NRI taxation in India isn't a simple variation of regular taxation. It's a different rulebook, built on a different core principle, and trying to apply resident rules to an NRI situation gets things wrong in ways that are easy to miss and expensive to discover late.
Money in your NRE or FCNR accounts is fully and freely repatriable, no cap, because it was foreign-sourced money that never entered India's tax net. Money in your NRO account is capped at USD 1 million per financial year, combined across everything you repatriate from it, rent, interest, dividends, sale proceeds, because that account holds India-sourced income that India has a genuine tax claim on.
The USD 250,000 LRS limit governs residents sending their own worldwide income out of India. The USD 1 million NRO facility governs NRIs sending their own India-sourced money out of India, to their country of residence abroad. These are separate schemes, for separate people, solving separate problems.
Form 15CA is a self-declaration, filed online by whoever is sending the money, confirming to the Income Tax Department that the applicable tax on this remittance has been handled.
Form 15CB is a certificate from a Chartered Accountant, verifying the substance behind that declaration: whether the remittance is taxable at all, what rate applies, and under which section of the Income Tax Act or which DTAA provision.
Together, the two forms exist for one purpose, to make sure no India-sourced income leaves the country without its tax position having been properly checked first.
For smaller remittances, cumulatively up to roughly ₹5 lakh in a financial year, a simpler version of Form 15CA suffices, without needing a CA certificate. Beyond that threshold, both the CA certificate and the fuller version of the form are generally required, and banks won't process the transfer without them.
If a property was originally purchased using money from your NRE or FCNR account, rather than from India-sourced funds, the original investment amount can be repatriated outside the USD 1 million NRO cap entirely.
Only the capital gain on the sale, the profit above what you originally paid, falls under that limit. This distinction matters, because it can mean a much larger sum moves freely than the headline NRO cap would suggest, provided you can trace the original purchase back to genuinely foreign-sourced funds.
If your circumstances genuinely require repatriating beyond the USD 1 million NRO limit in a single year, splitting the amount across two financial years is the straightforward option. Where that isn't practical, it's possible to apply to the RBI, through your bank, for special permission to exceed the limit, generally reserved for specific situations like medical emergencies or significant one-off needs. This route is slower, commonly taking two to three months, and approval isn't guaranteed, so it's a fallback rather than something to plan around.
With the full mechanical picture now in place, the final chapter gathers the mistakes NRIs make most often across everything this journey has covered.
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