What is Form 145 and how did it replace Form 15CA?

Last updated 3 August 2026

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An accounts executive at a Bengaluru software exporter logged into the income tax portal in April 2026 to file what she still called "the 15CA" for a consulting payment to a vendor in Singapore. The old menu item was gone. In its place sat a form labelled 145. Nothing about the transaction had changed, the vendor, the amount, and the TDS workings were identical to what she had filed a dozen times before, only the form's name and the law behind it were new.

Form 145 is the direct successor to Form 15CA. It is the online declaration a remitter, meaning you, your company, or whoever is instructing the outward payment, files on the income tax e-filing portal before money is sent abroad. Effective 1 April 2026, it replaced Form 15CA as part of the shift from the Income Tax Act, 1961 to the new Income Tax Act, 2025. Its legal basis now sits in Sections 393, 395, 397 and 462 of the Income Tax Act, 2025, read with Rule 220 of the Income Tax Rules, 2026, the direct replacement for old Section 195(6) and Rule 37BB.

Who has to file it has not changed. Any person making a payment to a non-resident that is chargeable to tax in India, an exporter paying a foreign contractor, a startup paying an overseas SaaS vendor, an individual sending money abroad for education or investment, needs to declare that payment through Form 145 before the bank processes it. The form still captures what 15CA did: the nature and purpose of the remittance, beneficiary details, the applicable TDS rate, and whether the sender is relying on a tax treaty (DTAA) to reduce or eliminate withholding.

What has genuinely changed is upstream of the form itself. Because Form 145 sits inside a re-numbered Act, the internal cross-references, the rule citations you will see in professional advice, and the sections a CA quotes when explaining your withholding position have all moved. Section 195(6) of the old Act is now Section 395 of the new one. If you come across guidance explaining "Section 195(6) obligations," know that it now maps to Form 145's obligations under Section 395 of the Income Tax Act, 2025.

Form 15CB has not disappeared either, it has become Form 146, covered in more detail elsewhere on this site. For taxable remittances above Rs 5 lakhs, you still need a practicing Chartered Accountant to review the transaction and certify the tax position before you file your declaration. Just as a 15CB acknowledgement number used to be entered into Part C of Form 15CA, the Form 146 certificate's acknowledgement now feeds into Form 145 in the same way. The sequence, CA certifies first, remitter declares second, has not changed at all. Only the form numbers attached to each step have.

This is worth sitting with, because a lot of the anxiety around "new forms" is really anxiety about a new law, and the two are not the same thing. The Income Tax Act, 2025 was largely a re-numbering and simplification exercise, not a rewrite of remittance compliance policy. The trigger for filing, a payment to a non-resident that is chargeable to tax, is identical. The threshold for needing a CA certificate is identical. The portal-based, pre-payment filing model is identical. What changed is the label on the form and the section numbers a CA or a bank's compliance officer will now quote back to you.

Practically, this means your bank will still ask for your Form 145 acknowledgement where before it asked for 15CA, will still cross-check it against the payment instruction, and will still expect a matching Form 146 for larger taxable remittances. If your CA firm or accounts team has existing checklists built around "15CA/15CB," the safest approach for FY 2026-27 onward is to update the paperwork's terminology, not the underlying process.

This article is for general information only. For your specific remittance, consult a practicing CA.