Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Capital gains tax on sale of Residential Apartments



The residential flat or apartment sale has direct implication on your computation of taxable income. The property in this context is an immovable property which is exclusively used for residential purpose.

The residential property  purchased may be sold with in three years or after three years. If the sale affected within 3 years it is considered as short term capital gain and the sale proceeds are added to the income and taxed at the applicable tax rates of the assesse.  , on other hand, residential flat or an apartment sold after three years from its purchase, it is considered as Long Term Capital Gain( LTCG) and taxed at 20% with indexation benefit.

The residential property sold after three years enjoys all the benefits of Indexation. The indexation considers the inflation effects on erosion of real value of money through rise in prices. Due to this your investment has risen three to four times, the purchasing power of money will have gone down 50%, from the time you made investment. To reduce the impact of inflation on your investment, indexation benefit is provided in calculating long term capital gains. Through this benefit you can adjust your capital gains from inflation by applying an appropriate factor from cost inflation index to the original units.

Her is an example how Indexation Benefits works :

Cost of purchasing a property in 2007                                             35,00,000 = 00

Cost of selling the property in 2012                                                 50,00,000 = 00

Inflation Index  2007 -  551
                         2011 -  785    

Indexed Purchase cost  - 35,00,000 * 785 / 551                    =          49,86,388 = 00


Long Term Capital Gains  = 50,00,000  - 49,86,388              =          13,612 = 00

Tax  on LTCG  = 13,612 * 20%                                                =          2,722 = 00 

Education Cess  = 2722 *3% =82 + 2722                             =          2,804 = 00      

If inflation index had not been considered the non indexed gain would have been Rs. 15,00,000

Thus the indexation benefit substantially reduces the tax liability of an assesse, otherwise would have been a huge tax liability resulted out of above example.

 
In a nut shell

Long Term Capital Gain is computed as below:

LTCG = Full value of consideration received or accruing - (indexed cost of acquisition + indexed cost of
improvement + cost of transfer)

Where, Indexed cost of acquisition =Cost of acquisition x CII of year of transfer /CII of year of acquisition

Indexed cost of improvement =Cost of improvement x CII of year of transfer  /CII of year of improvement

CII = Cost Inflation Index (Please see chart given below)

Tax liability on LTCG to be taken at 20%.

If total income other than LTCG is less than zero slab,LTCG over the zero slab only attracts tax at 20%.

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