Form C penalties: what the law actually says

Last updated: August 7, 2026

If you provide accommodation in India and a foreign guest stays with you, you must report them on Form C — now Form III — within 24 hours. This page is about the other half of that sentence: what the law says happens if you do not. It quotes the sections themselves, because most of what circulates on this subject does not.

Where the duty comes from

Section 8(1) of the Immigration and Foreigners Act 2025 (in force since 1 September 2025) makes it "the duty of the keeper of accommodation to submit to the Registration Officer such information in respect of foreigners accommodated in such accommodation and in such manner as may be prescribed". The prescribed manner is rule 17 of the Immigration and Foreigners Rules 2025 (G.S.R. 596(E)): Form III, transmitted electronically within 24 hours of the guest's arrival, through indianfrro.gov.in or the designated mobile application.

Two parts of rule 17 get far less attention than the deadline, and both are worth knowing before any conversation about penalties:

• Departure is reportable too. Rule 17(6) requires the departure details to be transmitted the same way, within 24 hours of the guest leaving — arrival is not the end of the obligation.
• The record must be kept and producible. Rule 17(1) requires the particulars to be maintained electronically for at least one year, and rule 17(2) makes them inspectable "at all times… on demand by Registration Officer, District Magistrate or police officer not below the rank of a Head Constable".

The actual penalty: section 23

The Act gives section 8 no penalty clause of its own. What reaches an accommodation provider is the Act's residual offence, section 23(b), which covers whoever

So the maximum exposure for not reporting a foreign guest is up to three years' imprisonment, or a fine up to ₹3,00,000, or both. It is a criminal offence, not an administrative fee. The Act does soften that edge in one respect: section 25 allows offences under section 23 to be compounded — settled before or during prosecution, for sums the Central Government prescribes by notification, capped at the maximum fine — though compounding is not available to anyone who compounded a similar offence within the previous three years. Two things about compounding are worth reading slowly:

• The sums come from a notification, not from the Act. This page quotes only figures we have read in the Act's own text, so it quotes no compounding amount — if you are ever quoted a settlement figure, the notification it comes from, not a news article, is the document to ask for.
• Compounding is a concession, not a price list. It is offered by the authorities, not chosen by you, and section 25 bars it for anyone who compounded a similar offence in the previous three years — the second time, you are back with section 23 in full.

Coverage of the new Act quotes a range of rupee figures, often without saying which provision — or which layer, the offence or its compounding — a number comes from. The same figure can exist in more than one place: the Act, the Rules, and the notifications under them each carry their own amounts. If a figure matters to a decision you are making, read it in the provision it comes from — that is why the sources are linked at the foot of this page.

What enforcement looks like in practice

For most properties the realistic event is not a prosecution out of nowhere. It is an inspection: someone with the authority of rule 17(2) asks to see your records for a stay, and the position you want to be in is a list of filings with acknowledgement numbers, not an explanation. A late or missing filing surfaces exactly then — during a routine check, or when an incident somewhere else makes the police trace where a foreign national stayed.

That is also why the record-keeping half matters as much as the deadline: a filing you cannot evidence a year later is, for inspection purposes, hard to distinguish from a filing that never happened. The 24-hour rule guide covers the deadline mechanics; keep the acknowledgement number for every filing.

The cheap way to never think about this page again

Every failure mode above starts with the same thing: the filing is manual, so it gets deferred. C Form Plus removes the manual part — your guest fills in their own details on their phone before or at check-in, your desk files to the FRRO portal in one click from our Chrome extension, the acknowledgement number is recorded against the guest, and every check-in shows a live countdown against its 24-hour deadline. The pricing is per check-in, with no subscription.

Sources

The claims on this page come from the statute and rules themselves, not from coverage of them:

• The Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025 (Act 13 of 2025) — sections 8, 18, 23 and 25 (India Code, official text).
• The Immigration and Foreigners Rules, 2025 — notified as G.S.R. 596(E), Gazette of India, 1 September 2025; rule 17 is the accommodation-reporting rule. As amended by the Immigration and Foreigners (Amendment) Rules, 2026 (G.S.R. 424(E), 1 June 2026), which left rule 17 unchanged.

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