Most of what you will read in an NRI guide to buying property in India was written before 1 April 2026, and a good deal of it is now citing a statute that no longer exists.
The Income-tax Act, 1961 was repealed on that date and replaced by the Income-tax Act, 2025. The tax policy did not change, but the section numbers, the forms and the filing route did. If you are buying in Chandigarh, Mohali or Panchkula this year, you are also dealing with three separate registering jurisdictions inside one urban area, each with its own charges and its own portal.
This is the buying side of the transaction: how the purchase actually runs, what you can do from abroad, what lands on you as the buyer rather than on the seller, and what registration genuinely costs. If you are still deciding whether the Tricity belongs on your shortlist at all, that is a different question and we have covered it separately in our piece on why the Tricity appeals to NRI buyers.
What changed on 1 April 2026, and why older guides now mislead
The Income-tax Act, 2025 was passed by Parliament on 12 August 2025 and received presidential assent on 21 August 2025. It came into force on 1 April 2026, and the Income-tax Act, 1961 stands repealed from that date (Income Tax Department). The Income-tax Rules, 2026 were notified on 20 March 2026 to operationalise it.
This was a drafting exercise rather than a policy shift. Rates, thresholds and the underlying obligations were carried across largely intact. What did change is where you find them. More than forty separate deduction sections were consolidated into a single provision, Section 393. The rule that used to sit in Section 194-IA, covering tax deducted when you buy immovable property, is now Section 393(1). The rule that used to sit in Section 195, covering payments to a non-resident, is now Section 393(2).
The forms were renumbered too. Form 26QB, the challan-cum-statement most buyers know, has been merged with Forms 26QC, 26QD and 26QE into a single Form 141. The Income Tax Department describes it as “the Challan cum Statement for payment and reporting of tax deducted under Section 393(1)”, and states that it “must be furnished within one month from the end of the month in which tax is deducted” (Income Tax Department).
None of this changes what you owe. It changes which form you file and which section your chartered accountant should be citing. An NRI guide to buying property that still points you at Form 26QB for a transaction dated after 1 April 2026 has not been updated, and the same goes for a broker or a template agreement. Old forms continue to apply only to transactions up to 31 March 2026.
What you are permitted to buy
An NRI or OCI cardholder may acquire residential and commercial immovable property in India without prior approval from the Reserve Bank of India, under the Foreign Exchange Management (Acquisition and Transfer of Immovable Property in India) Regulations, 2018. Agricultural land, farmhouses and plantation property are outside that permission and cannot be purchased, although they can be inherited.
That exclusion matters more here than in most Indian cities. A large share of the families we deal with have ancestral land in Punjab or Haryana and assume that buying more of it is simply a matter of price. It is not. We have covered the FEMA position and the inheritance route in more detail in the companion article, and the rest of this guide assumes you are buying a flat, a floor, a plot in an approved colony or a commercial unit.
How the purchase actually runs
The sequence below is the one a Tricity purchase follows in practice. The useful thing to notice is how little of it needs you physically in India.
The practical implication is that most NRI buyers who travel to India three or four times during a purchase are travelling for reassurance rather than for necessity. That is a legitimate reason. It is simply worth knowing which of those trips is doing real work.
Funding the purchase from abroad
Payment must move through banking channels. In practice that means an inward remittance from your overseas account, or a debit to an NRE, NRO or FCNR account held in India. Cash is not an option and neither is a transfer arranged privately outside the banking system.
Which account you use is not an administrative detail. It determines what you can take out of India when you eventually sell. Funds brought in through an NRE or FCNR account, or by direct inward remittance, sit on the repatriable side. Money paid from an NRO account generally does not, and unwinding that later is considerably harder than getting it right at the first instalment. If your family in India is offering to pay part of the consideration on your behalf, pause and take advice before accepting, because it can quietly change the character of your ownership.
Home loans are available to non-residents from Indian banks and housing finance companies. The structural point worth knowing in advance is that repayment is expected through the same non-resident banking channels, by inward remittance or by debit to your NRE, NRO or FCNR account, rather than from a foreign account directly. Sanction terms, loan-to-value and tenure vary between lenders and are usually tighter for non-residents than for resident borrowers, so get a written sanction before you commit to a completion date.
The tax that lands on you as the buyer
This is the part most first-time NRI buyers do not expect. In an Indian property purchase, the obligation to deduct tax at source sits with the buyer, not the seller. If you get it wrong, the demand comes to you, not to the person who took your money.
Everything turns on one question, and it is worth asking it in writing before you sign anything.
Buying from a resident seller
This is the straightforward case. You deduct 1% of the consideration or the stamp duty value, whichever is higher, where that figure is fifty lakh rupees or more. You do not need a TAN. You report and pay through Form 141 using your own PAN, and it is due within one month from the end of the month in which you deducted.
Two practical points. You will need a PAN, so if you do not hold one, apply early rather than in the week of registration. And where a property is bought jointly, the deduction and the filing follow each buyer’s share, which is a common source of muddle.
Buying from another NRI
This is where buyers get hurt, and it happens more than you would expect in the Tricity because a meaningful share of resale stock is held by families settled abroad.
If your seller is a non-resident, the 1% route is simply not available to you. The Income Tax Department is explicit that Form 141 “can be filed only for resident deductees” and “is not applicable where the deductee is a non resident”. The deduction falls under Section 393(2) instead, at non-resident rates that are substantially higher, and unless the seller has obtained a lower or nil deduction certificate in advance, it is generally applied to the entire sale consideration rather than to the seller’s gain. You will also need a TAN and a quarterly return rather than a single challan-cum-statement.
The failure mode is predictable. The seller says they are Indian, the buyer deducts 1%, the transaction registers without incident, and the shortfall surfaces later with interest and penalty attached, payable by the buyer. Get the seller’s residential status confirmed in writing in the agreement to sell, and where there is any doubt, treat it as a non-resident sale until proven otherwise. If the seller expects to obtain a certificate, make the timing of that certificate a condition of your completion date, not an afterthought.
What registration actually costs
Here the Tricity gets genuinely awkward, because the three cities in the title of this article sit in three different jurisdictions and none of them charges the same way.
Punjab, which covers Mohali, Zirakpur and Kharar, publishes a document-wise schedule of stamp duty, registration fee and facilitation charges. On a sale or gift deed it sets out stamp duty of 5% of the consideration amount plus 1% Social Infrastructure Cess, a registration fee of 1% capped at two lakh rupees, a Punjab Infrastructure Development Board levy of 1%, and facilitation charges on a slab basis (Department of Revenue, Rehabilitation and Disaster Management, Punjab). Consideration means the consideration or the collector rate, whichever is higher.
Notice how far that is from the single headline percentage most articles quote. Budgeting 5% and discovering roughly 8% at the sub-registrar’s office is an unpleasant surprise when you are wiring money from eight time zones away.
For Panchkula and for Chandigarh we would rather send you to the source than repeat a figure we cannot stand behind. Haryana publishes an official stamp duty calculator for sale deeds that distinguishes property inside and outside municipal limits and applies a gender-based concession, and Chandigarh sets its own rates as a Union Territory. Rates in all three jurisdictions move by notification, and time-limited rebates appear and lapse. Check the calculator for the specific jurisdiction shortly before you complete, and ask your advocate to confirm the collector rate applicable to the exact locality, because that, and not your agreed price, is often what the duty is computed on.
Where to verify, by jurisdiction
| Where you are buying | State or UT | Project regulator | Registration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mohali, Zirakpur, Kharar, Dera Bassi, Kurali | Punjab | Punjab RERA, rera.punjab.gov.in | NGDRS, igrpunjab.gov.in |
| Panchkula | Haryana | Haryana RERA, haryanarera.gov.in | jamabandi.nic.in |
| Chandigarh | Union Territory | Confirm the applicable authority with the UT Administration | Sub Registrar, Sector 17 |
The Chandigarh row is deliberately cautious. Published guidance on which authority regulates projects in the Union Territory is inconsistent, and we are not willing to state something we could not verify against an official source. If you are buying in Chandigarh specifically, confirm it with the UT Administration before you rely on any portal listing. That inconsistency is itself a useful illustration of why remote buyers get caught out here.
The jurisdiction error we see most often is a buyer checking a Zirakpur project on the Haryana register because Zirakpur borders Panchkula. It is a Punjab town and it appears only on the Punjab register.
Power of Attorney, done properly
A Power of Attorney is what lets someone execute and register the sale deed on your behalf, and it is the single document worth spending time on.
Execute it in your country of residence. If you are in a country party to the Hague Apostille Convention, an apostilled document needs no further legalisation. If you are not, it will need attestation at the Indian mission. Once it reaches India it generally needs to be stamped and, for property transactions, registered. Punjab publishes the charges for this alongside everything else: a General Power of Attorney covering up to five persons carries two thousand rupees in stamp duty with a four hundred rupee registration fee, and a Special Power of Attorney carries one thousand rupees with a one hundred rupee registration fee.
Keep the powers narrow. A Special Power of Attorney naming the specific property and the specific transaction is safer than a General Power of Attorney that hands someone open authority over your affairs in India. Give it an expiry date. Name someone whose interests are not in tension with yours in the transaction, which in practice means thinking carefully before appointing a relative who is also a party to the deal.
The GPA property trap
Somebody will eventually offer you a property that is “on GPA”, usually at a price that looks like a bargain. It is not a bargain. It is not a purchase.
In Suraj Lamp and Industries Private Limited v State of Haryana, decided on 11 October 2011, the Supreme Court held that transactions in the nature of GPA sales, or sale agreement, general power of attorney and will transfers, do not convey title and do not amount to a transfer of immovable property (Supreme Court of India). Such documents may create a right to seek specific performance, or serve as evidence of possession, but they are not a substitute for a registered conveyance.
Fifteen years on, GPA stock still circulates in parts of Punjab and Haryana, and overseas buyers are a natural market for it because they are less likely to know the local history and less able to inspect the paperwork chain in person. If a seller cannot show you a registered sale deed in their own name, you are not being offered ownership, whatever the price says.
Verifying a property when you are not in the country
Remote verification is a documentation exercise, not a video call. The video call tells you what a building looks like. It tells you nothing about whether the person selling it is entitled to.
- The registered sale deed in the current seller’s name, and the chain of title behind it
- The project’s RERA registration on the correct state portal, checked by registration number and not by a screenshot the builder sends you
- Approved layout and building plans, and for plotted colonies the licence position with the town planning department
- An encumbrance check covering the relevant period, to surface mortgages and charges
- Latest property tax receipts and utility dues, which frequently reveal disputes nobody mentions
- Mutation entries in the revenue record, matching the deed
- For inherited or jointly held property, the succession position and the consent of every co-owner
Instruct your own advocate rather than relying on the seller’s or the builder’s. The cost of an independent title opinion is trivial against the consideration, and it is the one expense overseas buyers most often try to save.
What we see NRI buyers get wrong
Patterns from the enquiries we handle, offered as observations rather than as statistics.
The most common is buying on family recommendation without independent verification. A relative knows a builder, the family has always bought in that area, and the diligence step gets skipped because it feels like distrust. It is not distrust. It is the same check a bank would run before lending against the property.
The second is budgeting for the price and not for the transaction. Duty, cess, registration, facilitation, mutation, legal fees and the deduction you must make on the seller’s behalf are all real cash, and in Punjab they add up to a meaningful percentage on top of the headline number.
The third is treating an announced road, metro line or airport expansion as though it is already built. Buy on what exists. If the announced project arrives, that is upside you did not pay for.
The fourth is leaving the property empty and unmanaged after purchase. An unoccupied flat in a society is usually fine. An unoccupied plot on the developing edge, with no one visiting it and no boundary wall, is a different proposition entirely, and encroachment questions are far cheaper to prevent than to litigate from abroad.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to be in India to buy property in Chandigarh, Mohali or Panchkula?
Not for most of the process. Shortlisting, verification, the agreement to sell, routing funds and the tax deduction can all be handled from abroad. The stage that requires presence is the execution and registration of the sale deed, and a properly drawn and registered Power of Attorney covers that if you cannot travel.
Which tax section applies to my purchase in 2026?
For transactions from 1 April 2026, Section 393 of the Income-tax Act, 2025. Section 393(1) covers purchases from a resident seller and was previously Section 194-IA. Section 393(2) covers payments to a non-resident and was previously Section 195. Older guidance citing the Income-tax Act, 1961 refers to a repealed statute, although the underlying obligations were carried across.
What happens if my seller turns out to be an NRI?
Your deduction obligation changes completely. The 1% route and Form 141 are unavailable, because the Income Tax Department restricts Form 141 to resident deductees. Deduction falls under Section 393(2) at non-resident rates, generally on the whole consideration unless the seller has obtained a lower or nil deduction certificate, and you will need a TAN. Confirm the seller’s residential status in writing before you sign.
Can I buy agricultural land or a farmhouse near the Tricity?
No. Under the FEMA regulations of 2018, an NRI or OCI cardholder may acquire residential and commercial property without RBI approval, but agricultural land, farmhouses and plantation property are excluded. Such property can be inherited, which is a different route with its own requirements.
What does registration cost in Mohali or Zirakpur?
On the Punjab Revenue Department’s published schedule, a sale deed attracts 5% stamp duty plus 1% Social Infrastructure Cess, a 1% registration fee capped at two lakh rupees, and a 1% Punjab Infrastructure Development Board levy, computed on the consideration or the collector rate, whichever is higher. Facilitation, mutation and pasting charges are additional and fixed. Confirm current rates before completion, since they change by notification.
Is a property sold on General Power of Attorney safe to buy?
No. The Supreme Court held in 2011 that GPA sales do not convey title and do not amount to a transfer of immovable property. Only a registered conveyance transfers ownership. If the seller cannot produce a registered sale deed in their own name, you are not buying ownership.
Which bank account should I pay from?
Payment must move through banking channels, by inward remittance or from an NRE, NRO or FCNR account. The choice affects what you can repatriate when you sell, so decide it before the first instalment rather than after. Funds routed through NRE or FCNR accounts, or remitted directly from abroad, are on the repatriable side.
Bringing it together
Buying in the Tricity as a non-resident is not difficult, but it is unforgiving of assumptions. The three that cost the most are assuming your seller is resident, assuming the headline stamp duty rate is what you will pay, and assuming that a document called a Power of Attorney amounts to ownership.
The 2026 change to the tax law does not alter what you owe, but it does mean that a large amount of the advice circulating online now points at repealed sections and superseded forms. When you are being told what to do by someone eight time zones away, it is worth checking that they know which year it is.
If you are working out which of the three cities suits your requirement, or you want the documentation on a specific property checked before you commit, our NRI services page explains how we work with overseas clients, and you are welcome to talk through your requirement and your timeline first. You may also find our guides to sectors in Mohali, sectors in Panchkula and areas in Zirakpur useful when you get to the shortlisting stage, and if you are weighing an agent, our note on choosing a property dealer sets out the checks worth running.
Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is intended for general informational purposes only and should not be considered legal, financial, tax or investment advice. Property laws, regulations, tax rules, market conditions and other requirements may change over time. Readers should independently verify relevant information and consult qualified legal, tax, financial or other professionals before making a property-related decision. Dewan Realtors makes no guarantee regarding future property prices, investment returns, rental income or other financial outcomes.
This article discusses FEMA regulations, RERA verification, stamp duty, registration charges and tax deduction provisions under the Income-tax Act, 2025 that apply to non-residents. All such information is general in nature, rates and forms change by notification, and current requirements should be verified with a qualified professional or the relevant official authority, including the Reserve Bank of India, the Income Tax Department, the Department of Revenue of the relevant state, Punjab RERA or Haryana RERA, before you act on it.
