The Budget 2026 NRI Action Checklist: Every Change You Must Actually Respond to This Year, and By When

If you only read one piece on what the 2026 changes mean for you, make it this one. The year stacked up an unusual number of moving parts for NRIs: a new Income-tax Act that took effect on 1 April 2026 and renamed the forms you have used for years, a Budget that quietly fixed the most annoying friction in selling Indian property, a one-time amnesty for foreign assets you forgot to declare, a TCS cut that helps your family, a banking change to who inherits your deposits, and an RBI window that has pushed NRI deposit rates up. Most of it is good news. Some of it has a hard deadline. A couple of items will cost you money or a frozen refund if you ignore them.

The 30-second answer: Eight 2026 changes need an NRI response this year. Property TDS: from 1 October 2026 your buyer uses their PAN, not a TAN, and files Form 141, so brief them early. Forms: from 1 April 2026, Form 10F is now Form 41, Form 67 is Form 44, 15CA and 15CB are Forms 145 and 146, update your paperwork. FAST-DS lets you settle undisclosed foreign assets under Rs 1 crore at 60% instead of 120%, but the six-month window opens only on a notified date, still awaited in June 2026. The new regime is default and Section 87A never helped NRIs. LRS TCS fell to 2% on education, medical and travel. Banks now allow four nominees. The FCNR(B) swap window runs to 30 September 2026.

This guide ties the year together. Each of the eight items below states what changed, what you specifically do about it, and the deadline. Where the answer is still awaiting a government notification, I say so rather than pretend otherwise. The detailed mechanics for each change live in their own pieces, linked throughout, so treat this as the map and the deadlines, not the full manual. If you read the full Budget 2026 round-up for NRIs and the Income-tax Act 2025 impact piece alongside this, you have the complete picture.

The one action table, ranked by what bites first

Most readers want the deadlines in one place, so here it is. The ordering is by urgency and by money at risk, not by how much press each change got.

Change	What you do	Deadline	Detail
FAST-DS amnesty	Decide if you have an undisclosed foreign asset to declare, get the valuation ready	Window opens on a date not yet notified (June 2026); 6 months once it does	FAST-DS guide
FCNR(B) swap window	Lock a 3 to 5 year FCNR(B) deposit while rates are 150 to 200 bps higher	RBI hedging support ends 30 September 2026	FCNR swap guide
Renamed forms	Replace Form 10F, 67, 15CA, 15CB references in your paperwork and tell your CA	In effect since 1 April 2026	IT Act 2025 impact
Property TDS on PAN	Brief any buyer of your property that they use PAN and Form 141, not a TAN	From 1 October 2026	TDS TAN-to-PAN guide
Four-nominee banking	Add up to four nominees to your NRE, NRO and FCNR accounts	Live since 1 November 2025	Four-nominee rule
LRS TCS cut	If family in India funds you, they now pay 2% not 5% on education and travel	From 1 April 2026	LRS TCS cut
New regime default plus 87A	Confirm which regime your ITR uses; do not expect 87A on gains	AY 2026-27 onwards	New regime impact
Section renumbering	Learn the new numbers for residency and treaty relief so you read notices right	Act in force 1 April 2026	IT Act 2025 impact

Now the detail on each, in the order that matters.

The FAST-DS amnesty: a one-time off-ramp, if your foreign assets are under Rs 1 crore

This is the change with the highest stakes and the most confusion, so it goes first. India introduced a one-time disclosure scheme, the Foreign Assets of Small Taxpayers Disclosure Scheme, FAST-DS, alongside the Finance Bill 2026 and a CBDT notification on 1 February 2026. It lets an eligible taxpayer come clean on foreign assets or foreign income that was never reported, and settle at a 60% liability, 30% tax plus a 30% additional charge, with full immunity from penalty and prosecution under both the Black Money (Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets) Act, 2015 and the Income-tax Act. The alternative, if the department finds the asset first, is the Black Money Act's roughly 120% exposure plus the threat of prosecution. The gap between 60% and 120% is the entire point of the scheme.

The eligibility ceiling is the catch: your aggregate undisclosed foreign assets must be up to Rs 1 crore as on 31 March 2026. This is squarely aimed at small and mid taxpayers, not large evaders. And here is the part that makes it an NRI item rather than a purely resident one: a person who is currently an NRI but was a resident in India when the foreign income was earned or the foreign asset was acquired is eligible. That covers a very specific and common profile. The engineer who worked in the US for three years on RSUs while still tax-resident in India and never reported the vesting on an Indian return. The student who kept a dormant UK current account after their degree. The professional on a short overseas deputation who opened a brokerage account and forgot it on the way back.

Put a number on it. Suppose you held unreported foreign assets, say a US brokerage account and some vested RSUs, worth Rs 80,00,000 as on 31 March 2026, acquired during a period when you were resident in India. Under FAST-DS you would pay roughly 60% of Rs 80,00,000, about Rs 48,00,000, and walk away clean. Had the department detected the same Rs 80,00,000 under the Black Money Act, the exposure runs to around 120%, about Rs 96,00,000, plus the real risk of prosecution. The difference is roughly Rs 48,00,000 and your peace of mind. That is not a rounding error.

The honest part: as of June 2026 the commencement date has not been notified. The scheme exists on paper with a six-month window, but the window only starts running when the Central Government notifies the start date, and any declaration filed before that notification is invalid. So the action is not "file now". The action is get ready now: pull together account statements, RSU vesting records and valuations as on 31 March 2026, work out whether your aggregate sits under Rs 1 crore, and have a decision ready so you can move the moment the window opens. Read the full FAST-DS guide for the eligibility carve-outs, because if there is already an ongoing assessment or search against you, the door may be shut.

The FCNR(B) swap window: free yield, but the clock ends 30 September 2026

The most quietly lucrative change of the year has nothing to do with tax. To attract dollar inflows and support the rupee, the RBI is running a swap facility under which it bears the full hedging cost on fresh three to five year FCNR(B) deposits until 30 September 2026. Because banks no longer have to absorb roughly 3% of hedging cost, they can pass it through to you, and the expectation is NRI deposit rates 150 to 200 basis points higher than prevailing levels, with CRR and SLR exemptions on these deposits echoing the 2013 scheme.

Why this matters specifically to an NRI: an FCNR(B) deposit is held in foreign currency, US dollars, pounds or euros, so you carry no rupee depreciation risk, the interest is tax-free in India for a non-resident, and both principal and interest are fully repatriable. A 150 to 200 bps uplift on a currency-hedged, tax-free, fully repatriable deposit is rare. For an NRI sitting on idle dollars who was going to park them somewhere conservative anyway, this is close to a free upgrade.

The lever is timing. The enhanced rates exist because the RBI is subsidising the hedge, and that subsidy ends 30 September 2026. Deposits booked while the window is open lock in the rate for their full tenor, so the action is to compare the FCNR(B) rates your bank is quoting now against your alternatives, and if FCNR(B) fits your plan, book inside the window rather than after it. The mechanics, the currency choice and how this stacks against an NRE deposit are in the FCNR swap window guide.

The renamed forms: your old paperwork now has wrong numbers on it

This is the change most likely to trip you up in a small, irritating way, because nothing about the substance changed, only the names, and the names are on documents you actually use. The Income-tax Act, 2025 came into force on 1 April 2026, and with it the Income-tax Rules, 2026 renumbered the entire form set. Four of those renames are squarely in an NRI's path:

Form 10F became Form 41. This is the self-declaration you file to claim DTAA relief alongside your Tax Residency Certificate. It is now governed by Section 159(8) of the 2025 Act, which replaces the old Sections 90(5) and 90A(5). If you are a UAE resident claiming zero tax on Indian share gains, or anyone claiming a lower treaty rate, this is the form, under its new number.

Form 67 became Form 44. This is the foreign tax credit statement you file to avoid being taxed twice. There is a transition wrinkle worth knowing: Form 67 still applies for FY 2025-26, so returns you file during 2026 for AY 2026-27 use the old Form 67, and Form 44 applies from tax year 2026-27 onwards, filed in 2027. Do not file the new form a year early.

Form 15CA became Form 145, and Form 15CB became Form 146. These are the remittance forms. Form 145 is the remitter's declaration when money is sent to a non-resident; Form 146 is the chartered accountant's certificate, required where the taxable payment or aggregate exceeds Rs 5 lakh in the year. If your NRO funds are being remitted out, your bank and CA will now ask for 145 and 146, not 15CA and 15CB.

There is no number to memorise and act on by a deadline here; the action is hygiene. Update any templates, standing instructions or letters that reference the old form numbers, and tell your CA and bank to do the same, so a remittance or a treaty claim does not stall because someone quoted a form that no longer exists. The full old-to-new mapping is in the Income-tax Act 2025 impact guide.

Property TDS on PAN: the buyer's headache that scared off your buyers is gone

If you have ever tried to sell Indian property as an NRI, you know the problem this fixes. The rule was that the buyer had to deduct TDS under Section 195 and, crucially, had to obtain a TAN, a Tax Deduction Account Number, to do it. Resident buyers buying from a resident never needed a TAN; they just used Form 26QB and their PAN. But the moment the seller was an NRI, the buyer faced a TAN application, a separate compliance track, and quarterly TDS returns. The practical result was ugly: many buyers simply did not want to buy from an NRI, or demanded a discount for the hassle, and deals fell through.

Budget 2026 removed the TAN requirement. From 1 October 2026, a resident individual or HUF buying immovable property from a non-resident uses their PAN, not a TAN, and deposits the TDS through a challan-cum-statement, Form 141, the same way a resident-to-resident purchase already works. Form 141 itself is the unified challan that replaces the old 26QB, 26QC, 26QD and 26QE family under the new rules. The legal hook is Section 397(1)(c) of the 2025 Act exempting these buyers from TAN, with the deduction under Section 393.

Two honest caveats so you do not over-read this. First, the rates did not change. This is purely a procedural simplification; your TDS is still deducted at the existing rates on the sale, and an NRI selling property is still exposed to the over-withholding problem where a cautious buyer deducts on the full sale value rather than the gain. The fix for that remains a lower-deduction certificate, now under Section 395(1) of the 2025 Act, applied for before the sale; once you hold it, the buyer must deduct at the certificate rate. Get one on any large sale; the mechanics are unchanged in substance and covered in the capital gains guide and the dedicated property TDS TAN-to-PAN piece. Second, the change applies to deductions from 1 October 2026, so a sale closing in, say, August 2026 still runs under the old TAN regime.

The action is simple but easy to forget in a negotiation: if you are selling in late 2026 or beyond, tell your buyer up front that they no longer need a TAN, that their PAN and Form 141 are enough. It removes the single biggest objection a buyer has to purchasing from an NRI, and you should use it as a selling point.

Four nominees on your accounts: a five-minute fix that saves your heirs months

Since 1 November 2025, under the Banking Laws (Amendment) Act, 2025, bank account holders in India can nominate up to four people per deposit account, locker or safe-custody item, where the old rule allowed only one. You can set them up two ways: simultaneous, where you specify each nominee's percentage share and the shares total 100%, or successive, where a later nominee becomes operative only on the death of the one ahead of them.

For an NRI this is more useful than it looks, and most people will not bother, which is exactly the mistake. Your Indian deposits, the NRE savings, the NRO account holding rent and dividends, the FCNR term deposits, often sit far from where your family lives, and a single-nominee setup is a known cause of slow, contested claim settlements when something goes wrong. Naming four nominees with clear percentage shares across your NRE, NRO and FCNR accounts means the bank can settle quickly and without your heirs fighting over an account in a country none of them lives in. The official framing for the change was exactly this: faster claim settlement and clarity of succession.

The action takes one short visit or, increasingly, an online update with each bank: add up to four nominees, set the shares, and keep them consistent with your will so the two do not contradict each other. The interaction with succession law and what a nominee actually inherits versus merely receives is covered in the four-nominee rule guide. Do this once and it pays off precisely when you are not around to fix it.

The LRS TCS cut: relief for the people funding you, not for you directly

The Liberalised Remittance Scheme is a resident facility, so an NRI does not remit under LRS. But this change matters to most NRIs through the back door, because the people who use it are often your family. From 1 April 2026, the TCS on LRS remittances for education, medical treatment and overseas tour packages was cut to a flat 2%, down from rates that ran to 5% and, in some travel cases, 20%. The annual Rs 10 lakh threshold is unchanged, so remittances up to that amount in a year still attract no TCS at all. Critically, the 20% rate on remittances for foreign investments and asset purchases above Rs 10 lakh was left untouched, so this is relief for spending on education, health and travel, not for moving capital abroad.

Where this lands for you: if your parents in India are funding part of your overseas education, or remitting to you for a medical reason, their cost just dropped meaningfully. And it becomes directly your problem in the year you return to India and become resident again, when you start using LRS yourself, for instance to fund a child studying abroad. Remember that TCS is not a tax; it is collected at source and credited back against your income tax when you file, so even the 20% on investment remittances is a cash-flow cost, not a permanent one.

Make this concrete. Take a parent in India remitting Rs 25,00,000 in a year toward your master's degree. The first Rs 10 lakh is TCS-free. On the remaining Rs 15,00,000, the old 5% education rate would have collected Rs 75,000 up front; the new 2% rate collects Rs 30,000, a difference of Rs 45,000 in cash that no longer sits locked with the government until the return is filed. The full breakdown by remittance purpose is in the LRS TCS cut guide.

The new regime is default, and the 87A rebate was never yours anyway

Two linked points, because together they kill a piece of bad advice NRIs often hear from resident friends. First, the new tax regime under Section 115BAC is the default for AY 2026-27. If you want the old regime, with its deductions, you must actively opt in, and as an NRI with limited Indian deductions the new regime is usually where you end up regardless. Read the new regime impact piece for when opting out still pays.

Second, the Section 87A rebate. For residents, the new regime now gives a rebate that zeroes out tax on taxable income up to Rs 12 lakh. From FY 2025-26 a sharp limitation took effect: the rebate does not apply to income taxed at special rates, such as short-term capital gains under Section 111A or long-term gains under Section 112A. So a resident earning under Rs 12 lakh who books a short-term equity gain now pays the full 20% on that gain with no rebate against it, a trap that genuinely caught people in the AY 2026-27 filing season.

For an NRI the practical position is unchanged, because the 87A rebate has never been available to non-residents at all. But the reason it appears on this checklist is the advice it kills. NRIs are routinely told by family in India that "small capital gains are tax-free if your total income is low", which leans on the 87A rebate and the basic exemption. Neither helps you: you never had the rebate, and as covered in the capital gains guide, you also cannot set the basic exemption against your special-rate gains. Your equity LTCG is taxed from the first rupee above the Rs 1.25 lakh annual exemption. Plan your realisations on that basis and ignore the resident's rule of thumb.

Section renumbering: so you can read a notice without panicking

The last item is not an action so much as literacy, but it prevents a specific kind of mistake. The Income-tax Act, 2025 collapsed the old 819-section Act into a renumbered 536-section structure, and the sections you care about moved. The substance of residency did not change, the 182-day and 60-plus-365-day tests are intact, but the numbering did. The deemed-residency provision for high-income NRIs that was Section 6(1A) in the 1961 Act is now Section 6(7) in the 2025 Act for tax years from 1 April 2026. Treaty relief that lived in Sections 90 and 90A now runs through Section 159. The point is that if an assessment notice or a CA quotes "Section 6(7)" or "Section 159", you should recognise these as the familiar residency and DTAA provisions under new numbers, not assume some new rule has appeared. The residency rules guide and the IT Act 2025 impact piece carry the mappings for the sections an NRI meets most.

Edge cases

You are mid-sale on property in 2026. The PAN-not-TAN change applies to deductions made from 1 October 2026. A deal where the buyer deducts TDS in, say, July or August 2026 still runs on the old TAN regime, so do not promise a buyer the simplified route for a closing that lands before October.

You are unsure whether FAST-DS even covers you. The clean test is two-part: were you a resident when the foreign asset was acquired or the income earned, and is your aggregate undisclosed foreign asset under Rs 1 crore as on 31 March 2026. If yes to both and there is no ongoing assessment against you, you are the target taxpayer. If you were already a non-resident when you acquired the asset and it was genuinely outside India's tax net, you may have nothing to disclose at all; that is a question for your CA, not a blanket assumption.

You hold Form 67 work in progress for last year's return. Use Form 67 for the AY 2026-27 return you file in 2026; only switch to Form 44 for tax year 2026-27, filed in 2027. Filing the new form a year early is a needless rejection risk.

You are returning to India this year. Several of these flip from "not my problem" to "directly my problem" on the day you become resident again, especially LRS TCS once you start remitting and, more seriously, the foreign-asset reporting that makes FAST-DS relevant. The year of return is the year to get this right, and it interacts with RNOR status; the ITR filing guide covers the transition.

The closing read

The honest read is that 2026 was, on balance, a good year for NRIs, but it rewards the ones who act and quietly penalises the ones who drift. Two of these changes are pure upside you should grab before a deadline: book an FCNR(B) deposit before 30 September 2026 while the RBI is subsidising your yield, and use the PAN-not-TAN property change from 1 October 2026 as a selling point that removes your buyer's biggest objection. One is a genuine off-ramp with real money attached but no start date yet: if you have an undisclosed foreign asset under Rs 1 crore, get your valuations and statements ready now so you can file the moment the FAST-DS window opens, because 60% beats 120% by a margin that pays for a lot of CA time. The rest is hygiene that costs you only if you ignore it: update your paperwork for the renamed forms, add four nominees to your Indian accounts in an afternoon, and stop believing the resident's rule of thumb that small gains are tax-free, because the 87A rebate was never yours and the new regime narrowed it for residents too. If your situation is a large foreign-asset disclosure or a high-value property sale, that is the point to pay a chartered accountant, not to rely on a checklist, this one included. The deadlines are the part you cannot delegate; the rest you can.

Related guides

• Budget 2026: what changed for NRIs
• Income-tax Act 2025: the NRI impact
• Property sale TDS: TAN to PAN in 2026
• FAST-DS foreign asset amnesty 2026
• TCS on LRS cut in 2026
• The bank four-nominee rule, 2025
• RBI FCNR swap window 2026
• The new tax regime default and its NRI impact
• ITR filing for NRIs: AY 2026-27
• Capital gains tax for NRIs on shares and mutual funds
• All News guides
• All Taxation guides
• All Banking guides

This guide is educational and general in nature. It is not individual tax or financial advice. Several changes described here, including the FAST-DS commencement date, depend on government notifications that were still awaited as of June 2026, and the section and form numbers reflect the Income-tax Act, 2025 and Income-tax Rules, 2026. Confirm your specific position, deadlines and eligibility with a qualified chartered accountant before you act, particularly on a foreign-asset disclosure or a property sale.