Repatriating from an NRO account, end to end

Published guidance is that it does not. The USD 1,000,000 per financial year cap applies to capital-source balances — proceeds of a sale, inheritance, older savings. Current income such as rent, fixed-deposit interest, dividends and pension is repatriable outside that cap once the tax on it is paid. Where the cap does apply it is aggregate: transfers to your own NRE account and remittances abroad draw on the same annual allowance, so it is not one million each way. Which bucket a particular balance falls into is a question for your Chartered Accountant, and it is the question worth asking first if you are near the limit.

Where the money ends up, and whether any currency is converted. An NRO-to-NRE transfer stays inside India and stays in rupees — nothing is exchanged, so there is no rate and no spread, and the bank uses its own transfer form rather than Form A2. Money sent to an overseas account is converted to dollars on the way out, which is where the exchange rate starts costing you. The tax paperwork is much the same either way; the FX is not.

Because balances in an NRE account are freely repatriable afterwards, so money that needs paperwork on every wire becomes money that does not. Two things it does not do, both worth knowing before you decide: it does not get around the USD 1 million cap, which is aggregate across what you move to NRE and what you send abroad in the same year, and the transfer itself still needs Form 145, Form 146 where required, and a FEMA declaration. It also saves nothing on the exchange rate — an NRE account holds rupees, not dollars, so nothing is converted by the move. Whether it suits your position is a Chartered Accountant's call; we describe the mechanism, not the recommendation.

No — it holds Indian rupees, and foreign currency sent to it is converted on arrival. FCNR is the account that holds foreign currency. It matters here because it decides how many times your money is converted, and each conversion carries your bank's markup. The guide on the three accounts sets it out in full.

Published guidance names PAN, a recent NRO account statement, and documentary proof of the source of the funds — a lease and rent receipts, an interest certificate, a dividend statement, or the sale deed and computation on a capital transaction — alongside Form A2 and the Form 145 acknowledgement, plus Form 146 where one was required. Your bank may ask for more; none of them ask for less.

The RBI classification of what a remittance is for, recorded on Form A2. It is how the transaction is reported, and it is worth being accurate about rather than picking whatever the form defaults to — the code should describe the money you are actually moving.

No. We are not Chartered Accountants and we do not file, certify or submit anything, and we never touch the money — you wire it yourself, at your own bank, with your own credentials. What we publish is the sequence and the arithmetic on the rate. The managed service coordinates the sequence for a property exit, with the CA invoicing you directly for the work only a CA can do.