The Eleven-Month Lease: Why India Rents in Eleven-Month Blocks

The rule, in the words of the two statutes that create it

Registration Act, 1908, section 17(1)(d) — documents of which registration is compulsory:

Transfer of Property Act, 1882, section 107 says the same thing from the other side: a lease “from year to year, or for any term exceeding one year, or reserving a yearly rent, can be made only by a registered instrument.” All other leases “may be made either by a registered instrument or by oral agreement accompanied by delivery of possession.”

And section 18(c) of the Registration Act — the provision almost nobody quotes, though it is the actual home of the eleven-month agreement — lists among documents whose registration is optional: “leases of immovable property for any term not exceeding one year.”

The trap: there are three triggers, not one

INTERPRETATION Read section 17(1)(d) again. It is disjunctive. A lease is compulsorily registrable if it is either from year to year, or for a term exceeding one year, or reserving a yearly rent. Writing “eleven months” at the top of the page defeats the second limb only.

Two common drafting habits walk straight into the other two:

• Expressing rent as an annual figure. “Annual rent of ₹6,00,000, payable monthly” reserves a yearly rent. “Rent of ₹50,000 per month” does not.
• An automatic renewal clause. An eleven-month term that renews itself automatically, so the aggregate term is longer than twelve months, invites the argument that the real bargain is a longer lease dressed as a short one.

OPINION Of every practical point in this article, this is the one worth acting on today. It costs nothing to fix, and it is the difference between an agreement that is validly outside section 17 and one that a court can hold should have been registered.

Lease or leave and licence — and why calling it a licence does not make it one

A lease under section 105 of the Transfer of Property Act is “a transfer of a right to enjoy” property. A licence under section 52 of the Indian Easements Act, 1882 is a right to do something on another’s land which “does not amount to an easement or an interest in the property.” Possession versus permission.

FACT Indian courts decide which one a document is by looking at what the parties actually did, not at the heading. In Associated Hotels of India Ltd. v. R.N. Kapoor, AIR 1959 SC 1262, the Supreme Court held that “to ascertain whether a document creates a license or lease the substance of the document must be preferred to the form. The real test is the intention of the parties.” The Allahabad High Court put it more bluntly in Ram Niwas v. Municipal Board, AIR 1976 All 241: “A lease cannot be converted into a license by merely calling it a license.”

So a document titled “leave and licence” that gives the occupier exclusive possession, with no real right of entry or control retained by the owner, is likely to be read as a lease — and the section 17(1)(d) analysis then applies to it.

Maharashtra: the eleven-month device does not work here at all

This is the single largest error in Indian rental writing, and it affects the country’s biggest rental market.

Note what is not in that section: any duration threshold. It says “any agreement.” An eleven-month leave and licence in Mumbai, Pune, Thane or Nashik is compulsorily registrable, and the Registration Act’s one-year line is overridden.

And the party who loses most by skipping it is the landlord

INTERPRETATION Section 55(2) is the provision to understand. It is not merely that the agreement is unregistered; it is that the tenant’s account of the terms is presumed correct. In a dispute over what the deposit was, or whether there was a lock-in, or what the rent escalation was, an unregistered Mumbai agreement puts the landlord in the position of having to disprove the tenant’s version.

Section 24 of the same Act completes the picture, and it explains why a well-advised Maharashtra landlord registers without being asked. A licensee who does not deliver possession when the licence expires can be evicted by application to the Competent Authority — a summary route, not a civil suit — and is liable to pay damages at double the licence fee. The explanation to the section provides that “an agreement of licence in writing shall be conclusive evidence of the fact stated therein.”

OPINION Registration in Maharashtra is not a tax on the landlord. It is the price of admission to the fastest eviction remedy in Indian residential tenancy law. Skipping it to save a few thousand rupees of stamp duty trades a summary remedy and double damages for a statutory presumption against you. State-level detail is on our Maharashtra rules page.

What it costs: the two states where we can quote the statute

Stamp duty on rent agreements is state law, and most state schedules are amended in almost every budget session. We are printing only the two rates we could read on the face of the current Act. Everything else on the Indian web for the other states traces back to agreement-drafting vendors, and we are not repeating it.

Maharashtra — Article 36A, Maharashtra Stamp Act, 1958

For a leave and licence agreement of not more than sixty months, duty is 0.25% of the total of: the licence fee or rent payable; plus any non-refundable deposit or premium at full value; plus interest at 10% per annum on the refundable security deposit.

INTERPRETATION The refundable deposit is not taxed at face value. Only a notional 10% return on it enters the base. A non-refundable deposit does go in at full value — which is a reason to be careful about how a deposit is described in the document.

One honest caveat on our own arithmetic. Article 36A says “interest calculated at the rate of 10 per cent. per annum” and does not spell out whether an eleven-month term is pro-rated. Computed for a full year instead, the notional interest is ₹60,000, the base ₹11,60,000 and the duty ₹2,900 — a difference of twelve rupees. It is immaterial here, but on a five-year agreement with a large deposit it is not, and the department’s own calculator should be used for anything longer. Registration is separate from duty, and the fee is set by a notification we could not retrieve; get it from the Sub-Registrar. Maharashtra’s e-registration facility for leave and licence is live and lets the whole process be completed without visiting the office.

Karnataka — Article 30, Karnataka Stamp Act, 1957, and the real reason Bengaluru writes eleven months

Karnataka charges lease duty at fifty paise per hundred rupees — 0.5% — on the total of average annual rent, premium, fine and money advanced. Note that last item: unlike Maharashtra, Karnataka puts the deposit itself into the base, not a notional return on it. Bengaluru deposits are famously large, so that matters enormously.

And then comes the clause that explains the entire local custom. For a lease of residential property for a term not exceeding one year, the duty is “subject to a maximum of rupees five hundred.” For a term exceeding one year, there is no such ceiling.

INTERPRETATION The eleven-month agreement in Bengaluru is not primarily about avoiding registration. It is a ₹500-versus-₹5,500 decision, driven by a rupee ceiling in the state’s own stamp schedule, and it gets larger as the deposit gets larger. Whether that is a good trade is a separate question, addressed below. The state-level position sits on our Karnataka rules page, and if you are the landlord working out whether the property is worth holding, the rental yield calculator is the place to start.

What you actually give up by not registering

Not the tenancy. The terms.

FACT Section 49 of the Registration Act says an unregistered document that required registration shall not affect the property and shall not “be received as evidence of any transaction affecting such property” — but the proviso allows it as evidence “of any collateral transaction not required to be effected by registered instrument.” The scope of that proviso is where everything turns, and the Supreme Court has narrowed it.

In M/s Paul Rubber Industries Private Limited v. Amit Chand Mitra, 2023 INSC 854, decided 25 September 2023, the Court reaffirmed the five propositions from K.B. Saha and Sons Private Limited v. Development Consultant Limited, (2008) 8 SCC 564. The fifth is the one to remember:

And the Court in Paul Rubber defined the boundary: content can be used “for a purpose other than for which it has been executed” or “for a purpose remote to the main transaction” — but where the disputed point is the main term, “the Court is excluded by law from examining the unregistered deed for that purpose.” Earlier authority is consistent: in Park Street Properties Private Limited v. Dipak Kumar Singh, (2016) 9 SCC 268, the Court held that courts are not precluded from determining the factum of tenancy from other evidence.

INTERPRETATION Translated for a tenant or a landlord standing in a dispute: you will be able to establish that there was a tenancy. You may not be able to establish what the rent was, what the deposit was, whether there was a lock-in, when it ended, or what it was for. Those are terms, and proposition 5 shuts them out.

Registering it later is not a plan

Section 23 of the Registration Act requires a document to be presented for registration within four months of execution. Section 25 allows a further four months on payment of a fine “not exceeding ten times the amount of the proper registration-fee.” Section 34 adds a further fine of up to ten times where the executants fail to appear in time, “in addition to the fine, if any, payable under section 25.” After eight months, the door is shut.

And a notary cannot fix any of this

FACT Section 8 of the Notaries Act, 1952 sets out the complete list of what a notary may do: verify, authenticate, certify or attest execution; present and protest negotiable instruments; administer oaths and take affidavits; prepare mercantile and foreign-jurisdiction documents; translate; act as commissioner, arbitrator, mediator or conciliator. There is no power to register anything, and no power to cure a section 49 defect.

A notary attests that a signature was made in his presence. That is a statement about execution. Registration is a transactional act performed by a Sub-Registrar under a different statute. Notarising a document that section 17(1)(d) required to be registered leaves it exactly as inadmissible as it was before.

The biggest myth: “it is only eleven months, so I can evict easily”

This is wrong, and for a structural reason rather than a procedural one.

The expiry of the term does not put the landlord back in possession. It determines the lease. What happens next is governed by section 116 of the Transfer of Property Act:

INTERPRETATION Accept one month’s rent after the eleven months are up and, absent a clause saying otherwise, you have renewed the tenancy by operation of law. You are then back to serving a notice under section 106 — fifteen days, expiring with the end of a month of the tenancy, for a residential letting where there is no written contract — and, if the tenant still will not go, to a suit. There is no lawful self-help eviction anywhere in India. The eleven-month term shortens the contractual period. It does not shorten the procedure.

Where the Maharashtra Rent Control Act applies, the summary route under section 24 exists — but only for a registered licence. That is the loop closing: the landlord who skipped registration to save ₹2,888 gave up the remedy that would have got the flat back.

Three things about 2025 and 2026 that are worth knowing

One. There is no new central rent law. FACT Claims that the Centre has notified nationwide rent rules — mandatory digital registration, deposit caps, fast-track dispute resolution — are false. Rent and tenancy are State subjects. The Model Tenancy Act, 2021 was approved by the Union Cabinet expressly “for circulation to all States / Union Territories for adaptation by way of enacting fresh legislation or amending existing rental laws suitably.” It binds nobody by its own force. A state must enact it, and most have not.

Two. In Tamil Nadu there is a second, separate registration you probably do not know about. Under the Tamil Nadu Regulation of Rights and Responsibilities of Landlords and Tenants Act, 2017, tenancy agreements must be in writing and registered with the Rent Authority — an obligation distinct from, and additional to, anything under the Registration Act. The state runs a dedicated portal for it.

Three. Parliament looked at this rule in 2025 and deliberately kept it. The Department of Land Resources released a draft Registration Bill, 2025 for public consultation, intended to replace the Registration Act, 1908 entirely with “a modern, online, paperless and citizen centric registration system.” Comments closed on 25 June 2025.

Clause 12(1) of that draft, listing documents whose registration is compulsory, reproduces the lease trigger word for word: “leases of immovable property from year to year, or for any term exceeding one year or reserving a yearly rent.” Meanwhile the same clause newly captures agreements for sale, developer and promoter agreements, powers of attorney authorising transfer, documents recording a mortgage by deposit of title deeds, and sale certificates.

INTERPRETATION Given a blank sheet and a mandate to modernise, the drafters went after the instruments that have caused the most litigation — and left the one-year lease line exactly where it was put in 1908. The eleven-month agreement is not surviving by oversight. It is surviving by deliberate re-enactment. As at 12 September 2026 the Bill remains a draft in pre-legislative consultation; we could find no evidence it has been introduced, and we track changes like this on the property law changes page.

Questions to settle before you sign

• Does the document express rent as a monthly figure? If it says “annual rent”, change it.
• Is there an automatic renewal clause that takes the aggregate term past twelve months?
• Is the property in Maharashtra? Then registration is compulsory whatever the term says, and it is the landlord’s legal duty.
• Is the deposit described as refundable or non-refundable? In Maharashtra that single word changes the stamp duty base from a notional 10% to full value.
• If a dispute arose tomorrow over the deposit amount, what document would prove it?
• Has the landlord confirmed that the person signing is the owner, and have you seen the tax receipt or a title document in that name?
• Which forum hears a dispute over this property — a rent authority, a competent authority, or the civil court?

Related reading: Who pays whom in an Indian property deal, and our glossary of Indian real estate terms for leave and licence, lock-in, holding over and the rest.