of the intrinsic motion of partons (intrinsic $$k_{\textrm{T}}$$ k T ) and to the resummation of soft gluons taken into account by the PB TMD evolution equations. We study the role of soft-gluon emissions in TMD as well as integrated parton distributions. We perform a detailed investigation of the PB TMD methodology at next-to-leading order (NLO) in Drell–Yan (DY) production for low transverse momenta. We present the extraction of the nonperturbative “intrinsic- $$k_{\textrm{T}}$$ k T ” distribution from recent measurements of DY transverse momentum distributions at the LHC across a wide range in DY masses, including a detailed treatment of statistical, correlated and uncorrelated uncertainties. We comment on the (in)dependence of intrinsic transverse momentum on DY mass and center-of-mass energy, and on the comparison with other approaches.