It's a genuinely common point of confusion: news coverage about Tax Collected at Source (TCS) on foreign remittances is describing the Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS), an RBI framework that governs how resident Indians send money out of India — for education, travel, investments, and similar purposes. NRIs repatriating funds out of India, including property-sale proceeds, are not operating under LRS at all.
Why the distinction holds
FEMA classifies NRIs as non-residents, and LRS is specifically a scheme for residents remitting funds abroad — it simply doesn't apply to an NRI moving their own money out of India. That means the TCS rates and thresholds attached to LRS (which have their own periodic changes NRIs sometimes see referenced in the news and mistakenly assume apply to them) are not the rule governing an NRI's repatriation.
What NRIs are actually subject to instead
NRI repatriation runs through the mechanisms covered elsewhere on this site: freely repatriable NRE funds, the annual RBI ceiling on NRO funds (with Form 15CA/15CB documentation), and — for property sale proceeds specifically — the Section 393(2) TDS withheld by the buyer at the time of sale, plus whatever the seller's actual tax liability turns out to be once a return is filed. None of these are LRS or its TCS regime.
If you've seen a TCS rate or threshold quoted somewhere and are trying to work out whether it affects your own property-sale repatriation as an NRI, the short answer from current guidance is: that rate almost certainly describes LRS for residents, not your situation. The repatriation headroom estimator and Section 393(2) TDS estimator on this site's Investments & Repatriation and Real Estate Capital Gains pages reflect the rules that actually apply to NRIs instead.