Stamp duty and registration charges in Karnataka.

Checked on 8 August 2026. Rates, rules and portals in Karnataka change, sometimes at short notice. Treat this as an orientation, not as advice on your own transaction, and have your advocate confirm anything that decides money.

What you pay, on top of the price

Two separate charges land on the buyer. Stamp duty is a state tax on the instrument of transfer, and registration fee is what the sub-registrar charges to record it. They are calculated on the same base but they are not the same thing, and both are the buyer's cost by custom in Karnataka unless you have agreed otherwise in writing.

As checked in 2026, Karnataka's stamp duty runs on slabs by property value: broadly 2 per cent below ₹20 lakh, 3 per cent between roughly ₹21 lakh and ₹45 lakh, and 5 per cent above ₹45 lakh. The registration charge is 2 per cent of value, revised in August 2025 from the older 1 per cent that many older articles still quote.

There is also a cess and a surcharge layered on the stamp duty, which vary by whether the property sits inside a municipal body or a panchayat. For plantation land in the taluks, that usually means the panchayat rate. Your advocate will compute the exact figure; the point here is to budget for it rather than discover it.

The number it is calculated on is not the number you agreed

Karnataka applies duty to the guidance value or the actual consideration, whichever is higher. Guidance value is the government's own minimum rate for that survey number, published on the Kaveri portal, and it is revised periodically.

This catches people out in both directions. If you negotiate hard and agree a figure below guidance value, you still pay duty on guidance value. If the guidance value in that pocket was revised upward last year and nobody mentioned it, your registration bill is larger than the arithmetic you did at home.

Check the guidance value for the specific survey number before you commit, not the village average. On plantation land, adjacent survey numbers can carry different rates.

The costs nobody budgets for

Beyond duty and registration there is a sequence of smaller sums that together are rarely trivial: the advocate's fee for title search and drafting, the encumbrance certificate, surveyor charges if the boundary needs establishing, mutation and khata transfer after registration, and the document writer or facilitation charges at the sub-registrar's office.

Ask for the full picture in writing before you pay an advance. A seller who cannot tell you what the registration will cost has usually not done this recently.