The 24-hour rule for foreign guests

Last updated: August 6, 2026

You have 24 hours from a foreign guest arriving at your property to report them on Form C — now Form III — at indianfrro.gov.in. That is the whole rule. Almost everything properties get wrong about it comes down to one question: 24 hours from what?

The clock starts when they arrive at YOUR property

Not when they landed in India. Not when they booked. Not when you got round to the paperwork. A guest who entered the country in February and checks into your guest house in July starts a fresh 24-hour clock in July, and the February date is irrelevant to your deadline — even though the form asks for it too.

What "arrival" means in practice

Check-in. The moment the guest takes up accommodation with you. If they arrive at 23:00 on a Tuesday, you have until 23:00 on Wednesday — the clock does not politely start the next morning, and a property that files "the next working day" as a habit will be late roughly every time a guest arrives in the evening.

This is exactly why C Form Plus shows a countdown rather than a date. A row that says "3h left" is a different instruction from one that says "arrived yesterday", and at a front desk at 21:00 that difference is the whole point.

Late arrivals, night arrivals, and the weekend

• There is no weekend. The portal is online and the 24 hours do not pause on a Sunday.
• A 2am arrival is a 2am clock. If nobody is going to be at a desk with a computer, this is precisely the case for having the guest fill in their own details on their phone — then the filing itself takes seconds whenever you get to it.
• Long stays are one filing, not a daily one. You report the arrival. A guest staying three weeks does not need reporting three weeks running.

What being late actually costs

The realistic risk for most small properties is not a dramatic one; it is that a late or missing filing surfaces during an inspection or a police enquiry, at which point "we usually file" is a much weaker position than a list of acknowledgement numbers. The FAQ sets out the enforcement position.

Keep the acknowledgement number the portal gives you back. It is the only artefact that proves a filing was accepted, and it is worth recording against the guest rather than leaving it in a browser tab. C Form Plus stores it against the check-in for you.

How to stop racing the clock

The 24 hours are only tight when the work starts at check-in. Almost all of that work is transcription — passport number, visa type, date of issue, place of issue — and none of it has to be done by your staff, at your desk, while a guest waits.

Send the guest a link (or put a QR standee on the counter). They fill it in on their own phone, in their own language, and upload their own passport scan. When they arrive, the check-in is already sitting in your dashboard with a countdown on it, and filing it to the FRRO portal is one click from our Chrome extension. Fifteen to twenty-five minutes of typing becomes a few seconds of checking.

Keeping the record afterwards

Filing is not the end of it. Rule 17 requires you to keep each foreign guest's electronic record for at least 12 months. That duty is yours as the accommodation provider — see what changed under Form III.

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