Registration is the part everyone sells you. The deadlines that start running the moment your company exists are the part nobody mentions — and by the time you hear about them, the per-day fees have usually been running for a while.
Here is the first-year map, and what each miss actually costs.
The first 180 days
INC-20A — commencement of business (Section 10A): within 180 days of incorporation.
This is the declaration that every subscriber has actually paid for the shares they agreed to take. It applies to share-capital companies incorporated on or after 2 November 2018. Until it is filed, the company cannot legally commence business or borrow.
Miss it and the company is liable to ₹50,000, and every officer in default to ₹1,000 for each day the failure continues, up to ₹1,00,000 — and the Registrar gains grounds to strike the company off the register.
First auditor (Section 139(6)): within 30 days of incorporation.
The Board must appoint the company's first auditor within 30 days. If the Board fails to, the members must do it at an extraordinary general meeting within 90 days.
One recent change worth knowing: Form ADT-1 is now mandatory for the first auditor too, following an MCA amendment effective 14 July 2025, filed within 15 days of the appointment. Previously ADT-1 was not required for the first auditor, and plenty of guidance still online says so — which makes this an easy and current miss.
The housekeeping. The bank account, share certificates and statutory registers — unglamorous, but exactly what later audits and due-diligence checks ask for.
The annual cycle
For a private limited company, each financial year:
- AOC-4 — financial statements
- MGT-7 / MGT-7A — annual return
- DIR-3 KYC — annually, for every director
- Board meetings and an AGM, with minutes
For an LLP:
- Form 11 — annual return, by 30 May
- Form 8 — Statement of Account & Solvency, by 30 October
What it costs to miss
| Default | Cost |
|---|---|
| INC-20A | ₹50,000 (company) + ₹1,000/day per officer, cap ₹1,00,000 — plus strike-off exposure |
| AOC-4 / MGT-7 late | ₹100 per day, per form — no cap |
| LLP Form 8 / Form 11 late | ₹100 per day, per form — uncapped |
| DIR-3 KYC missed | DIN deactivated; ₹5,000 to reactivate |
| 3 continuous FYs of non-filing | Director disqualified 5 years (s.164(2)); office vacated (s.167(1)) |
Two of those deserve emphasis.
The ₹100/day, uncapped. There is no ceiling. A single AOC-4 forgotten for two years is not a small fixed fine — it is a number that has been quietly compounding the whole time. This is the one that turns a ₹3,000 filing into a five-figure problem.
The DIR-3 KYC knock-on. When a director's DIN is deactivated for missed KYC, the MCA portal will not accept any form signed by that director. So your AOC-4 and MGT-7 cannot be filed either — one missed KYC quietly blocks the company's entire compliance, and the per-day fees on those forms keep running while you sort it out.
Dormant is not exempt
The most common misconception: "the company hasn't started trading, so there's nothing to file."
Compliance attaches to the entity's existence, not its turnover. A company with no revenue still owes AOC-4 and MGT-7; its directors still owe DIR-3 KYC. Companies that file nothing are precisely the ones the Registrar strikes off under Section 248 — and a struck-off company can only be restored by an appeal to the NCLT under Section 252, which is time-bound and considerably more expensive than the filings would have been.
If the entity genuinely is dead, a clean closure (strike-off on application in STK-2) is almost always cheaper than letting it drift into default with the directors' disqualification clock running.
If you're already behind
Nothing here gets better with time — the two most damaging items (₹100/day and the three-year disqualification clock) are both functions of how long you wait. The sequence that works: quantify the pending filings and the accumulated fees first, so you know the real number, then decide between regularising and closing.
For the full picture — the annual calendar, penalties, strike-off and revival — see our page on company and LLP compliance after registration.