Short answer: a chartered accountant's certificate is not required on every remittance. Under the renamed forms — Form 15CA is now Form 145, and Form 15CB is now Form 146 from 1 April 2026 — the certificate is needed on one part of four: where the sum is chargeable to tax in India and exceeds ₹5 lakh in the tax year. Everything else is a self-declaration.
Banks rarely put it that way. The usual message is that nothing moves until a CA has signed something, and for a great many remittances that is simply not what the rule says.
What the two forms are
They work as a pair, and the distinction is the whole point:
- Form 145 (formerly 15CA) — your declaration, as the person remitting.
- Form 146 (formerly 15CB) — a chartered accountant's certificate on the nature of the payment and its taxability.
The renaming took effect for remittances initiated on or after 1 April 2026, under the Income-tax Act 2025. The substance did not change. What changed is that most of the guidance you will find online — and some of the paperwork at the branch — still uses only the old numbers.
Which part applies to you
| Part | When it applies | Form 146 needed? |
|---|---|---|
| A | Remittance ₹5 lakh or less in the tax year | No |
| B | You hold an Assessing Officer's certificate under Section 195(2), 195(3) or Section 197 | No |
| C | Above ₹5 lakh and chargeable to tax | Yes |
| D | Not chargeable to tax, whatever the amount | No |
Two conditions have to be satisfied together before a certificate arises: the sum must be taxable, and it must be above the threshold. Fail either and you are in Part A, B or D.
The ₹5 lakh limit is an annual aggregate, not a per-transfer figure. Splitting one large remittance into several smaller ones does not keep you underneath it.
Some remittances are outside it altogether
There is a specified list of categories that require no filing at all, whatever the amount — among them personal travel, education abroad, maintenance of close relatives, medical treatment, and imports of goods. If your remittance falls within that list, neither Form 145 nor Form 146 arises.
That is worth checking first, because it disposes of a large share of ordinary family remittances before any question of a certificate comes up.
Moving your own money from NRO to NRE
The most common case, and the one where the misconception costs most.
Where the funds are your own after-tax money — a balance on which TDS has already been deducted, or income already offered to tax in an earlier year — the remittance is generally not chargeable to tax a second time. That points to Part D: a self-declaration, no certificate, whatever the amount.
The qualification matters, though. "My own money" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Sale proceeds of a property, accumulated rent, and a maturing deposit are three different things with three different tax histories, and the bank will ask which it is. Where the character of the funds is genuinely mixed, or where the tax position of an earlier year was never settled, Part C and a certificate is the honest answer rather than the inconvenient one. If the underlying asset was never disclosed in a year you were resident, deal with that first — FAST-DS 2026 closes on 31 December, and repatriating ahead of it does not make the earlier omission go away.