This site's general repatriation-limits explainer covers the broad NRO ceiling that applies to rental income, dividends, and other India-sourced income. Property sale proceeds sit inside that same broad framework, but carry enough property-specific wrinkles — how the property was originally funded, a near-mandatory CA certificate, and a direct handoff from the TDS already withheld at sale — that they're worth walking through on their own.
How the property was funded changes the ceiling
If the property was originally purchased using foreign-currency funds remitted through banking channels, or paid for out of an NRE or FCNR account, current guidance describes NRIs as able to repatriate the full sale proceeds — not capped at USD 1 million — subject to documenting that original foreign-currency funding. Several secondary sources describe this full-repatriation route as limited to a set number of residential properties (two is a figure that recurs across multiple sources) before later sales fall under the general ceiling instead; this specific property-count limit is not independently confirmed here against the RBI's Master Direction and should be checked directly before relying on it.
Where the property was instead purchased using rupee funds (an NRO account, or Indian-sourced income generally) or was acquired by inheritance, repatriation of the sale proceeds is capped at USD 1 million per financial year, out of the NRO account. That ceiling is an aggregate one across all your eligible remittances for the year — not a separate USD 1 million allowance per property or per transaction — so it's worth checking what you've already repatriated in the same financial year before assuming the full headroom is available to this sale.
The CA certification step
Before a bank will release an outward remittance, the Income-tax Act requires certification that applicable tax has been accounted for: Form 15CB, a chartered accountant's certificate, paired with Form 15CA, the remitter's own online declaration — the same two-form mechanism covered in more general terms on this site's Form 15CA/15CB explainer. For property sale proceeds specifically, the amounts involved and the fact that this is squarely a taxable capital-account remittance mean this almost always lands in the fuller Part C-plus-15CB bracket rather than the simplified small-remittance path, even when the underlying gain itself turns out to be modest.
How this interacts with the TDS already withheld
By the time you're ready to repatriate, the buyer has typically already withheld TDS under Section 393(2) — generally on the full sale consideration, as covered in this site's Section 393(2) explainer, not just on the gain. The certifying CA's job at the 15CB stage is largely to confirm the tax position looks accounted for, referencing that withheld TDS, rather than to independently relitigate your total liability the way filing an actual return does. If the TDS withheld turns out to be larger than what you'll actually owe once your real cost basis and gain are worked out, that excess isn't released early through the 15CB process — it's recovered only by filing an Indian income tax return and claiming a refund, or, for a future sale, by front-loading the correction with a lower/nil TDS certificate obtained before the sale closes.
The Section 393(2) TDS estimator and Form 13 explainer on the Real Estate Capital Gains page both feed directly into this chain — the withholding figure they estimate is generally what a 15CB certificate will reference. Confirm the current property-count limit on the full-repatriation route, and the exact document checklist, directly with your bank's NRI desk before setting a remittance timeline around either.