You sold the Bangalore flat. The buyer paid, the bank deducted its tax, and now a little over two crore rupees sits in your NRO account in India. You want it in Dubai. You log into your banking app, try to send it, and the transfer stops dead. The money is yours. It still will not move.
This is the wall almost every NRI hits at least once. Not because the money is stuck forever, but because India puts a gate in front of it. The gate has a number on it: USD 1 million per financial year.
I have lived in Dubai long enough to watch friends sell property back home and assume the proceeds will land in their UAE account the same week.
They do not. The rules are not cruel, but they are specific, and the people who lose time are the ones who learn them halfway.
The 30-second answer
If you are an NRI, you can repatriate up to USD 1 million per financial year out of your NRO account. That ceiling covers the things that are not “current income”: sale proceeds of property and shares, inherited money, balances built up over the years.
Current income is different. Rent, dividends, pension, interest. That money is freely repatriable after tax and does not eat into your million.
Money in an NRE account has no limit at all. Principal and interest, both fully repatriable, no forms beyond the bank’s own.
To actually move NRO money, you file Form 15CA (your own declaration on the tax portal) and usually Form 15CB (a chartered accountant’s certificate), sign the bank’s Form A2 and a FEMA undertaking, and the bank sends the funds. Above USD 1 million in one year, you need the RBI’s prior approval.
That is the whole shape of it. The detail below decides whether your transfer takes three days or three months.
Two accounts, two completely different rules
Most of the confusion starts here, so start here.
The NRE account holds money you earned abroad and brought into India. Your Dubai salary, the savings you wired home, the deposits you parked in rupees for a better interest rate. India treats that money as already yours from outside. It flows out freely. No ceiling, no CA certificate, no annual limit. You want it back in dirhams, you send it back.
The NRO account holds money that has its origin in India. Rent from the Bangalore flat. The dividend from shares your father left you. The proceeds when you sell that property. India watches this account more closely, because this is money the Indian economy generated, and the country wants its tax before the money leaves.
The advice I give every colleague who asks is one line: keep the money you make abroad in NRE, and you keep it free. The moment Gulf savings get mixed into an NRO account, you have handed yourself paperwork you did not need.
Some banks will let you transfer from NRO to NRE first, then send out of NRE with less friction. That NRO to NRE move still counts against your USD 1 million for the year and still needs the 15CA and 15CB. You do not escape the gate by walking through a side door. You just move where you stand in the queue.
What the USD 1 million actually covers
The limit comes from the Foreign Exchange Management (Remittance of Assets) Regulations, 2016, and the RBI’s Master Direction on Remittance of Assets. The RBI’s own FAQ spells out who can remit what.
For an NRI or a person of Indian origin, the USD 1 million per financial year covers three buckets:
One, the balances in your NRO account. Whatever has accumulated there, subject to a declaration that the money is your own legitimate income and not borrowed or shuffled in from someone else’s account.
Two, the sale proceeds of assets. Property, shares, securities, any asset you held in India and sold.
Three, assets that came to you through legacy, inheritance, or a deed of settlement. The flat your mother left you. The fixed deposits in your late father’s name that passed to you.
Notice what sits inside one shared ceiling. If you sell a flat and inherit money in the same financial year, both draw from the same million. They do not get separate allowances.
Now the part people miss. Current income does not live inside this ceiling at all. Rent, dividends, pension, interest earned in India. The RBI treats current income as freely repatriable once tax is settled, and it can even be credited straight to your NRE account. So the retired uncle drawing an Indian pension and the landlord collecting monthly rent are not rationing their million. That cap is for capital, not for income.
If you remember one distinction from this article, make it that one. The million is a wall around your assets, not your earnings.
The financial year reset is the lever almost nobody uses
The limit is not USD 1 million, full stop. It is USD 1 million per financial year. India’s financial year runs from 1 April to 31 March. On 1 April, the meter resets to zero and you get a fresh million.
That reset is a planning tool, and it is sitting right there for anyone who reads the calendar.
Say a sale closes in March and the proceeds are larger than one million dollars. You can send up to a million before 31 March, then send the balance any time after 1 April under the new year’s allowance. Two transfers, a few weeks apart, no RBI approval needed. The same sale closing in April instead of March costs you a full year of waiting for the second tranche. Timing the closing, where you have any say over it, is worth real money in patience.
One honest wrinkle. You will sometimes read “USD 1 million per calendar year” in older bank material and even in some RBI text about NRO deposits. The regulation that governs repatriation of assets says financial year, and that is the one your bank applies. If a document in front of you says calendar year, check which rule it is quoting before you plan around it. When two official phrasings drift apart, trust the one written for the transaction you are actually doing.
The paperwork is the real bottleneck, not the limit
For most people the USD 1 million ceiling never binds. A single midsize flat in most Indian cities does not sell for the rupee equivalent of a million dollars. The thing that actually delays your transfer is the tax compliance, and it has four pieces.
Form 15CA. This is your declaration, filed by you on the Income Tax Department’s e-filing portal, stating that the remittance follows FEMA and that tax has been handled. It has four parts, and which part you use depends on the size and taxability of the payment.
Form 15CB. This is a certificate from a chartered accountant confirming the nature of the payment and that the correct tax has been paid or deducted. You need it when the taxable remittance crosses a threshold.
One threshold decides your workload. Under Rule 37BB, if your taxable remittance in the financial year stays at or below Rs 5 lakh, you file only Form 15CA Part A and skip the CA certificate. Cross Rs 5 lakh and you move to Part C, which requires Form 15CB from a chartered accountant first. There is also Part B if you have obtained a specific order or certificate from the assessing officer, and Part D if the remittance is not taxable at all.
My view, plainly: for a small, clean remittance under Rs 5 lakh, do not pay a CA to produce a 15CB you do not need. Some firms will quietly bundle it in. Read what the rule actually asks of you first.
Form A2 and the bank’s request form. The A2 is the foreign exchange declaration the bank needs for any outward remittance. Alongside it you sign the bank’s own remittance request.
The FEMA undertaking. For NRO repatriation specifically, the RBI requires the bank to take an undertaking from you stating that the money is your own legitimate income, not borrowed and not transferred in from another NRO account. The RBI’s wording is precise, and the penalty for a false declaration is real. Do not sign it loosely.
Hand the bank the 15CA and 15CB acknowledgments, the A2, the undertaking, and the request form together, and a clean file usually clears in a few working days. An incomplete file goes to the back of the queue, and you find out a week later.
A note on the 20% TCS scare
A lot of NRIs panic about the 20% tax collected at source they have read about on money transfers out of India. Here is the distinction that should calm you down.
That 20% TCS belongs to the Liberalised Remittance Scheme, the LRS, which is for resident Indians sending money abroad, capped at USD 250,000 per financial year. NRIs are not eligible for the LRS, and the USD 1 million repatriation route is a different scheme entirely. The tax you owe on NRO money is the ordinary tax on the underlying income, handled through TDS before the money leaves, not a TCS bolted on at the point of transfer.
Confirm your own numbers with your CA, because surcharge and cess sit on top of the base rates and the figures shift with budgets. But do not let a headline written for residents send you down the wrong rabbit hole.
Worked examples
I will use a rate of roughly Rs 86 to the dollar to keep the math readable. Use the actual rate on your transfer day, because it moves.
Example 1: Rhea sells her Pune flat
Rhea, a software lead in Dubai, sells the flat she bought before she moved. After the buyer deducts TDS, about Rs 1.8 crore lands in her NRO account. At roughly Rs 86 to the dollar that is around USD 209,000, comfortably under the million.
So the ceiling is not Rhea’s problem. Her real task is compliance. The remittance is well above Rs 5 lakh, so she needs a chartered accountant to issue Form 15CB, she files 15CA Part C herself, she signs the A2 and the FEMA undertaking, and the bank sends the money. Start to finish, a clean file is days, not weeks. The limit was never her problem. The paperwork was the only thing standing between her and the transfer.
Example 2: Imran inherits, sells, and trips over the ceiling
Imran inherits a plot of land and, the same year, sells a commercial unit. The two together leave about Rs 12 crore in his NRO account. At roughly Rs 86 to the dollar that is close to USD 1.4 million, which is over the wall.
Two clean routes:
Split it across the financial year line. If the funds are ready before 31 March, Imran remits USD 1 million before year end, then sends the remaining roughly USD 400,000 after 1 April under the new year’s allowance. No special approval, just patience and timing.
Or, if he needs the full amount now and cannot wait, he applies to the RBI for prior approval to remit above USD 1 million. That is a real process with documentation, not a rubber stamp, and it takes time. Given a choice between waiting a few weeks for April and waiting on an approval file, I would take April every time.
Example 3: Arjun and his rent and dividends
Arjun keeps a Bangalore flat rented out and holds a portfolio of Indian shares. The rent runs about Rs 60,000 a month, so Rs 7.2 lakh a year, plus a few lakh in dividends. He worries this is slowly using up some annual limit.
It is not. Rent and dividends are current income. After Indian tax is paid, they are freely repatriable and do not touch the USD 1 million ceiling at all. Arjun can send his rent home to Dubai every quarter for the rest of his life and never come near the cap, because the cap was never built for income. His only job is to make sure the tax on that income is settled, which for rent and dividends usually means TDS plus whatever he squares up at filing.
When you actually need the RBI’s permission
The USD 1 million route is designed to work without anyone asking the RBI for anything. You only need prior approval in a narrow set of cases:
When you want to remit more than USD 1 million in a single financial year out of NRO balances, sale proceeds, or inherited assets, and you do not want to wait for the next year’s allowance.
When a remittance involves genuine hardship that the standard limit cannot accommodate, which the RBI assesses case by case.
For most NRIs, neither applies, and the approval route is a fallback rather than a first step. If your number is over the million and you can wait, the financial year reset is almost always the cheaper and faster answer.
The mistakes I watch people make
Mixing Gulf savings into the NRO account. Money you earned in Dubai belongs in NRE, where it stays freely repatriable. Let it drift into NRO and you have wrapped your own savings in red tape.
Signing the FEMA undertaking without reading it. You are declaring the money is legitimately yours and not borrowed or routed through another account. That declaration has teeth. Know what you are signing.
Assuming a property sale clears like a salary transfer. It does not. Build in time for the 15CB, for the bank’s review, and for the inevitable request for one more document.
Paying for a 15CB you do not need. Below the Rs 5 lakh taxable threshold, Part A of 15CA stands on its own. Do not let a default package charge you for a certificate the rule does not require.
Treating the 20% TCS headline as your problem. That is a resident LRS rule. Your NRO repatriation runs on a different track.
Action checklist
- Confirm which account holds the money. NRE means freely repatriable. NRO means the USD 1 million route applies.
- Separate current income (rent, dividend, pension, interest) from capital (sale proceeds, inheritance). Only the capital counts against the million.
- Check whether your taxable remittance for the year is above or below Rs 5 lakh. That decides whether you need a 15CB.
- Settle the tax on the underlying income or gain before you try to remit. The bank will not release funds until it is satisfied tax is handled.
- Gather the file: 15CA acknowledgment, 15CB if required, Form A2, the FEMA undertaking, the bank’s remittance request.
- If your total for the year will exceed USD 1 million, decide early between splitting across 1 April and applying to the RBI.
- Use the actual exchange rate on transfer day for your own planning, not an estimate.
FAQ
Is the USD 1 million limit per person or per account? Per person, per financial year. It is not multiplied by the number of NRO accounts you hold.
Does money in my NRE account count against the million? No. NRE balances, principal and interest, are freely repatriable with no limit. The USD 1 million ceiling is an NRO and asset sale concept.
Is it a calendar year or a financial year? The Remittance of Assets regulation that governs this says financial year, 1 April to 31 March. You will occasionally see “calendar year” in older NRO deposit material. For repatriating assets, plan around the financial year.
Do I need a chartered accountant? For a taxable remittance above Rs 5 lakh in the year, yes, because Form 15CB must come from a CA. At or below Rs 5 lakh, Form 15CA Part A is filed by you alone and no 15CB is needed.
Can I send rent from my Indian flat to Dubai every month? Yes. Rent is current income. After Indian tax, it is freely repatriable and does not count against the USD 1 million ceiling.
What if my proceeds are more than USD 1 million? Either split the remittance across the financial year line and use two years’ allowances, or apply to the RBI for prior approval to send more than a million in one year.
Will I be charged the 20% TCS I keep reading about? That TCS applies to the Liberalised Remittance Scheme, which is for resident Indians. As an NRI repatriating NRO funds, you are on a different scheme. Confirm the specifics with your CA, but the resident TCS is not your rule.
How long does it take? A complete, clean file usually clears in a few working days. Missing documents are what turn days into weeks.
Last updated: June 2026. This article is education, not advice. Confirm your position with a qualified chartered accountant before acting.
Primary sources used:
- Reserve Bank of India, Foreign Exchange Management (Remittance of Assets) Regulations, 2016 (Notification No. FEMA 13(R)/2016-RB, dated 1 April 2016).
- Reserve Bank of India, Master Direction No. 13 on Remittance of Assets.
- Reserve Bank of India, FAQ on Remittance of Assets (rbi.org.in/commonperson/English/Scripts/FAQs.aspx?Id=17).
- Reserve Bank of India, FAQ on Accounts in India by Non-residents.
- Income Tax Department, Form 15CA and Form 15CB guidance under Rule 37BB (incometax.gov.in).
One clear letter a week. The rules, the math, and the moves. No hype, nothing to sell.