Form 15CA and 15CB Are Now Form 145 and 146: Foreign Remittance Rules Under the Income-tax Act, 2025

Search for Form 15CA or Form 15CB anywhere after April 2026 and you may run into articles calling them Form 145 and Form 146 instead. That's not a typo or a scam — the Income-tax Act, 2025, which replaced the 1961 Act from the financial year beginning April 1, 2026, renumbered both forms as part of a much larger renumbering exercise across the entire Act and its rules. The actual question anyone sending money abroad cares about — do I need a chartered accountant's certificate before my bank will release the transfer — barely changed at all.

What These Forms Actually Do

Before an authorised bank processes almost any remittance of money out of India to a non-resident, the law requires the remitter to first file a declaration about the nature of the payment and whether tax needs to be withheld on it. That declaration — filed online on the income tax portal before approaching the bank — was Form 15CA. For larger or more complex taxable remittances, a chartered accountant must additionally certify the correct tax treatment and the rate of withholding applied; that certificate was Form 15CB. Neither form moves money — they're the compliance step a bank checks before it will let the transfer go through.

The Renumbering: What Changed, What Didn't

Effective April 1, 2026, under the Income-tax Act, 2025, and the accompanying Income-tax Rules, 2026, Form 15CA was renamed Form 145 and Form 15CB was renamed Form 146. The rule that governs them moved as well, from the old Rule 37BB to the new Rule 220. For remittances completed on or before March 31, 2026, the paperwork on file still carries the old 15CA/15CB names; it's only remittances from April 1, 2026 onward that use the new form numbers. Beyond the renumbering, the core compliance logic — who needs to file, when a CA certificate is mandatory, and the ₹5 lakh threshold that decides it — has carried over largely unchanged, consistent with how our overview of the Income-tax Act, 2025 changes describes most of this rewrite: a renumbering exercise more than a rewrite of substance.

Do You Actually Need to File One?

Whether a remittance needs the declaration, the CA certificate, both, or neither depends on two questions: is the payment taxable in the recipient's hands at all, and if so, does it cross ₹5 lakh in that financial year for that one payee.

• Payment isn't chargeable to tax in India at all — for example, most tuition fee payments to a foreign university, since the fee itself isn't the remitter's taxable income: only the basic declaration is needed, no CA certificate
• Payment is taxable, but the total remitted to that one payee stays under ₹5 lakh for the year: a simplified declaration is enough, again with no CA certificate
• Payment is taxable, crosses ₹5 lakh, and there's no lower- or nil-deduction order from the assessing officer under Section 195: the full declaration plus a mandatory CA certificate are both required
• Payment is taxable, crosses ₹5 lakh, but the remitter already holds a Section 195(2), 195(3) or 197 order fixing the deduction rate: only the declaration is needed, no separate CA certificate
• A specified list of transaction types — certain travel expenses, import payments, and a handful of other routine current-account remittances — is exempt from both forms entirely, regardless of amount

The ₹5 Lakh Threshold Hasn't Moved

This is the one number most people actually need to remember, and it survived the Act rewrite intact: a chartered accountant's certificate only becomes mandatory once the taxable portion of what you're remitting to a single payee crosses ₹5 lakh in a financial year. A parent paying a full year of overseas tuition well above that amount doesn't automatically trigger a CA certificate requirement, because tuition payment itself typically isn't a taxable payment to begin with. It's remittances that are genuinely taxable in the recipient's hands — interest, royalty, fees for professional or technical services paid to a non-resident, certain gifts — that need to be tested against the ₹5 lakh line.

What a Bank Will Actually Ask to See

Most authorised dealer banks won't release a foreign remittance without the online declaration — and CA certificate, where one is required — already on file, alongside the standard FEMA-mandated Form A2 and, for an individual's own LRS transfer, the usual self-declaration. If the remitter wants a lower withholding rate under a tax treaty rather than the domestic rate, that additionally needs a Tax Residency Certificate from the recipient's home tax authority, plus Form 10F — filed electronically — wherever the TRC doesn't already carry every detail the rules require. That treaty-rate process sits alongside, not in place of, the declaration itself, and is separate again from claiming credit later for tax already paid abroad under our Foreign Tax Credit and Form 67 guide.

The Bottom Line

Form 15CA and Form 15CB exist today as Form 145 and Form 146, a renaming that came with the Income-tax Act, 2025 and took effect April 1, 2026 — but the actual compliance test is exactly what it always was: check whether the payment is taxable at all, then check it against the ₹5 lakh threshold, and only then worry about whether a chartered accountant's certificate is mandatory. Getting the form number wrong on paperwork filed after April 2026 is a cosmetic mistake; skipping the underlying declaration or certificate when one is actually required is the one that can hold up your remittance — or draw a penalty — regardless of what the form is called.