HRA Exemption Calculator

Your exempt HRA is the smallest of three amounts, worked out for the year: (1) the HRA actually paid to you by your employer; (2) the rent you actually paid minus 10% of your salary; and (3) 50% of your salary if you live in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata or Chennai, or 40% of salary anywhere else. Whichever of those three is smallest is your exemption — the rest of your HRA is taxable. "Salary" here means basic pay plus dearness allowance that counts towards retirement benefits, plus any commission fixed as a percentage of turnover. It does not include bonus, overtime or other allowances. The calculator on this page shows all three amounts side by side so you can see which one is holding your exemption down.

For the return covering income up to 31 March 2026, only four: Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. Nowhere else qualifies. Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, Gurugram, Noida and every other city take the 40% rate, however expensive the rent is there. This is the single most common mistake people make with HRA — the metro list for this rule is not the same as the list of big cities, and it is not the same as the city classification your employer may use for paying HRA. From 1 April 2026 the rule moves into the Income-tax Act, 2025, and the city list is being restated there; if you live outside the four cities, confirm the percentage with your employer or adviser before you assume 40%.

No. HRA exemption is only available under the old tax regime. The Income Tax Department states it plainly: HRA is exempted under section 10(13A) for salaried individuals under the old regime, and that exemption is not available in the new regime. The new regime is the default, so if you want to claim HRA you have to actively choose the old regime for that year. That trade-off is worth doing the arithmetic on: the new regime has lower slab rates but strips out HRA, so a person paying high rent in a metro can easily be better off on the old regime, while a person paying little or no rent usually is not. The return-filing software checks this — the ITR validation rules require the exempt allowance under section 10(13A) to be zero when the new regime is selected.

Yes, if the arrangement is real. Your parents must actually own the home, you must actually live in it, and you must actually pay the rent — ideally by bank transfer every month, not cash, so there is a trail. Your parents then have to declare that rent as income from house property in their own return and pay tax on it (after the standard 30% deduction on rental income). Keep a written rent agreement and rent receipts. What does not work is a paper arrangement with no money moving, or claiming rent for a house you co-own. You also cannot claim HRA for rent paid to your spouse — that arrangement has repeatedly failed on the grounds that spouses are expected to live together anyway.

Yes, once the rent you pay in the year is more than ₹1,00,000. When you declare rent to your employer on Form 12BB so that less tax is deducted from your salary, you must give the landlord’s name, address and PAN if the annual rent crosses ₹1,00,000 — roughly ₹8,334 a month. If your landlord genuinely has no PAN, you need a signed declaration from them saying so, along with their address. Missing PAN details are one of the most common reasons an employer refuses to give effect to an HRA claim in Form 16, which then leaves you claiming it in your return and having to defend it.

Yes — they are separate provisions and neither one cancels the other. HRA exemption is about rent you pay for the home you live in; the home loan deductions are about interest and principal on a property you own. The usual real-life case is someone who owns a flat in one city (with a loan running) and works in another city where they rent. It also covers someone whose owned property is genuinely let out, and someone whose owned home is too far from work to live in. What tax officers look for is whether the story holds together: if you claim rent for a flat in the same building you own and live in, expect that claim to be questioned. Keep rent receipts and loan interest certificates for both sides.

Then section 10(13A) does not apply to you, but section 80GG might. It is a deduction for people who pay rent and receive no HRA, and it is capped at the least of ₹5,000 a month (₹60,000 a year), 25% of your total income, or rent paid minus 10% of your total income. You cannot claim it for a period in which you also claimed HRA, you cannot claim it if you, your spouse or your minor child own a home in the city where you work, and it also needs the old tax regime. It is much smaller than a typical HRA exemption, which is why an HRA component in your salary structure is worth asking for if you rent.

Work it out for the months you were actually in rented accommodation, not for the whole year. The rule is applied to the relevant period — so if you rented for seven months, take the salary and the HRA that relate to those seven months, and the rent you paid in them, and run the three-way test on those figures. If your salary, your rent or your city changed part-way through the year, split the year at each change and calculate each stretch separately, then add the exempt amounts. To do that on this page, switch the input mode to yearly and enter the totals for one stretch at a time.