What is guideline value?

In Karnataka, the Central Valuation Committee under the Department of Stamps and Registration notifies guideline values, and you can look them up on the Kaveri online portal by district, sub-registrar office and street. Tamil Nadu publishes street-wise and survey-number-wise values on TNREGINET. Kerala calls its version "fair value", and Telangana and Andhra Pradesh use "market value" for the same idea. Same principle, different names, so a buyer moving from Chennai to Hyderabad will hear a new word for an old concept.

For apartments, the value usually has two parts: the undivided share of land (UDS) valued at the land rate for that street, and the construction valued at a per-square-foot rate that depends on the type of building. That's why UDS matters so much in Chennai. For years, many builders there registered only the land share and signed a separate construction agreement, keeping stamp duty low; Tamil Nadu moved to registering new flats at a composite value from December 2023.

Guideline values in Bengaluru and Chennai often sit well below what flats actually sell for in areas like Whitefield or OMR, so duty ends up on the real price. The value still matters when a deal happens below it, and for income tax: the rule from the old Section 50C, continued in the Income-tax Act, 2025, lets the tax department use the stamp duty value when it exceeds the declared price by over 10%.

Revisions are not annual everywhere. Karnataka's last broad revision came in October 2023 after a long gap, so check the date on the value you're relying on.