The India-Singapore DTAA for NRIs: Treaty Rates, the Shares Exemption That Ended, and How to Claim Relief

A reader in Singapore wrote to me last year convinced he owed nothing in India on a Rs 38 lakh gain from selling Infosys shares, because someone had told him the India-Singapore treaty exempts share gains. He had bought those shares in 2021. The exemption he was relying on died on 1 April 2017, and he owed Indian tax in full. In the same portfolio he held Rs 22 lakh of equity mutual funds, and on those he owed India nothing, for a reason that has nothing to do with shares and everything to do with the fact that an Indian mutual fund is a trust. He had the two exactly backwards.

The 30-second answer: For a Singapore-resident NRI, the India-Singapore treaty caps NRO interest at 15% (10% on bank-loan interest) under Article 11 and dividends at 15% under Article 10, with no surcharge or cess on the treaty rate, against domestic TDS of 30% and 20% respectively. The famous shares capital gains exemption ended on 1 April 2017: shares of an Indian company acquired on or after that date are fully taxable in India under Article 13(4A). Only pre-2017 shares stay grandfathered and taxable only in Singapore, and that relief is gated by a limitation-of-benefits (LOB) clause. Mutual fund units are not shares, so their gains fall under the residual Article 13(5) and remain taxable only in Singapore. Salary for work done in Singapore is taxable only in Singapore under Article 15. To claim any of this you need a TRC from IRAS and an electronically filed Form 10F.

This guide assumes you already know how DTAA relief works in principle, the difference between the exemption and credit methods, and what a TRC is for; if you want that grounding, start with DTAA relief for NRIs and the mechanics in TRC and Form 10F. What follows is specific to the India-Singapore treaty and to your situation as someone tax-resident in Singapore: the exact article numbers, the rates that bind, the 2017 change that catches people, the LOB trap, and the order of operations to actually get the lower rate. When you are done here, the natural next step is the filing itself, covered in the ITR filing guide for AY 2026-27.

Why Singapore is a structurally good treaty, until it suddenly is not

The India-Singapore Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement, signed in 1994 and amended three times since, is one of the more generous treaties India runs, because Singapore taxes its residents only on a territorial basis and levies no personal capital gains tax at all. That asymmetry is the whole game. When the treaty assigns a taxing right to Singapore, the effective tax on that income is frequently zero, not because the treaty grants an exemption but because Singapore simply does not tax it. India gives up the income, Singapore declines to pick it up, and the money falls through the gap legally.

That is exactly why India spent years closing the gap. The Third Protocol, signed in December 2016 and effective from 1 April 2017, was the single most important change to this treaty in a generation, and it is the source of most of the confusion I see. Before it, an entire category of capital gains, the gains on Indian shares, fell through to Singapore and were taxed nowhere. After it, that route is shut for new acquisitions. The treaty is still good. It is just good in different places than it used to be, and a reader operating on pre-2017 advice will get the most expensive items wrong.

The honest framing of this treaty in 2026 is that the easy wins are on the income side, interest and dividends, where the rates are clean and the relief is reliable, and the salary side, where Singapore work is taxed only in Singapore. The capital gains side is now a minefield, where shares lose and mutual fund units win, and where the difference turns on a technicality about corporate form that most NRIs have never heard of.

NRO interest: 15% instead of 30%, and the surcharge disappears

Start with the income that touches almost every NRI in Singapore: interest on an NRO account, an NRO fixed deposit, or a loan you have given in India. Interest on an NRE or FCNR deposit is already exempt from Indian tax under domestic law, so the treaty does nothing for it; the treaty matters only for NRO and other taxable interest. If you are fuzzy on which account is which, the NRE, NRO and FCNR guide sorts it out.

Domestic law tells your Indian bank to deduct TDS on NRO interest at 30%, plus surcharge if your income is high enough and a 4% health and education cess on top, so the real bite ranges from roughly 31.2% to 35.88%. That is the rate you pay if you do nothing. Article 11 of the India-Singapore treaty caps it at 15% of the gross interest in the ordinary case, and at 10% where the interest is paid on a loan granted by a bank or an approved financial institution carrying on bona fide banking business. For an NRI living off NRO deposit interest, the binding number is 15%.

Two features of the treaty rate matter and are routinely missed. First, when the treaty rate applies, no surcharge and no cess are added on top. The 15% in Article 11 is the all-in rate. Domestic surcharge and cess attach to the domestic rate, not to a treaty rate, so a Singapore resident claiming the treaty pays a flat 15%, while one who claims nothing can pay close to 36%. Second, the rate is applied at source by the bank only if you have handed over the documents before the interest is credited. Miss that window and the bank deducts 30%, and the only way back to 15% is to file an Indian return and claim a refund of the excess, which means waiting months for your own money.

Put real numbers on it. Suppose Priya, tax-resident in Singapore, holds an NRO fixed deposit paying Rs 8,00,000 of interest in the financial year. If she files nothing with her bank, the bank deducts TDS at 30% plus 4% cess, Rs 2,49,600, and if her income crosses Rs 50 lakh a surcharge pushes it higher still. With a valid IRAS TRC and an e-filed Form 10F lodged with the bank before each interest credit, the bank instead deducts 15% flat, Rs 1,20,000, with no cess. That is Rs 1,29,600 less withheld, on a single deposit, purely from paperwork she could complete in an afternoon and a two-week wait for the certificate.

Here is the counterfactual that catches careful people out. Say Priya does the paperwork but lodges it with the bank a week after the first quarterly interest credit. The bank, having already deducted 30% on that first credit, cannot retrospectively reverse it; it can only apply 15% to future credits. So on the first Rs 2,00,000 of interest she has had Rs 62,400 withheld instead of Rs 30,000, and that Rs 32,400 difference is locked up until she files her Indian return for the year and claims it back. The treaty rate is only as good as the timing of your documents. Lodge them before the financial year's first interest date, not after.

Dividends: 15% under Article 10, but watch what your registrar actually does

Since the 2020 shift that moved dividend taxation back into shareholders' hands, dividends from Indian companies are taxable income for an NRI, and the company's registrar deducts TDS under Section 195 at 20% plus surcharge and cess, an effective rate that can reach about 23.3% for an individual non-resident. Article 10 of the India-Singapore treaty caps the rate at 15% for an individual shareholder (the lower 10% band applies only to a company that holds at least 25% of the paying company, which is not the retail NRI's situation). Again, the treaty 15% carries no surcharge or cess.

The practical problem with dividends is not the rate, it is the registrar. Indian companies use registrars and transfer agents (KFin Technologies, Link Intime, and others) to process dividends, and each runs its own pre-dividend documentation drive, usually with a hard cut-off date a few weeks before the record date. To get 15% rather than 20%-plus on a given dividend, your TRC, your e-filed Form 10F, and a beneficial-ownership self-declaration (often the registrar's own Annexure for individual non-residents) must reach that registrar before its cut-off. Miss one company's cut-off and that one dividend is taxed at the full rate while the others go through at 15%. There is no single submission that covers your whole portfolio; you do this company by company, every year.

Consider Arjun in Singapore, holding shares across five Indian companies that together pay Rs 5,00,000 in dividends in the year. If he lets every registrar deduct the domestic rate, he loses roughly Rs 1,16,480 to TDS at 23.296%. If he gets his TRC and Form 10F to all five registrars before their cut-offs, the deduction is 15% flat, Rs 75,000, a saving of about Rs 41,480, recovered upfront rather than chased through a refund. The counterfactual most people actually live is the middle case: he documents three of the five in time and forgets the other two. He is then over-deducted on those two dividends and has to file an Indian return to reclaim the difference, which, for a small dividend, often costs more in effort and CA fees than the refund is worth. The discipline is to treat the registrar cut-offs as immovable deadlines, the same way you treat the dividend record date.

One more point that genuinely surprises people. The treaty caps the Indian tax at 15%. Whether you owe anything further in Singapore depends on Singapore's remittance and foreign-income rules, and Singapore generally does not tax foreign-sourced dividends received by an individual. So for most Singapore-resident NRIs the 15% deducted in India is the end of the dividend story, with nothing more to pay and, because Singapore does not tax it, nothing to claim back either. That is different from a US-resident NRI, who pays the 15% to India and then reports the dividend at home and uses a foreign tax credit, the Form 67 route, to avoid double tax.

Capital gains on shares: the exemption you have heard about is dead

This is where pre-2017 advice does the most financial damage, so be precise. Before 1 April 2017, Article 13 of the treaty assigned gains on Indian shares to the seller's state of residence, Singapore, which taxes no capital gains, so a Singapore-resident NRI paid zero Indian tax on share gains. That was the legendary advantage, and it is the thing people still repeat at dinner tables.

The Third Protocol ended it. The treaty now taxes share gains on a source basis, with a date-based test that turns on when you acquired the shares, not when you sell them. The structure has three layers. Shares of an Indian company acquired before 1 April 2017 stay grandfathered: gains on them are taxable only in Singapore, which means zero, however long you hold and whenever you sell, subject to the LOB clause discussed below. Shares acquired between 1 April 2017 and 31 March 2019 sat in a transition window where India could tax the gain but at no more than 50% of the domestic rate, again subject to LOB; that window is now historical and rarely relevant to a current sale. Shares acquired on or after 1 April 2019 are taxable in India at the full domestic rate, exactly as they would be for any non-resident, with the treaty giving no relief at all.

So in 2026, for the vast majority of shareholdings, which were bought after 2019, the India-Singapore treaty does nothing for share gains. You pay the Indian rate: 20% short-term and 12.5% long-term above the Rs 1.25 lakh annual exemption under Section 115AD, with the surcharge cap and the other NRI-specific quirks set out in the capital gains guide for shares and mutual funds. Singapore then does not tax the gain, so there is no double tax to relieve and no foreign tax credit to claim; India simply gets its 12.5% and that is the whole bill.

The gap between the two regimes is easiest to see on one holding bought twice. Suppose Kavya, in Singapore, owns 10,000 shares of an Indian company she bought in 2016 and another 10,000 she bought in 2021, and she sells all 20,000 in 2026 for a long-term gain of Rs 10,00,000 on each lot, Rs 20,00,000 total. On the 2016 lot, grandfathering applies, the gain is taxable only in Singapore, and she pays zero Indian tax on that Rs 10,00,000, provided she meets the LOB conditions and documents the treaty claim. On the 2021 lot, the treaty gives nothing; India taxes the Rs 10,00,000 long-term gain under Section 115AD at 12.5% above the Rs 1.25 lakh exemption, so Rs 8,75,000 at 12.5% is Rs 1,09,375 plus cess. Identical shares, identical gain, and the only thing separating a zero bill from a Rs 1.13 lakh bill is the year of purchase. If she had been told "the treaty exempts share gains" and applied it to both lots, she would have under-reported by over a lakh and exposed herself to interest and penalty.

The honest read on shares is blunt: do not rely on the treaty to exempt any share gain unless you can prove the shares were acquired before 1 April 2017. For everything bought since, treat the Indian tax as unavoidable and plan around the domestic rules, not the treaty.

The mutual fund survival: units are not shares

Here is the part that almost no casual reader knows, and it cuts the other way. The Third Protocol changed the treatment of shares. It did not change the treatment of units of a mutual fund, because in India a mutual fund is constituted as a trust, and its units represent a beneficial interest in that trust, not equity in a company. A unit is not a share. So the date-based source-taxation rule in Article 13(4A) does not reach mutual fund units at all.

Where do mutual fund gains fall, then? Into the residual clause, Article 13(5), which assigns gains on any property not specifically covered elsewhere to the state of residence. For a Singapore-resident NRI, that is Singapore, and Singapore taxes no capital gains. The result is that gains on Indian mutual fund units, equity funds, debt funds, hybrid funds, redeemed by a Singapore tax resident, are taxable only in Singapore, which means zero, regardless of when the units were bought and regardless of holding period. The 1 April 2017 cut-off that kills the shares exemption simply does not apply to fund units.

This is not a fringe interpretation. The Mumbai bench of the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal held exactly this in the Anushka Sanjay Shah matter decided in 2025, ruling that mutual fund units are not shares within Article 13(4A) and that the gains fall under Article 13(5), taxable only in the resident state. Several similar ITAT rulings have followed the same logic. So the position has solid support.

But be honest about the status, because this is genuinely the debated part of the treaty. The Indian tax department has not formally accepted the position by circular or by statute; it has lost on it at the tribunal level. ITAT decisions bind the parties and carry persuasive weight, but they are not the same as a settled legislative position, and the department can and does litigate the point. A mutual fund registrar will often still deduct TDS on the gain at redemption under Section 196A or 195, because the registrar applies domestic law and is not in a position to adjudicate a treaty claim. The relief then comes by filing an Indian return, reporting the gain, claiming the Article 13(5) exemption, and seeking a refund of the TDS, with your TRC and Form 10F in support. That is a return-filing position you take and defend, not a rate the registrar gives you at source.

Put the two together to see the strange symmetry. Lavanya in Singapore sells, in the same year, Rs 15,00,000 of long-term gain on post-2019 Indian shares and Rs 15,00,000 of long-term gain on Indian equity mutual funds. On the shares, the treaty gives nothing and she pays Indian tax under Section 115AD: Rs 13,75,000 above the exemption at 12.5% is Rs 1,71,875 plus cess. On the mutual funds, the treaty's residual clause assigns the gain to Singapore, so the correct Indian tax is zero, even though a registrar may have deducted TDS that she must reclaim by filing. Same rupee gain, same year, same person, and the tax is Rs 1.72 lakh on one and nil on the other. The lever is not how long you held or how much you gained; it is whether the instrument is legally a share or a unit. If she had instead held the equity exposure through direct shares rather than an equity fund, she would have handed India Rs 1.72 lakh it was not otherwise going to collect. For a Singapore-resident NRI building Indian equity exposure, that is a real argument for the fund wrapper over direct shares, with the caveat that the position relies on a tribunal line the department contests.

The LOB clause: substance, and the S$200,000 test that does not catch you

The grandfathering relief and the transition-period half-rate were never unconditional. The Third Protocol attached a limitation-of-benefits clause, mirroring the LOB India put into the Mauritius and Cyprus treaties at the same time, to stop the relief being captured by shell companies set up in Singapore purely to route Indian gains tax-free. The core test for an entity is twofold: a company is denied the treaty's capital gains relief if its affairs are arranged with the primary purpose of taking advantage of the benefit, and, more concretely, if it is a shell or conduit with negligible business operations, or if it failed to spend at least S$200,000 on operations in Singapore in the 24 months before the gain arose.

For most readers of this guide the LOB is reassuring rather than threatening, and it is worth saying why plainly. The S$200,000 expenditure test and the shell-company test are aimed at companies and corporate structures, the special-purpose vehicles that private equity and corporate investors set up. An ordinary individual NRI who is genuinely living, working and tax-resident in Singapore is not a shell company, has a real life and real substance in Singapore, and is exactly the person the treaty is meant to benefit. If you have an Employment Pass or are a permanent resident, you work in Singapore, you have an IRAS tax file, and you can produce a Certificate of Residence, you are not the target of the LOB.

Where it bites is the artificial case: the NRI who has never really moved to Singapore but acquires a Certificate of Residence to dress up gains, or who routes Indian investments through a Singapore holding company with no employees and no expenditure. India's general anti-avoidance rule (GAAR) sits behind the treaty LOB as a second line, and the department has become aggressive about substance. The honest read is that the LOB is not a problem for a genuine resident individual and is a serious problem for a paper structure, so the planning point is simply to be, and be able to prove you are, a real Singapore tax resident: file your Singapore taxes, keep your COR current, keep evidence of physical presence and a home and a job. The substance you need is the substance you already have if you actually live there.

Salary under Article 15: Singapore work is taxed only in Singapore

The cleanest article in the treaty for most working NRIs is Article 15 on dependent personal services. The rule is that salary is taxable only in your state of residence, Singapore, unless the employment is exercised in the other state, India. So salary for work physically performed in Singapore is taxable only in Singapore, full stop, and India has no claim on it even though you are an Indian citizen and may still have Indian assets and income.

This matters in the year you move and in any year you spend time working in India. If you spend part of a year working physically in India, the days you exercised the employment in India can become taxable in India, with a short-stay exemption under Article 15(2): India cannot tax the India-exercised salary if you were present in India for 183 days or fewer in the fiscal year, your employer is not Indian-resident, and the cost is not borne by an Indian permanent establishment. For a Singapore-based employee on a short Indian work trip paid by the Singapore employer, that salary stays taxable only in Singapore. For someone seconded to India for most of a year, or paid by an Indian entity, the picture changes and Indian tax can attach to the India-workdays portion.

The practical trap is the transition year, the year you move from India to Singapore or back, when your residency status under domestic Indian law and your treaty residence may not line up. That is squarely the residency and RNOR and tie-breaker territory, and it is the most common place a Singapore-bound NRI gets the first year wrong. Get the residency determination right first; Article 15 only tells you who taxes the salary once you know which state you are resident in.

Treaty rates at a glance

Income type	Treaty article	Treaty rate for a Singapore-resident individual	Domestic rate without the treaty	The thing to watch
NRO / other taxable interest	Article 11	15% (10% on bank-loan interest), no surcharge or cess	30% plus surcharge and cess	Lodge TRC and Form 10F with the bank before the first interest credit
Dividends from Indian companies	Article 10	15%, no surcharge or cess	20% plus surcharge and cess	Meet each registrar's pre-dividend cut-off, company by company
Gains on shares acquired before 1 Apr 2017	Article 13 (grandfathered)	Taxable only in Singapore (nil)	Section 115AD rates	Prove the pre-2017 acquisition date; LOB applies
Gains on shares acquired on/after 1 Apr 2019	Article 13(4A)	No relief; Indian rate applies	12.5% LTCG / 20% STCG	The old exemption is gone; plan around domestic rules
Gains on mutual fund units	Article 13(5) residual	Taxable only in Singapore (nil)	TDS at redemption	Registrar deducts; reclaim by filing the return; ITAT-backed but contested
Salary for work done in Singapore	Article 15	Taxable only in Singapore	n/a	India-workdays can be taxed in India absent the 183-day short-stay relief

How a Singapore-resident NRI actually claims relief

The mechanics are the same shape as any treaty claim but with Singapore-specific steps, and the order is what matters. First, get your Tax Residency Certificate. In Singapore that is the Certificate of Residence (COR) issued by the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS), applied for online or by letter, naming India as the country where you will use it and the relevant year. IRAS typically issues it in about two to three weeks. This is the document Section 90(4) of the Indian Act requires before any treaty benefit is allowed; without it, no relief, no exceptions.

Second, file Form 10F electronically on the Indian income tax e-filing portal. Since October 2022 this must be done online, and since the portal added the facility, a non-resident without a PAN can register under the "Non-residents not holding and not required to have a PAN" category and file it; you no longer need an Indian PAN purely to lodge Form 10F. Form 10F captures the details the TRC omits, your status, nationality, tax identification number in Singapore, period of residence, and address, and it must be backed by the COR. Keep the e-filed acknowledgement.

Third, deliver both documents to each Indian payer before the income is paid: to your bank for NRO interest, to each company's registrar for dividends, to your broker or depository where relevant. This is what gets you the treaty rate at source rather than a refund later. The painful truth is that this is not a one-and-done; the COR is year-specific and Form 10F has a validity tied to the COR, so you repeat the cycle each Indian financial year, and you respect each payer's cut-off dates.

Fourth, for anything the treaty assigns to Singapore but where Indian TDS was still deducted, principally mutual fund gains and any over-deducted interest or dividend, you recover the money by filing an Indian income tax return, reporting the income, claiming the treaty position, and seeking the refund. The return is also where you take the Article 13(5) mutual fund position formally. For the share gains the treaty leaves taxable in India, you report and pay in the ordinary way; there is no Singapore tax to credit against because Singapore does not tax the gain.

Edge cases

You have a PAN but it is inactive or unlinked. If you hold a PAN, you should still use it; the no-PAN Form 10F route is a convenience for those who genuinely never had one. A PAN that has become inoperative (commonly because it was not linked to Aadhaar, a problem some returning or long-absent NRIs hit) can cause TDS to be deducted at the higher 20% rate under Section 206AA regardless of your treaty claim. Sort the PAN status out before relying on the 15% rate.

Interest on a loan you gave an Indian company. The 10% rather than 15% band in Article 11 is narrow: it is for interest on loans from banks and approved financial institutions. A private loan from you, an individual, to an Indian borrower is ordinary interest at the 15% treaty cap, not 10%. Do not assume the lower band applies just because the income is interest.

The mutual fund position is the one to take advice on. Everything else in this guide is settled law. The Article 13(5) treatment of mutual fund units is supported by ITAT but contested by the department and not codified, so for a large fund gain it is worth a CA confirming the current state of the litigation for your assessment year and documenting the position carefully on the return, rather than treating the refund as automatic. Honest uncertainty here is not hedging; the law genuinely is not closed.

Property is always taxable in India. As under every Indian treaty, gains on immovable property in India are taxable in India under Article 13, and Singapore residence gives no relief on them. The treaty wins are on financial assets, never on real estate.

You split the year between India and Singapore. In the year of moving, your Indian residential status and your treaty residence can diverge, and the tie-breaker rules decide which state you are treaty-resident in. The treaty rates in this guide assume you are clearly Singapore-resident for the year in question; in a split year, settle residence first.

The honest read

The India-Singapore treaty in 2026 is excellent on income and uneven on gains, and the readers who lose money are the ones still living in 2016. So commit to the parts that are reliable and stop relying on the part that is gone. For almost every Singapore-resident NRI, the single highest-value move is to get an IRAS Certificate of Residence and an e-filed Form 10F in place before the financial year's first interest and dividend dates, and to give them to every bank and registrar on time, because that turns 30% into 15% on interest and 23% into 15% on dividends with no surcharge, recovered upfront rather than chased through a refund. On capital gains, stop telling yourself the treaty exempts share gains: it does not for anything bought since 1 April 2019, and you should plan those around the domestic Section 115AD rules and treat the Indian tax as the whole bill. The genuine, and underused, win is the mutual fund position: gains on Indian fund units are taxable only in Singapore under Article 13(5), which is zero, so for building Indian equity exposure the fund wrapper has a real tax edge over direct shares, with eyes open to the fact that the department contests it and you take it as a return-filing position. And the LOB is nothing to fear if you actually live in Singapore; it exists to catch paper structures, not real residents. The one place to pay a CA rather than rely on a blog, this one included, is a large mutual fund gain where the Article 13(5) position is in play, because that is where the law is genuinely unsettled and the rupees are large enough to matter.

Related guides

• DTAA relief for NRIs: the full picture
• DTAA mechanics: TRC, Form 10F and Section 90
• The DTAA tie-breaker and dual residency
• Foreign tax credit and Form 67
• Capital gains tax for NRIs on shares and mutual funds
• Tax on NRO interest
• ITR filing for NRIs: AY 2026-27 master guide
• NRI residency and RNOR rules
• NRE, NRO and FCNR accounts compared
• All Taxation guides
• All Banking guides
• All Investments guides

This guide is educational and general in nature. It is not individual tax advice. Treaty outcomes depend on your exact residency, the acquisition dates of your holdings, the instrument's legal form, and the state of ongoing litigation, and several positions here, in particular the mutual fund treatment under Article 13(5), are supported by tribunal rulings but contested by the tax department. Confirm your specific position, and obtain a current TRC and Form 10F, with a qualified chartered accountant before you act.