GST on freelance and consulting income from India when you live abroad

GST is a tax on a supply, and for services the question is where the recipient sits — not where you sit. Sort your clients: who is outside India, who is inside.

Supplying services to a client outside India, paid in foreign currency, is generally treated as an export of services — outside the domestic GST burden. Supplying services to a recipient in India can fall within India's GST net, where registration and charging questions arise.

Place-of-supply has specific rules and exceptions, and the nature of the service matters. A CA confirms the position against your actual contracts before anyone registers or files anything.

When your work qualifies as an export of services, GST law treats it as a zero-rated supply under the IGST Act. Zero-rated is not the same as exempt: the supply is taxable at a zero rate, letting the exporter avoid the tax cost while staying inside the system.

In practice this is done by filing a Letter of Undertaking (LUT) so you can export without paying IGST up front. The alternative — pay IGST and claim it back as a refund — ties up cash, making the LUT route cleaner for a regular service exporter. It requires registration and filing the undertaking correctly; it is not automatic.

The conditions matter: the supplier and recipient must be distinct, the place of supply must be outside India, and payment generally has to be received in convertible foreign exchange. A CA checks those conditions against your contracts before you rely on zero-rating.

If what you sell is delivered over the internet with little or no human intervention — platform access, downloadable templates, an automated tool, hosted software — it can fall under OIDAR (online information and database access or retrieval services). OIDAR has its own place-of-supply and registration treatment because the supplier and user can sit in different countries while the service crosses borders invisibly.

For an overseas supplier providing such services to recipients in India, whether a registration obligation arises depends on who the Indian recipients are and how the service is delivered.

If your work is straightforward professional advisory billed to named clients, OIDAR usually isn't your world. If you run a paid app, subscription tool or self-serve digital product with Indian users, raise it specifically — automated digital products and live human-delivered advisory are not treated the same way.

Separate from GST is what happens to the income itself. Fees for services connected with India are India-source income, and as an NRI you are taxable in India on income arising here — so even where GST is a non-issue, the income-tax question can still apply.

Fees from an Indian client are typically received into an NRO account, and the payer may deduct TDS. That TDS is not a final cost — it is credited against your actual tax, and where a DTAA applies between India and your country of residence, it can reduce the rate or shift where the income is finally taxed. The practical work is matching what was deducted to what is due, claiming any treaty benefit, and filing so nothing is taxed twice.

The GST treatment governs whether you charge or register; the income-tax treatment governs what you owe and what comes back.

Karthik lives in Dubai and freelances as a brand designer — two clients in the UAE and Europe, one startup in Bengaluru. The Bengaluru client has asked for a GST number.

His UAE and European work is supplied to recipients outside India, paid in foreign currency — pointing to export of services, zero-rated, run under a LUT so no IGST is paid up front. The Bengaluru engagement is a supply to a recipient in India, so that is the piece where GST registration and charging need to be assessed.

On the income side, the Bengaluru fees are India-source. They go into Karthik's NRO account; the client may deduct TDS. Because India and the UAE have a tax treaty, his CA checks how the income is finally taxed and whether any TDS is refundable. The outcome: foreign work kept outside India's GST burden, the Indian engagement handled correctly, income reported once in the right place.

A non-resident who makes a taxable supply inside India but has no fixed place of business here is a Non-Resident Taxable Person (NRTP) and registers on Form GST REG-09 — not the REG-10 used for OIDAR suppliers; the two forms serve different cases.

Two key points. First, no turnover threshold applies — the usual Rs.20 lakh / Rs.10 lakh exemption does not protect an NRTP, so even a small one-off supply requires registration (Section 24). Second, the registration is temporary: up to 90 days, extendable by up to 90 more. You estimate your tax for the period and deposit it in advance at registration; it sits in your electronic cash ledger.

This is for someone coming to India for a trade fair, on-site project, or short event — not a freelancer abroad billing Indian clients. Apply at least five days before you start. A CA confirms which side of the line you are on.

Where your supply falls under OIDAR — an app, a SaaS tool, hosted content delivered automatically — and your Indian users are ordinary consumers rather than GST-registered businesses, registration sits with you as the overseas supplier. An unregistered Indian consumer is a non-taxable online recipient (NTOR), and an overseas OIDAR supplier serving such recipients must register regardless of any threshold (Section 24).

The route is simplified: register on Form GST REG-10, charge and pay IGST at 18% on supplies to Indian consumers, and file a monthly return (GSTR-5A) by the 20th of the next month. No Indian place of business is needed.

If your Indian users are GST-registered businesses, they account for the tax themselves — so confirm who your users are before assuming you must register. A CA confirms whether your product is OIDAR at all and, if so, sets up the REG-10 registration and GSTR-5A filing.

Renting property in India splits sharply by use. Letting a home for residence is exempt from GST. Renting commercial space — a shop, an office, a warehouse — is a taxable supply at 18%.

The trigger is turnover. Once taxable receipts — commercial rent plus any other taxable supplies — cross the registration threshold (Rs.20 lakh, or Rs.10 lakh in special-category states), you must register and charge 18% GST on the commercial rent.

One reverse-charge wrinkle: if your tenant is a GST-registered business and you, the landlord, are not registered, the tenant accounts for the GST under reverse charge — the obligation shifts rather than disappears. A CA confirms whether you need to register, who accounts for the tax, and gets the position right before the first invoice.