NRI Property Seller TDS — Income-tax Act, 2025

Income-tax Act, 2025 — Non-Resident Property Seller TDS (Form 144 / Form 131):
With effect from 1 April 2026, where the seller (deductee) in a property-purchase transaction is a non-resident, the buyer (deductor) does NOT use the resident Form 141/Schedule B pathway (which replaced the erstwhile Form 26QB under Section 194-IA of the Income-tax Act, 1961). Instead, the transaction is governed by the Act's non-resident-specific TDS provisions, under which the buyer files Form 144 and issues a Form 131 certificate to the non-resident seller.
This is a deliberate and important distinction: the resident and non-resident property-TDS pathways under the Income-tax Act, 2025 use different forms, and using the resident Form 141/Schedule B route for a non-resident seller's transaction (or vice versa) would be an error. Historically, the analogous non-resident property-TDS obligation was governed under Section 195 of the Income-tax Act, 1961 (requiring deduction at the rate applicable to the seller's actual capital gains, generally necessitating an application for a lower/nil deduction certificate from the Assessing Officer to avoid deduction on the full sale consideration) — the Income-tax Act, 2025's Form 144/Form 131 pathway continues this non-resident-specific treatment under the new form regime.
The specific rate, threshold, and procedural details of the Form 144/Form 131 process under the Income-tax Act, 2025 have not been independently verified against a first-party source this round beyond the confirmation that this (and not Form 141/Schedule B) is the correct pathway for a non-resident seller; procedural specifics should be confirmed before publication.

Purchasing property from an NRI seller requires careful withholding analysis under the Income-tax Act, 2025, generally through the non-resident payment framework rather than the resident-seller Form 141 Schedule B route. We help the buyer determine the correct TDS route, documentation, payment workflow, return reporting and certificate handover.