Rent Agreement Stamp Duty Calculator

A rent agreement of twelve months or more must be registered, which is why most Indian residential agreements run for 11 months. Where registration does apply — and it is compulsory for leave and licence agreements in Maharashtra regardless of term — stamp duty is charged on a formula that includes both the rent and the deposit.

Maharashtra uses the clearest rule in the country: 0.25% of the total rent for the term, plus any non-refundable deposit, plus notional interest at 10% a year on the refundable deposit. Rates below are from each state's official source, read 19 September 2026.

How the duty is charged, state by state

There is no national rate. Each state taxes a tenancy under its own Stamp Act schedule, and the basis differs as much as the rate: Maharashtra charges a percentage of rent plus notional interest on the deposit, Karnataka works from average annual rent plus the advance, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh from the total rent plus any premium. The calculator carries the four formulas we could confirm on an official state source.

Maharashtra (Article 36A, up to 60 months): 0.25% × [ total rent for the term + non-refundable deposit + notional interest at 10% a year on the refundable deposit ]

A worked example

₹25,000 a month for 11 months with a ₹3,00,000 refundable deposit in Pune: total rent ₹2,75,000, plus notional interest at 10% a year on the deposit for 11 months (₹27,500) = ₹3,02,500. Duty at 0.25% is ₹756, plus the registration fee, conventionally split between landlord and tenant.

Stamp schedules are amended by state finance acts, often annually. Treat these as a planning figure and confirm on your state's registration portal before you pay.

Why Indian rent agreements run for 11 months

Because of one clause. Section 17(1)(d) of the Registration Act, 1908 makes registration compulsory for “leases of immovable property from year to year, or for any term exceeding one year, or reserving a yearly rent”. Eleven months sits just under that line. No statute mentions eleven months; it is simply the market's safety margin below twelve.

Read the clause carefully, though, because it contains three separate triggers joined by “or”, and meeting any one of them forces registration:

• a lease from year to year — a periodic tenancy that renews annually;
• a lease for any term exceeding one year — twelve months and a day is enough;
• a lease reserving a yearly rent — rent expressed as an annual figure.

The third is the trap almost nobody sees. An eleven-month agreement that states the rent as “₹3,60,000 per annum” can still be compulsorily registrable, because it reserves a yearly rent even though the term is under a year. This is why a well-drafted agreement always expresses rent per month.

The mirror provision, Section 18(c), makes leases of a year or less optionally registrable. So an eleven-month agreement is not barred from registration — it is simply not compelled, and registering it voluntarily buys the evidentiary protection described below.

Section 107 of the Transfer of Property Act, 1882 uses the identical threshold and says what may be done instead: a lease not caught by it “may be made either by a registered instrument or by oral agreement accompanied by delivery of possession”. An eleven-month tenancy is therefore a perfectly valid contract in writing, or even without it.

What happens if an agreement that should have been registered is not

Section 49 of the Registration Act is the sanction. A document that Section 17 required to be registered shall not “affect any immovable property comprised therein” and shall not “be received as evidence of any transaction affecting such property”. A proviso lets it be used as evidence of a collateral transaction.

That collateral exception is far narrower than it sounds. In K.B. Saha and Sons v. Development Consultant Ltd (Supreme Court, 12 May 2008) the court set out five principles, and the fifth is the one that decides real disputes: if a document is inadmissible for want of registration, “none of its terms can be admitted in evidence”, and using it to prove an important clause is not a collateral purpose.

So an unregistered fifteen-month lease is not void. It is worse than that in practice: you cannot prove what you agreed. Not the rent, not the lock-in, not the escalation, not the notice period. Both sides fall back to a month-to-month tenancy — the landlord loses the lock-in and the tenant loses the fixed term.

Stamping is a separate requirement from registration

These are two different obligations and clearing one does not clear the other. Section 35 of the Indian Stamp Act, 1899 bars an insufficiently stamped instrument from being admitted in evidence for any purpose, and it can be cured only by paying the deficient duty plus a penalty of up to ten times the proper duty. Executing an eleven-month agreement on a nominal ₹100 e-stamp when the state schedule demands a percentage of rent escapes registration and creates a stamping defect instead.

Leave and licence, rent agreement, or lease deed

Indian law recognises two instruments here, not three. A lease is defined by Section 105 of the Transfer of Property Act as a transfer of a right to enjoy property — it carves an interest out of the owner's title. A licence is defined by Section 52 of the Indian Easements Act, 1882 as a permission to do something that would otherwise be unlawful, which expressly “does not amount to… an interest in the property”.

“Rent agreement” is not a legal category at all. The term appears in none of these Acts. A document titled that way is classified by what it actually does.

The label on the document does not decide it

In Associated Hotels of India v. R.N. Kapoor (Supreme Court, 19 May 1959) the court held that substance beats form: if a document creates an interest in the property it is a lease, and if a party gets exclusive possession he is prima facie a tenant, whatever the paper is called. The document in that case called itself a licence; the court held it was a lease.

This matters commercially. Handing an occupant exclusive possession for a fixed term, with no genuine owner access or control, can make the arrangement a tenancy with rent-control protection attached — no matter that the heading reads “Leave and Licence Agreement”.

Where the 11-month rule does not apply

The eleven-month convention works only where the Registration Act is the sole rule. Some states override it.

Maharashtra is the clearest. Section 55 of the Maharashtra Rent Control Act, 1999 opens with “Notwithstanding anything contained in this Act or any other law for the time being in force” and requires that any leave-and-licence or letting agreement be in writing and registered. There is no duration exemption: an eleven-month, six-month or one-month agreement must be registered.

Two details make it bite. The duty to register is placed on the landlord, and Section 55(2) provides that where there is no registered agreement, the tenant's version of the terms prevails unless the landlord proves otherwise. That reversal of the burden of proof is a sharper penalty than Section 49, and it is why Maharashtra landlords register even short agreements.

Other states route tenancies through a Rent Authority under newer tenancy legislation rather than through the Sub-Registrar. The Model Tenancy Act, 2021 is a template of this kind, but it is a model only: it has no force of law in any state until that state enacts it. Check your own state's rent legislation rather than assuming the central rule governs.

E-stamping, and whether notarisation is enough

Most states buy non-judicial stamp duty electronically through the system run by StockHolding (SHCIL), appointed by the Ministry of Finance as Central Record Keeping Agency; its portal reports coverage of 26 states and union territories as of March 2025. Each certificate carries a Unique Identification Number, a 20-character alphanumeric code generated once and never reissued, which is what makes a certificate checkable and stops the same stamp being used twice.

Verify the certificate before you sign. On the SHCIL portal, “Verify e-Stamp Certificate” asks for the state, the certificate number, the duty type, the issue date and a captcha. Forged certificates that look right on paper but do not exist in the database are a known fraud, and the check takes a minute. Some states run their own platforms instead of SHCIL, so start from your state registration department's portal if in doubt.

Notarisation is not registration

Under Section 8 of the Notaries Act, 1952 a notary may “verify, authenticate, certify or attest the execution of any instrument”. That function goes to execution — evidence that these people signed this document. Nothing in the Notaries Act gives a notarised document the effects that the Registration Act attaches to registration.

What that means in practice, stated more precisely than most writing on this manages:

• Where registration was never compulsory — a properly stamped eleven-month agreement in a state without an overriding rule — Section 49 is not engaged at all, and the agreement is admissible on ordinary principles. The common claim that “notarised agreements are not valid in court” is wrong as a general statement.
• Where registration was compulsory, notarising changes nothing. Section 49 applies in full and, under K.B. Saha, none of the document's terms can be proved.
• Registration also creates a public record at the Sub-Registrar's office. A notarial seal does not. That is why institutions asking for address proof generally want a registered agreement, and requirements differ between them — check the current official list for whatever you are applying for rather than relying on what worked for someone else.

This page explains the general legal framework and is not legal advice. Statutory text is reproduced from the bare Acts; rates and registration procedure change by state and over time. For a specific tenancy, check your state's registration portal or take advice.

Rent agreement stamp duty by monthly rent — 11 months, Maharashtra

Stamp duty on an 11-month leave and licence agreement, with the deposit taken as ten months’ rent. Eleven months is not a legal limit — it is the point above which registration stops being optional, which is why almost every Indian rent agreement is written for exactly that term.

Maharashtra charges 0.25% of the total rent plus notional interest at 10% a year on the refundable deposit (Article 36A of the Maharashtra Stamp Act). The registration fee is extra. Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh each work differently — switch state in the calculator above.

Frequently asked questions