Ejendomsvaerdiskat on the house you kept in India

Ejendomsskatteloven 3 stk. 2 puts a dwelling situated abroad inside the charge, and 2 stk. 2 puts it on you personally if you are fully liable to Danish tax. There is one condition, in 2 stk. 3: the property has to be at your disposal as a dwelling. That is why the empty flat you keep for visits is the expensive one.

India is doing the opposite. Under Section 23(2) the annual value of a house you occupy yourself, or cannot occupy for any reason, is nil, and Section 23(4) caps that at two houses. So the flat bears no Indian income tax and an annual Danish one, which is the reverse of what most people brace for.

One carve-out ends the charge outright, and it is worth checking before anything else. The second sentence of 2 stk. 2 says that where you are resident of the other state under a double tax treaty, Danish ejendomsvaerdiskat covers only property situated in Denmark. So if the tie-breaker in the treaty puts you in India rather than Denmark, the Indian flat drops out completely. That is a residence question, not a property question, and it is settled long before any valuation work starts.

Nobody sends you this figure. Ejendomsskatteloven 14 makes it yours to establish, in a fixed order.

The first two routes are closed to an Indian flat. Vurderingsstyrelsen has approved exactly one foreign public assessment, the Swedish valuations of 2001 and 2002 for properties bought before 2002, so no Indian valuation can be a 14 stk. 1 assessment. And the approved price index list runs to a dozen countries, none of them India, so nr. 1 is out too. Vurderingsstyrelsen's own instruction for a country not on the list is to use the Danish sommerhusindeks.

So the default answer is nr. 2: what you actually paid for the flat, indexed forward on a Danish index. Which makes one Indian document carry the whole calculation, the sale deed showing the real consideration and the date you took the property over.

One date detail saves rework. Skattestyrelsen ties the figure to the Danish valuation cycle, so income years 2025 and 2026 both run on the flat's value at 1 January 2024. The value does not move between them, though the flat still has to be reported.

The three Indian numbers a CA normally reaches for do nothing here, because none of them is what you paid:

- the circle rate, ready reckoner or guideline value, a stamp duty floor set by the state - the stamp duty value used for Section 50C, the same figure for a different tax - the municipal assessment, a rateable figure for levying local property tax

A Danish home enters the base at 80% of its assessed value. Your Indian flat, on the ordinary route, enters at 100%.

That reduction, the forsigtighedsprincip, is written into ejendomsskatteloven 13 stk. 2 for Danish property. For foreign property it attaches to some routes and not others. It applies where the value comes from an approved foreign public assessment (14 stk. 1), or from other documentation (14 stk. 2 nr. 3), or from an estimate (14 stk. 2 nr. 4). It does not apply to the index routes in nr. 1 and nr. 2, and Den juridiske vejledning gives the reason plainly: an indexed figure is fixed by an objective norm, so it involves no exercise of judgment for the reduction to soften.

Since an Indian flat lands on nr. 2 by default, it carries no reduction. On the same underlying value a Danish home is taxed on four fifths of it and your Pune flat on all of it.

That is what makes nr. 3 worth a look. Unlike nr. 2 and nr. 4 it carries no fallback wording: where other documentation gives a more accurate figure than the indexed one, that documentation shall be used, and the value then enters at 80%. So it can override the index route rather than merely fill a gap behind it.

Two things stop that being free money. It is a more-accurate test rather than a choice, so the documentation has to be shown to beat the index, and neither the statute nor the guidance says what qualifies. And it runs both ways: the preparatory works say Skatteforvaltningen may equally rely on better documentation if it holds any. Where a Danish index has lagged a hot Indian market, the indexed figure is already the lower number and 80% of today's value is worse. So this is arithmetic to do before commissioning anything, not after.

Ejendomsskatteloven 22 stk. 1 sets two rates: 5.1 promille of the base up to a threshold, and 14 promille above it. The threshold moves on a two-yearly cycle under 22 stk. 2, and it went down, not up, at its first adjustment. Those two were stk. 2 and stk. 3 until lov nr. 562 of 27 May 2025 repealed the old stk. 1 and shifted the rest up, so older write-ups cite the wrong numbers.

There is also a rabat, and one Indian document decides whether you get it. Ejendomsskatteloven 35 and 36 give a reduction to owners who took the property over on or before 31 December 2023 and were liable for 2024, and foreign property is expressly inside it. Being let in 2024 does not cost you it either: 37 stk. 2 computes the difference as if you had been charged. The amount is then frozen in nominal terms (40 stk. 5) and it lapses on a change of owner (43). One exception is worth knowing, because this is a transfer NRIs actually make: 43 stk. 4 and stk. 5 carry the rabat over to a spouse, including a surviving spouse in uskiftet bo and a spouse taking the property on divorce. Any other name on the deed and it goes.

The test is the take-over date recorded in the sale agreement or the registered deed, not the date of registration and not the date you paid the builder. On a flat bought off-plan those can be years apart, and the difference decides whether the rabat exists at all.

Letting removes the Danish charge in one case only. Ejendomsskatteloven 3 stk. 3 takes a property let commercially outside the charge entirely, and Den juridiske vejledning explains why: a commercial letting means you no longer have the property at your disposal to live in. The bar is an effective surrender of your own use, not a tenancy agreement you could end when you visit.

Short of that, the reductions are narrower than people expect.

That third row is the one that catches people. Choosing the simple bundfradrag method on the Danish rental income keeps the property value tax running at full rate for the whole year.

And the Danish saving buys an Indian cost. Once the flat is let, India taxes the rent as house property income after the 30% standard deduction, your tenant has to deduct tax under Section 195 (Section 393(2) from FY 2026-27) on the gross rent because you are a non-resident, and remitting the rent out needs Form 15CA (Form 145 from FY 2026-27), with a CA's Form 15CB (Form 146) behind it once the year's remittances pass Rs 5,00,000, unless you already hold an assessing officer's certificate under Section 195(2) or Section 395, formerly Section 197. Letting periods also cut into the rabat while they run. So the empty flat and the let flat both have a bill attached, in different countries, and which is larger is a computation on your own numbers.

Article 22 of the India-Denmark treaty is the capital article, and Skattestyrelsen's own walkthrough says it has practical significance only for ejendomsvaerdiskat, which it treats as a partial wealth tax, because Denmark has no general wealth taxation. So the treaty does reach this charge. It just has nothing to give you.

The treaty lists an Indian tax that no longer exists and offers a credit for an amount that is always nil. Nothing in it stops Denmark charging you.

Indian municipal property tax does not fill the gap through the treaty either. It is levied by a municipal corporation, not by India as a Contracting State, and this treaty's taxes-covered article carries no wording extending it to political subdivisions or local authorities. If that tax is going to reduce anything, it has to do it through Danish domestic law.

Ejendomsskatteloven 27 credits foreign tax against ejendomsvaerdiskat on the same property. Three features matter, and one of them is unexpectedly generous.

1. The foreign tax does not have to resemble ejendomsvaerdiskat. Den juridiske vejledning says relief is available even where the foreign tax is not of the same kind. 2. It does have to be computed by reference to the value of the property. That is the statutory test. 3. Land taxes, registration duty and transaction charges are expressly excluded, relief is given property by property, it cannot exceed the Danish tax on that property, and you have to be able to document the payment.

So whether your Indian municipal property tax qualifies turns on how your city computes it, and Indian cities do not agree.

Read the basis off your own demand rather than off a guide. Karnataka and Telangana have both had value-based reforms in play in recent years, and what governs is what your corporation actually assessed you on.

Be straight about the limits of all this. No Danish source addresses Indian municipal tax, Skattestyrelsen's published examples are Swedish, Spanish and French, and an Indian levy on land and building together may be characterised as a land tax, which 27 excludes outright. There is a further wrinkle: Den juridiske vejledning presents 27 mainly as the route for property in a state Denmark has no wealth-tax treaty with, and India is a treaty state, so even the domestic route is not clean. This is a binding-ruling question in Denmark, not a look-it-up question, and nobody should promise you the credit.

What we can do from the Indian side is produce the demand and the receipt, and show on the face of them which basis your corporation used. Skattestyrelsen wants the paid foreign property tax reported in rubrik 254, with documentation kept.

Grundskyld, the Danish land tax, is not in play at all. Ejendomsskatteloven 4 stk. 1 charges it only on property situated in Denmark.

Priya pays Danish tax every year on a Pune flat that India charges no income tax on at all, and she pays it on a quarter more base than a Dane with an identical home.

Her flat was bought in 2016 and stands empty for visits. India charges nil annual value on it under Section 23(2). Say the purchase price indexed forward on the Danish index comes to DKK 1,200,000.

DKK 1,224 a year sits on the difference, and it repeats for as long as she owns the flat. Both figures are before any rabat. Taking the flat over in 2016 gets her past the date test, but the rabat itself is only the amount by which the new rules cost her more than the old ones did in 2024, and where that difference is not positive it is set to zero. On a two-decade hold that is real money, which is why the arithmetic gets done before anyone commissions a report, not after.

Whether the Indian municipal tax she pays does anything about that turns on which basis her corporation used to raise the demand, which is the first thing to read off the receipt.