Where you sit is the test, not where you're paid
The single idea that resolves most of the confusion is this: Indian tax follows where the work is physically performed, not where the salary is paid or which account it lands in. When you sit in India and do your job for a foreign employer, you are rendering services in India — and salary for services rendered in India is deemed to arise in India (Section 9(1)(ii)). That the money is paid abroad, in a foreign currency, into a foreign account, makes no difference to that conclusion.
So the foreign payslip is a red herring. A developer in Pune coding for a London company, paid in pounds into a UK account, has Indian-source salary for those workdays just as surely as if a Mumbai employer had paid it. The income is Indian because the keyboard was in India.
This matters even before your residential status changes, because an NRI is taxed on income that accrues, arises or is deemed to arise in India (Section 5) regardless of residential status. So salary for work done on Indian soil is within India's net from the first such day — residency then decides how much else comes in, not whether this part does.
Your days in India quietly change your status
The second thing happening while you work from India is that your residential status is shifting under your feet, on a day-count you may not be tracking. Section 6 decides it on physical presence, and the more of the year you spend in India, the more likely you tip from non-resident to resident.
| Test | When it makes you resident |
|---|---|
| 182 days | In India 182 days or more in the financial year |
| 60 + 365 | In India 60 days or more this year and 365+ over the four preceding years |
| 120 days | Visiting Indian citizen / PIO with Indian income over ₹15 lakh, in India 120 days or more |
The 182-day test is the headline, but the 60-days-plus-365-days test catches people who split their time and assume short stints are safe. The 120-day variant applies specifically to an Indian citizen or person of Indian origin who is on a visit to India and has Indian income above ₹15 lakh — relevant once your India-worked salary itself pushes your Indian income past that line.
Why it matters: while you're non-resident, only your Indian-source income (including the India-worked salary) is taxable here. Once you become a resident, India can tax your worldwide income — so the rest of that foreign salary, for work done outside India, and your other foreign income come into the net too. The day-count is the switch between those two worlds.
The payroll and PE wrinkles your employer may not have thought about
Working from India for a foreign employer raises questions that sit slightly beyond your own return, and it helps to know they exist even though some are the employer's to solve.
The foreign employer usually has no Indian payroll, so no Indian tax is deducted at source on your salary — which means the tax doesn't disappear, it lands on you to pay directly through advance tax and your return. Expecting a TDS-cleared payslip and finding none is a common shock; the right response is to budget for advance-tax instalments rather than a year-end surprise.
There is also a question for the employer about whether your sustained presence and work in India could create a taxable presence for the company itself — a permanent establishment. Whether it does depends on what you do, how senior you are, whether you conclude contracts, and the relevant treaty, and it is genuinely the company's risk to assess with its own advisers, not something you resolve on your personal return. But raising it early matters, because some employers prefer to formalise the arrangement, route you through an employer-of-record, or set expectations on how long the remote-from-India stint can run.
For you, the personal-tax picture is cleaner: the India-worked salary is taxable here, you pay it via advance tax and your return, and where the same income was also taxed abroad you claim relief. The PE and payroll questions are the employer's to manage; your job is to flag them and get your own filing right.
A worked example: Priya's six months coding from Pune
Priya is employed by a Berlin software company and, in the 2026-27 financial year, decides to work remotely from her family home in Pune for about seven months while keeping her German salary, paid in euros into her German account. She assumes that because the money never enters India, India has nothing to do with it.
The day-count says she becomes a resident: seven months puts her well past 182 days in India for 2026-27. More immediately, the salary for the days she worked from Pune is for services rendered in India and is Indian income (Section 9(1)(ii)) — taxable here even though Germany paid it into a German account. So a large slice of her year's salary, the part earned at her Pune desk, is on the Indian table; and because the long stay also makes her resident, India can look at her worldwide income for the year too. There is no Indian TDS on a German payslip, so she pays this through advance tax and her Indian return rather than waiting for tax to be deducted for her.
Germany taxed some of that salary as well. Because the same income is being taxed in both places, she claims relief for the German tax against her Indian liability so it isn't taxed twice — and that relief, plus the residential-status and foreign-income reporting, is what her Indian return has to capture. The lesson for Priya is the planning one: had she watched the calendar and kept her India workdays lower, both her residency and the size of the India-worked salary would have looked very different. The days are the lever — which is exactly what you plan before the stint, not after.