Most NRIs are owed an NRI tax refund from India — the 30% TDS your bank withheld is rarely your actual liability. Here's how to find the gap before July.

NRI Tax Refund from India: The Number in Your 26AS That Changes Everything

There is a number sitting in your Form 26AS that most NRIs never calculate — the gap between what India's banks withheld from you at 30% and what you actually owe after DTAA. For many NRIs, that gap is an NRI tax refund from India sitting unclaimed, or claimed imprecisely, because nobody told them to check the arithmetic before handing documents to their CA.

This is not a complicated number. It is usually a subtraction. But it is the subtraction that determines whether India owes you money, by how much, and whether you need to chase your bank for a corrected certificate before July 31.

Why Banks Withhold More Than You Owe

Your NRO savings account earns interest. Your bank deducts TDS at 30% — that is the default rate under Section 195 of the Income Tax Act for non-resident income. No bank does the DTAA calculation for you. They apply the domestic rate and move on.

If you are a US tax resident, the India-US Double Tax Avoidance Agreement caps NRO interest taxation at 15% under Article 11. If your bank deducted 30% on ₹42,000 of NRO interest, they deducted ₹12,600. Your actual DTAA-limited liability is ₹6,300. The difference — ₹6,300 — is refundable through your ITR-2.

This is the number that matters. Not the interest earned. Not the total TDS. The gap.

The same logic applies across countries with active DTAA treaties: UK (Article 11, 15%), Canada (similar), Singapore (varies by income type), Netherlands (updated December 2025). The rate differs; the pattern is identical. India's banks deduct the domestic maximum. The treaty caps the actual rate. Your ITR-2 claims the difference.

What to Look For in Form 26AS

Form 26AS is your starting point — a master ledger of every TDS deduction reported against your PAN by every institution. You download it from incometax.gov.in using your PAN credentials.

Here is what to check on each line item:

Deductor name — the bank, broker, or tenant who deducted TDS
Amount credited — gross income before deduction (interest, rent, capital gains)
TDS deducted — what they actually withheld
Section — the TDS section applied (194A for NRO interest, 195 for rent to an NRI, 112A for long-term capital gains)
Quarter — whether all four quarters are present for recurring income

Once you have this list, compare it to your actual certificates: Does the figure in 26AS match the Form 16A your HDFC or ICICI branch issued? Is the section code right? Is every deductor you expect — your bank, your broker, your tenant — present across all four quarters?

Missing entries are not rare. Banks sometimes file their quarterly TDS returns late. Tenants who are legally required to deduct under Section 195 sometimes do not file at all. Each gap is either something you can chase in May or June, or a problem your CA discovers in July when the window to fix it has mostly closed.

The DTAA Arithmetic: Your NRI Tax Refund from India Calculated

Once you know your TDS per source and the applicable DTAA rate, the calculation is simple:

Excess TDS = TDS deducted − (Treaty rate × Gross income)

For ₹42,000 NRO interest with 30% TDS deducted (₹12,600) and a 15% India-US treaty cap:

DTAA liability = 15% × ₹42,000 = ₹6,300
Excess deducted = ₹12,600 − ₹6,300 = ₹6,300 refundable

Multiply this across two NRO accounts and two years of unclaimed treaty relief and the aggregate becomes worth the paperwork. To claim it, you need two documents: a Tax Residency Certificate (TRC) from your country's tax authority, and a completed Form 10F. These are the legal foundation of every DTAA claim. Without them, your CA cannot invoke the treaty rate.

Getting the TRC takes time. In the US, it is IRS Form 8802 — allow six to eight weeks for processing. If you have not already requested it, this week is the right moment.

When Your NRI Tax Refund from India Gets Complicated

Sometimes Form 26AS shows the wrong figure. This happens more often than people expect:

A bank filed their Q4 TDS return late, so the ₹8,200 from your Kotak NRO account is absent entirely
Your tenant deducted ₹16,848 per month TDS on rent but only filed for three quarters
A broker reported a different LTCG figure than your account statement shows
An old EPF withdrawal appears under an unexpected TDS section

Each discrepancy needs a response. Missing deductor filings require the deductor to file a correction return — something you cannot do yourself, but something you can request if you flag it in May or early June. Discrepancies in amount require matching your bank's Form 16A against 26AS line by line.

This reconciliation work is unglamorous. It is also the part that determines whether your India tax refund arrives cleanly or gets held up in a defective return notice that takes another four months to resolve.

Arriving with the Number Already Done

The difference between an organized and an unorganized NRI filing is rarely the complexity of the taxes. It is whether the excess-TDS number has been calculated before the CA conversation starts.

When you hand your CA a specific figure — "I have ₹6,300 excess TDS on NRO interest under India-US Article 11, TRC attached, Form 10F ready" — they file with confidence and speed. When you hand them a pile of certificates and ask them to figure it out, they charge for the time to do what you could have done in a focused afternoon.

IndiaTax NRI is built around exactly this workflow: enter your income sources by type, import your Form 26AS, run the DTAA calculator for your country of residence, then export a CA-ready PDF with the reconciliation already done. All on-device, no uploads, no accounts. The app covers 12 DTAA treaties — India-US, India-UK, India-Canada, India-UAE, India-Singapore, and more.

If you think about your Indian finances as part of a larger picture — NRO accounts, remittances, property values, net worth — the Make the money behave collection brings together private, calm tools for exactly that: clarity on the things you have been half-avoiding, without handing your data to a server somewhere.

One Subtraction, Before July

The number that matters is not your total Indian income. It is the gap — the excess TDS that sits between what banks deducted at the domestic rate and what your treaty actually allows them to take. That gap is the NRI tax refund from India that most NRIs undercount or leave imprecisely claimed.

Calculate it now, in April or May. Request your TRC if you need one. Flag the 26AS discrepancies while there is still time to fix them. Arrive at your CA conversation with the arithmetic already done.

IndiaTax NRI is a private, on-device tax organizer for NRIs filing ITR-2. TDS reconciliation, DTAA calculator for 12 countries, CA-ready PDF export. No accounts. No uploads. Join the waitlist for IndiaTax NRI →