The 2% Bhu Guarantee window closed on 23 August 2026. What B Khata to A Khata conversion costs now, who still qualifies, and what to verify first.
The Bhu Guarantee window that cut the B-Khata to A-Khata conversion fee from 5 percent of guidance value to 2 percent ran from 15 May 2026 to 23 August 2026. It closed nine days ago. Every guide currently ranking on this question was written while the window was still open and tells you to hurry. That advice has expired. If you own a B-Khata property in Bengaluru, or you are negotiating to buy one, the question is no longer whether to catch the discount. It is whether conversion at the standard rate still pays, and the honest answer is that it does for most owners, for reasons that have almost nothing to do with the fee.
The Bhu Guarantee concession cut the B-to-A conversion fee from 5 percent of guidance value to 2 percent for a 100 day window running 15 May 2026 to 23 August 2026. That window has closed.
As at 1 September 2026, no notification confirming an extension, a fresh window, or the reversion rate has been published. Verify the current rate with the Greater Bengaluru Authority before you budget for it. Do not rely on any article written before 23 August, including the ones still ranking first.
Roughly 7 lakh Bengaluru properties sit in the B register against roughly 16 lakh in the A register.
The fee was never the real cost. A B-Khata property is generally refused as bank collateral, cannot obtain a building plan sanction, and sells at a discount that persists into your own exit. The conversion charge is a fraction of that gap.
Take-up before the discount was very low. Fewer than 7,000 owners applied in the six months preceding the fee cut, which is what prompted the concession in the first place.
An e-Khata on a B-Khata property is still a B-Khata. Digitisation moved the record online. It did not change the register.
Here is the fact that reframes this whole question. In the six months before the Greater Bengaluru Authority cut the fee, fewer than 7,000 owners applied to convert, out of roughly 7 lakh eligible properties. That is a take-up rate of about one percent. The board's own stated reason for the discount was to move a queue that was not moving.
Think about what that means. The fee was already 5 percent of guidance value, and 99 percent of owners were not converting. Then the fee dropped by 60 percent for a hundred days, and roughly 60,000 conversions were approved during the drive. Better, but still under 10 percent of the eligible base.
If a 60 percent price cut only moves a tenth of the market, price was not the binding constraint. Complexity was. Owners do not convert because they do not know whether they qualify, they cannot find their layout approval, the name on the Khata is their late father's, or the survey number on the sale deed does not match the number in the municipal system. The municipal reorganisation itself added a layer of uncertainty here, which we covered separately in the note on what the BBMP to GBA transition means for property owners.
That is why the deadline passing matters less than everyone assumed. The owners who were going to be moved by 3 lakh rupees have mostly moved. The ones still sitting in the B register were never blocked by the fee.
The conversion charge is the smallest number in this calculation. Work through the rest.
Financing. Mainstream lenders generally decline B-Khata property as collateral. The lenders who will fund it typically cap the advance at a materially lower loan-to-value and price the risk into the rate. On a purchase where the buyer intended 70 percent leverage, that is not a cost increase. It is a transaction that does not happen. The structures available at this end of the market, and what each one requires from the title record, are set out in our guide to financing a 5 crore rupee plus purchase in Bangalore.
Buyer pool at exit. Because most banks will not lend, your resale market narrows to cash buyers. Every seller in Bengaluru discovers this at the same moment, which is the moment they list. A narrower buyer pool produces a lower clearing price, and that discount does not reverse on its own. Our read on who is actually buying and selling in the Bangalore luxury resale market sets out how thin that cash segment really is.
Development rights. You cannot obtain a building plan sanction on a B-Khata site. On a plot bought to build a house, this is not a friction. It is the entire purpose of the purchase, unavailable.
Compounding transaction friction. Every future sale, mortgage, succession or partition runs into the identical wall. The problem does not decay. It transfers to whoever inherits it. The pattern is the same one we described for apartments without an occupancy certificate, where a single missing compliance document quietly governs sale, finance and insurance for the life of the asset.
Set the conversion charge against that. Even at the standard 5 percent rate, on a site with a 1 crore rupee guidance value, the fee is 5 lakh rupees against a resale discount and a financing gap that are both multiples of it. The arithmetic was favourable at 5 percent. The discount simply made it obvious.
The number repeated in almost every article on this topic is that 7 lakh owners are eligible. That figure describes the size of the B register, not the size of the qualifying pool, and the two are not the same.
Reported eligibility conditions for the GBA pathway are cumulative rather than alternative. A property needs a valid B-Khata authenticated on the municipal portal, property tax cleared to the current cycle, an approved underlying layout, and adequate public road access. Properties on unapproved layouts, properties inside panchayat limits rather than corporation limits, properties on land earmarked for roads or public infrastructure, and properties carrying active violation or demolition notices do not qualify.
The tax condition trips up more owners than it should, usually because the assessment itself is wrong rather than unpaid. If you are unsure whether your dues are actually clear, our breakdown of how property tax is calculated under the Greater Bengaluru Authority covers where the arrears typically come from.
Read the third condition again. An approved layout. Sites in unapproved revenue layouts are one of the largest single reasons properties end up in the B register in the first place, and on these terms they are excluded from the very scheme designed to fix them.
I want to be careful here, because these specific conditions come from secondary reporting rather than from a notification I have read in full, and the road-width threshold in particular is stated inconsistently across sources. Treat them as the shape of the eligibility test, not as the operative text. Before you price conversion into a transaction, get the property checked against the live portal.
The separate point that catches sophisticated buyers is scope. The GBA conversion pathway addresses B-Khata status arising from layout and land-use defects, where a building was validly constructed but the underlying layout lacks approval or the land lacks a conversion order. It does not resolve construction deviation from a sanctioned plan. A property can be in the B register for more than one reason at once, and a revenue-layout site that also carries an unsanctioned third floor is in a considerably harder position than one that only lacks layout approval. Converting the first defect does not cure the second.
This is the most expensive misunderstanding in Bengaluru property documentation right now, and the discount window made it worse rather than better.
An e-Khata issued on a B-Khata property is a B-Khata e-Khata. The digitisation exercise moved the existing register online and attached a verifiable identity to each record. It did not upgrade anyone's status. The e-Khata certificate itself states which register the property sits in, and that character determines whether the property is loanable and plan-sanctionable.
I have seen owners receive their e-Khata during the drive, conclude the matter was resolved, and let the discount window pass. It was not resolved. Nothing about the register changed.
Two further distinctions that decide whether a transaction completes. A draft e-Khata is auto-generated from digitised records and is a preview, not a document. Only a final e-Khata, issued after supporting documents are uploaded and approved, permits registration. And a final e-Khata is mandatory for registering a Bengaluru property transaction, which means the sub-registrar's system stops the deal rather than a person doing it. There is no counter to appeal to.
Our fuller treatment of these categories sits in the note on A-Khata, B-Khata and e-Khata as a title record, and the underlying point that the Khata proves tax liability rather than ownership is developed there.
The deadline passing changes the negotiation, and it changes it in the buyer's favour more than most sellers have realised.
Until 23 August, a seller could argue that conversion was cheap and imminent. That argument is gone. The cost is now higher, the timeline is unverified, and the qualifying test is unresolved until somebody actually checks the property against the portal.
The structure I would use on any purchase above 3 crore rupees:
Establish register status from the document, not the description. Obtain the e-Khata and read the register classification on its face. A seller saying it is A-Khata in a message is not a check, and at this end of the market that sentence is said with genuine confidence by people who are wrong.
Establish eligibility before you price anything. Confirm the layout approval position, the tax position, the road access and whether any violation notice attaches. If the property cannot convert, the conversion cost is irrelevant and you are buying a permanent condition.
Make conversion a condition precedent, not a post-completion intention. The seller converts before completion, or the full cost plus a margin for delay is escrowed against a defined longstop date. Buying the problem and inheriting it is how a 5 lakh rupee fee becomes a 40 lakh rupee resale discount seven years later.
Verify the current rate in writing before the number goes in the contract. Given that the concession has lapsed and no successor position is confirmed, any figure either party quotes today is an assumption.
Pull a fresh encumbrance certificate covering at least 30 years regardless. The Khata will never show a mortgage, a lien or pending litigation. It was never designed to.
For the wider diligence sequence this sits inside, see our walkthrough of how to buy luxury real estate in Bangalore from shortlist to registration and the 12-point checklist we run on any luxury apartment. Two numbers govern what you will actually pay at the counter: the guidance value your purchase cannot be registered below, since that is the base the conversion charge is calculated on rather than the price you agree, and the revised Karnataka registration fee structure, which lands on the same base.
Three situations account for most of the Khata problems I see above 5 crore rupees.
Older bungalows and independent houses on resale. Stock built before the modern approval regime frequently carries a B-Khata, or a Khata still in the name of a deceased owner with mutation never completed. The title can be perfectly sound and the record still unusable. These are also the properties least likely to satisfy the approved-layout condition, because the layout predates the approval framework entirely. This is disproportionately the old-money belt, and our note on Sadashivanagar and Dollars Colony explains why the oldest addresses carry the messiest records.
Land and plotted holdings bought to build. Here the B-Khata is not a discount. It is a veto. No plan sanction means the site cannot be developed, and a site that cannot be developed is priced as a speculative land parcel rather than as a buildable plot. Buyers comparing plotted land against ready stock should read our survey of what 5 crore to 25 crore rupees buys across Devanahalli, Whitefield, Sarjapur and the CBD fringe before assuming the land route is cheaper.
Remote purchases by non-resident buyers. A buyer working from scanned documents and a power of attorney has no way to distinguish a draft e-Khata from a final one, or an A-register record from a B-register record, without someone verifying against the portal directly. Our NRI guide to buying luxury property in Bangalore covers the wider remote-purchase exposure, and the step-by-step Hebbal case study shows where the document checks sit in a real remote transaction.
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