Form 67 Filing Guide: How to Claim Your Foreign Tax Credit Before 31 March 2027

Form 67 is the online statement you file to claim a Foreign Tax Credit (FTC), the credit for tax you’ve already paid outside India on income that’s taxable here too. It’s required under Rule 128 of the Income-tax Rules, 1962.

Skip it and the same income gets taxed twice over. For FY 2025-26 income you have until 31 March 2027, and you file it on the Income Tax e-filing portal.

• Purpose: relief from double taxation on foreign income, claimed under section 90, 90A or 91 of the Income-tax Act, so the same income isn’t taxed twice over.
• Due date: for FY 2025-26 (Assessment Year 2026-27), on or before 31 March 2027, provided the return itself was filed within the section 139(1) or 139(4) deadline.
• Mode of filing: exclusively online, through the Income Tax e-filing portal. There is no offline route.
• Which form applies now: Form 67 for FY 2025-26 and earlier. Form 44 from Tax Year 2026-27 onward.

Three things decide whether the claim actually lands.

• Evidence of the foreign tax: a certificate or statement covering the nature and amount of the income and the foreign tax, plus proof of payment (Rule 128(8)). It can come from the foreign tax authority, from the person who deducted the tax, or from you.
• Verification: Form 67 can be e-verified using an Electronic Verification Code (EVC), Aadhaar OTP, or a Digital Signature Certificate (DSC).
• No chartered accountant certificate needed: a CA certification isn’t mandatory to submit Form 67.

Form 67 is for resident taxpayers who’ve had tax paid or deducted outside India on income that’s also taxable here.

For a services exporter, that’s usually withholding deducted by an overseas client on a services invoice. It applies whether you export through a company, an LLP, a partnership or as a sole proprietor, and the form itself is the same for all of them.

What changes from Tax Year 2026-27 is the certification, covered in the Form 44 section below.

For a resident, foreign income is taxable in India regardless of where it was earned or where it was received. Foreign tax credit only becomes relevant once that income has already been brought into your Indian assessment. The residency tests and the taxability rules sit in our guide to tax on foreign income.

Two things govern the claim: which section gives you the relief, and what Rule 128 makes you do to get it.

The route your claim takes depends on whether India has a Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement (DTAA) with the country that taxed you. Three sections cover the possibilities.

Either way the claim runs through Form 67. For the treaty mechanics themselves, we’ve covered how double taxation arises and how relief is structured.

Under Rule 128(3), the credit runs against tax, surcharge and cess, not against interest, fee or penalty. Four parts of the rule decide most real cases.

• Year of the claim (Rule 128(1)): credit is given in the year the corresponding foreign income is offered to tax or assessed to tax in India. If that income is spread across more than one year, the credit is apportioned across those years in the same proportion.
• Currency conversion: use the telegraphic transfer buying rate on the last day of the month immediately preceding the month in which the foreign tax was paid or deducted. Banks publish this rate, and the State Bank of India rate is commonly used. The date that matters is the tax date, not the invoice date or the date the balance reached you. At an indicative USD/INR of ₹94.50, USD 5,000 of tax deducted by a payer converts to ₹4,72,500 of creditable foreign tax.
• Disputed foreign tax (Rule 128(4)): no credit is available for foreign tax that’s under dispute. Once the dispute is finally settled, you have six months to furnish evidence of the settlement, proof of payment, and an undertaking that no refund of the disputed amount has been claimed.
• MAT and AMT credit (Rule 128(6)): foreign tax credit is also available against Minimum Alternate Tax (MAT, section 115JB) and Alternate Minimum Tax (AMT, section 115JC), in the same way as against tax under the normal provisions. If the credit available would exceed what you’d get against normal-provision tax, only the normal-provision amount carries forward as MAT or AMT credit under section 115JAA or 115JD. The excess isn’t banked.

Here’s the arithmetic twice, with two different outcomes. Both are illustrative; your own rate depends on your entity type and taxable income.

Your company bills a US client USD 50,000 for software development services. The client withholds USD 5,000 and issues a Form 1042-S showing the amount withheld.

• Convert the foreign tax at the telegraphic transfer buying rate (TTBR) required by Rule 128. At an indicative USD/INR of ₹94.50, USD 5,000 x ₹94.50 = ₹4,72,500 of foreign tax paid.
• The same income offered to tax in India: USD 50,000 x ₹94.50 = ₹47,25,000.
• Indian tax attributable to that income, at an illustrative effective 25%, is ₹11,81,250.
• Credit allowed is the lower of the two: ₹4,72,500.

You pay the remaining ₹7,08,750 in India. That’s the ordinary outcome where the withholding abroad is lower than your Indian rate on the same income.

Your firm invoices a client in a country India has no DTAA with. The invoice is ₹20,00,000 and the local authority withholds tax worth ₹4,00,000 after TTBR conversion.

• Indian tax attributable to that ₹20,00,000, at an illustrative effective 15% after your deductions, is ₹3,00,000.
• Credit allowed is capped at the Indian tax on that income: ₹3,00,000.
• The remaining ₹1,00,000 of foreign tax isn’t creditable.

Rule 128 doesn’t provide for carrying that unused ₹1,00,000 forward to another year. So the withholding rate you agree with an overseas client carries a direct cash cost.

Example 2 shows why this matters. Often the cleaner move is to reduce the tax withheld abroad, so there’s less to reclaim later.

A US payer, for instance, must withhold 30% on US-source income unless you certify treaty eligibility.

Filing Form W-8BEN, or Form W-8BEN-E if you’re a company, tells the payer you’re an Indian resident entitled to treaty rates, which can bring withholding on many service payments down sharply.

Do this before the payment is made, not after. None of it removes the Form 67 obligation: if tax was still withheld, you still file.

If you’re filing now, in 2026, for income earned in FY 2025-26, your Form 67 is due on or before 31 March 2027, the end of Assessment Year 2026-27.

That’s conditional. The return for that year has to have been filed within the section 139(1) original deadline or the section 139(4) belated deadline. Miss the return deadline and you lose the relaxation, not just the filing window.

• FY 2025-26 (AY 2026-27): Form 67 due 31 March 2027.
• FY 2024-25 (AY 2025-26): that date was 31 March 2026, now passed.
• Updated return under section 139(8A): file Form 67 for the income in that return on or before the date you furnish the updated return itself.

This is the position under Rule 128(9) as amended by Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) Notification No. 100/2022 dated 18 August 2022. Before that amendment, Form 67 had to be in by the section 139(1) return due date.

One thing worth knowing if you go looking: the Income Tax Department’s own Form 67 FAQ page still carries the pre-2022 wording. The amended rule is the operative position.

Rule 128(9) sets a deadline and filing within it is what the rule requires. But the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT) has repeatedly treated that requirement as directory rather than mandatory, and has allowed the credit where the form was furnished before the assessment was completed.

Benches including ITAT Hyderabad have held that:

• Filing Form 67 under Rule 128 is directory, not mandatory.
• Rule 128(9) can’t override the substantive benefit a treaty grants.
• Furnishing Form 67 before the assessment is completed amounts to sufficient compliance.

In one such matter the tribunal read Rule 128(9) alongside Article 25(2)(a) of the India-USA DTAA, holding that the rule must be read in conformity with the Act and the treaty.

That’s what tribunals have decided in specific appeals on specific facts. It isn’t a general permission to file late, and nothing here is advice.

If you’ve already missed a deadline, take the facts to your chartered accountant, because the outcome turns on your own circumstances and on whether the department contests the point.

Rule 128(8) sets the documentary standard, and it’s more flexible than most filers assume. You need a certificate or statement specifying the nature and amount of income and the foreign tax deducted or paid, from any one of three sources.

Two things trip filers up: Part B left blank when a carry-back refund or a disputed amount should have been declared, and attachments that show the deduction but not the tax reaching the foreign exchequer.

With those in hand, the filing itself is short. It helps to know the shape of the form first. It has four parts.

Form 67 is filed online only; there is no offline route. It can go in before or after your Income Tax Return (ITR), as long as it’s inside the Rule 128(9) window.

• Log in to the Income Tax e-filing portal with your PAN and password.
• Go to e-File, then Income Tax Forms, then File Income Tax Forms.
• Choose “Persons not dependent on any Source of Income”, or search for Form 67 directly.
• Select Double Taxation Relief (Form 67).
• Choose the correct assessment year and click Continue.
• Fill in the details of foreign income and foreign tax, then preview.
• Upload the supporting certificates and proof of payment.
• Proceed to e-verify and complete verification with a Digital Signature Certificate (DSC), an Electronic Verification Code (EVC), or Aadhaar OTP.
• Match the claim to your return. It has to agree with what you report in the foreign-source income and tax-relief schedules, Schedule FSI and Schedule TR.

Mismatches between the two are a standard trigger for a notice. The wider reporting picture is covered in receipt of foreign remittance in the ITR.

Invoicing a related party abroad, such as your own subsidiary or a parent, brings arm’s-length pricing rules into play on top of everything on this page.

That’s a separate compliance track from the Form 67 claim, and it’s set out in transfer pricing in multinational companies.

Most guides either miss this change or state it as though it’s already live. It isn’t, for anyone filing this year.

Which form you file depends on the year the income belongs to, not on the date you file.

The Income-tax Act, 2025 came into force on 1 April 2026, replacing the Income-tax Act, 1961.

CBDT notified the Income-tax Rules, 2026 on 20 March 2026 under G.S.R. 198(E). These are the final notified rules, not the draft version circulated for comment earlier in the year.

Under those rules, Form 67 is renumbered Form 44, “Statement of income from a country or specified territory outside India and Foreign Tax Credit”, under Rule 76, from Tax Year 2026-27.

So if you’re filing now for FY 2025-26 income, you file Form 67. Form 44 first applies to income earned from 1 April 2026, filed from 2027 onward.

Form 44 also carries a certification requirement Form 67 doesn’t. Tax advisory guidance from RSM India and KPMG, following the CBDT-notified rules, states that a chartered accountant’s certificate will be required for all companies claiming the credit, and for individuals where the foreign tax paid is ₹1 lakh or more.

That requirement does not apply to a Form 67 filing for FY 2025-26 or earlier.

The same renumbering exercise consolidates the wider forms library, including Form 15CA and 15CB, which become Forms 145 and 146.

These five come up repeatedly for services exporters filing their own claims. Two of them depend on how your business is structured.

Using the invoice-date rate, the payment-date rate or the bank’s card rate instead of the TTBR on the last day of the preceding month. It moves the credit either way.

Claiming in the year the tax was deducted abroad, rather than the year the income was offered to tax in India. Rule 128(1) ties the credit to the Indian year, and calendar-year jurisdictions make this easy to get wrong.

A withholding certificate shows what your client deducted. It doesn’t always show the tax reaching the foreign exchequer. Where you rely on your own signed statement, the proof of payment isn’t optional.

The certification described in the Form 44 section lands from Tax Year 2026-27 and applies at entity level. Plan it into your close calendar rather than the week before the deadline.

If the return form you select doesn’t carry the foreign-source income and tax-relief schedules, there’s nowhere to report a claim you’ve already filed Form 67 for. Decide the form before you file.

Nothing here is hard in principle. It gets hard because the evidence sits in four places: your client’s withholding certificate, your bank’s remittance documentation, your accounting system, and your return.

When those four disagree, someone spends days reconciling them. The cleaner that record, the less assembly work the claim needs.

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