15CA, 15CB, the $1M Cap, and the Purpose Code That Freezes Transfers.

Two forms stand between your Indian money and your overseas account.

Form 15CA is an online declaration you file yourself on the income tax portal. It tells the government how much you are sending, why, and that the tax on it has been paid.

Form 15CB is a certificate your CA signs after checking that the tax really has been paid. Your bank will not release a taxable transfer over 5 lakh without it.

From 1 April 2026 these are renamed: Form 15CA becomes Form 145, and Form 15CB becomes Form 146. The switch goes by the date you make the remittance, not the year the income relates to. Money sent on or after 1 April 2026 uses 145 and 146; anything remitted up to 31 March 2026 still uses 15CA and 15CB.

The most common mistake is filing the wrong part of Form 15CA (Form 145). There are four, and the right one depends on how much you are sending and whether it is taxable:

Part A: the remittance is taxable, but the total for the year is 5 lakh or less. You self-declare, no CA needed.

Part B: it is taxable and over 5 lakh, and you have a lower or nil withholding certificate from the Assessing Officer under Section 395 (that certificate is Form 128, formerly Form 13).

Part C: it is taxable and over 5 lakh, and your CA has issued Form 15CB (Form 146). This is the usual path for a property sale or a large investment payout.

Part D: the remittance is not taxable at all. No CA certificate.

Some purposes on the RBI specified list, 33 of them, need no form at all. Pick the wrong part and the bank sends it back, and you start over.

Get the form wrong, or skip it, and the penalty is 1 lakh per form under Section 462 of the Income-tax Act 2025 (this was Section 271-I under the old Act). Not per transaction. Per form. A mistake on both the 15CA and the 15CB can mean 2 lakh for what is, in the end, a paperwork error.

That is why the CA certificate exists. The CA checks your past returns, your Form 26AS, your bank statements and the source of the money before signing, because their name is on the tax position.

RBI caps what you can send out of your NRO account at USD 1 million per financial year. That covers sale proceeds, rent that has piled up, FD maturities and redemptions. Sold a 2.5 crore flat? That is roughly USD 300,000, well inside the cap. But stack a big property sale on top of years of accumulated NRO income and you can hit the ceiling.

There is an important carve-out. If you bought up to two residential properties with money sent from abroad, through your NRE account or a foreign-exchange remittance, and you can prove it, the original foreign-exchange amount you paid is repatriable outside the $1 million cap. What still counts against the cap is the gain on top of that amount, plus anything you bought with NRO or inherited money.

Going above $1 million in a year is possible, but it needs prior RBI approval through your bank, with justification and tax-clearance papers. Budget two to four weeks for that.

Every transfer out of India carries a FEMA purpose code, a short code that tells RBI why the money is leaving: sale of property, investment income, a gift to family, salary savings. Your bank picks it from RBI's list based on the source of your money.

Get it wrong and the bank's compliance team does not reject the transfer, it freezes it. The money sits in limbo while they work out what the transfer actually is, and that can take weeks. The codes are specific, and the list gets revised, so a code a forum told you to use last year may not be right now.

This is not worth guessing. The correct code follows from where the money came from, and a CA who handles repatriation regularly, working with your bank, sets it the first time. That one detail is often the difference between a same-week transfer and a month-long hold.

Most repatriations follow the same four steps. The slow part is collecting documents, so start there. Start to finish, it is usually one to three weeks once your papers are in hand.

You can self-file Form 15CA (145) for small, non-taxable transfers. The moment the money is taxable and over 5 lakh, or a transfer has frozen, or you are near the $1 million ceiling, it is worth handing to someone who does this every week.

A repatriation CA verifies your tax position, issues Form 146, files Form 145 in the right part, sets the purpose code with your bank, and, where the numbers justify it, gets you a lower-withholding certificate under Section 395 first so less tax is blocked to begin with. That is the difference between your money arriving this month and sitting in a compliance queue.