If you sold Indian property as an NRI and the buyer withheld Section 393(2) TDS on the full sale consideration rather than the gain, you may be sitting on a refund — but only if you go and claim it. Unlike a Form 13 (recently renumbered Form 128) certificate, which corrects the withholding amount before the sale closes, this is the after-the-fact route: for sellers who either didn't apply for that certificate in time, or whose actual tax liability still came in below what was withheld even with one in place.
The mechanism is simple in principle and slower in practice: you file an Indian income tax return for the relevant financial year, report the sale and your actual capital gain, and let the return itself claim back the difference between TDS already paid and tax actually owed. Filing is required even if your total Indian income for the year is below the normal taxable threshold — a refund only gets processed if a return is filed.
The paperwork that has to line up
Two documents do the real work here. Form 26AS (and the newer Annual Information Statement, AIS) is the tax department's own ledger of TDS credited against your PAN — it's what the return is checked against, so if the buyer's TDS filing (Form 27Q, the non-resident-specific TDS return, not the resident-property Form 26QB) hasn't posted correctly, your claimed credit won't match and the refund stalls. Form 16A is the TDS certificate the buyer is required to issue you as proof of what was deducted; keep it, but treat Form 26AS/AIS as the authoritative record if the two ever disagree.
This is also where buyer cooperation matters more than sellers often expect: a buyer who deducted TDS under Section 393(2) needs their own Tax Deduction Account Number (TAN) and has to file Form 27Q correctly for your credit to show up. A sale where the buyer is disorganized about this step is a common, and frustrating, source of refund delay that has nothing to do with your own return.
How long it actually takes
For a straightforward return, refunds are commonly cited as arriving within roughly four to eight weeks of e-verification — but that figure is for routine cases, and property-sale returns reporting capital gains for an NRI are described by multiple sources as more likely to get pulled into scrutiny than an ordinary salary return, which can stretch the timeline to several months. Treat any specific week-count as a rough planning figure, not a guarantee, and confirm current processing patterns before relying on it for cash-flow planning around, say, a subsequent purchase abroad.
One thing works in your favor while you wait: Section 244A entitles you to interest on a delayed refund, commonly cited at 0.5% per month (or part of a month) from the start of the assessment year until the refund is issued — small compensation, but it does mean the wait isn't entirely uncompensated.
This route and the Form 13/128 certificate aren't competitors so much as a before/after pair: the certificate is the tool for preventing over-withholding at the point of sale, and the refund-via-return is the fallback for whatever gap remains — whether because the certificate wasn't pursued, arrived too late, or simply didn't close the gap completely. Most NRI sellers with a meaningfully appreciated property end up using some combination of both.