Booking amount to registration: the money timeline of buying a flat

Nobody buys a flat with one payment. You buy it eight or ten times: a token, a booking amount, a down payment, an agreement with stamp duty, a string of construction-linked instalments, and a final settlement at possession. Each payment has its own rules, its own receipts and its own risks, and the order is not negotiable. Buyers who see the whole timeline in advance negotiate better and panic less.

Priya and Arjun's spreadsheet moment#

When Priya and Arjun (our first-time buyers from Pune, illustrative as always) picked their project, they thought the hard part was over. Then the payment schedule arrived: 9 percent on booking, 21 percent on agreement, instalments at plinth, at every fourth slab, on brickwork, on flooring, at possession. Arjun opened a spreadsheet and discovered the real question was never "can we afford the flat". It was "can we afford March", the month when the agreement, the stamp duty and the first EMI all landed together.

The timeline, stage by stage#

Think of the purchase as a toll road. You know the destination price, but the tolls come at fixed gates along the way, and each gate issues a different document. Here is the road for a typical under-construction purchase, using a Rs 80 lakh flat as the running example.

Gate 1: the token or expression of interest (Rs 50,000 to Rs 2 lakh). A small amount to freeze the unit and the price while paperwork starts. Insist on a receipt stating it is adjustable against the price, and get the refund terms in writing before you pay.

Gate 2: the booking amount (up to 10 percent, Rs 8 lakh here). This is where the law draws its first hard line. Section 13 of the RERA Act bars a promoter from accepting more than 10 percent of the cost before a registered agreement for sale. A builder asking for 15 or 20 percent "to process the file" before an agreement is asking you to fund a violation. This cap exists precisely because the booking stage is where you have paid money but hold the fewest rights.

Gate 3: the agreement for sale, with stamp duty and registration. The single most document-heavy day of the purchase. The agreement locks the carpet area, the price, the possession date and the payment plan; from here, RERA's delay and refund remedies attach to written promises. The same day, you pay stamp duty (roughly 5 to 7 percent depending on the state, with concessions in some states for women buyers), computed on the higher of your agreement price and the government's ready reckoner valuation for that building, and registration fees (commonly 1 percent, often capped). On Rs 80 lakh in Maharashtra, that is about Rs 4.8 lakh of stamp duty plus Rs 30,000 registration. First-time buyers consistently misplace this cost at possession; it is due years earlier.

Gate 4: construction-linked instalments. The bulk of the price, typically 70 to 80 percent, paid against certified construction stages: plinth, slabs, walls, finishing. Each demand letter should reference a stage you can verify in the project's quarterly progress reports. If your instalments are due on calendar dates instead of construction stages, you are on a time-linked plan, and our guide to payment plans explains why that shifts risk onto you.

Gate 5: GST, riding on every instalment. Under-construction homes attract 5 percent GST (1 percent for affordable housing), added to each payment. Rs 4 lakh on our example flat. Buy after the completion certificate and the GST is zero, one of the four numbers in the under-construction vs ready-to-move decision.

Gate 6: possession and the final settlement. The last 5 to 10 percent, plus the charges that cluster at handover: maintenance deposit, society formation, utility connections. Pay the final instalment only alongside the pre-possession inspection and after confirming the occupancy certificate exists.

Where the loan fits#

The home loan does not arrive as one cheque. After sanction, the bank disburses in slices against each demand letter, and your EMI grows with the disbursed amount (many banks charge interest-only on part disbursement first). Two data points show how central this machinery has become: the average home loan ticket size in India rose from about Rs 29 lakh to Rs 37 lakh over the three years to FY25 (industry lending data reported by IBEF, 2025), and housing credit was growing about 12 percent year on year in December 2025 after the RBI's repo rate cuts from 6.5 to 5.25 percent through 2025 made EMIs cheaper (RBI data).

The practical consequence of staged disbursement: if you live on rent during construction, rent and a growing EMI overlap. On a 30-month build, that overlap is routinely several lakh rupees, a line item that belongs in the spreadsheet next to stamp duty.

What the timeline looks like when it goes wrong#

Every gate has a known failure: a token that becomes non-refundable, a 20 percent pre-agreement demand, demand letters for slabs that do not exist, a possession call without an occupancy certificate. All of them are visible in advance to a buyer who checks filings before paying. This is where a Rs 499 ReraGenie buyer report earns its price at gate 2 rather than gate 6: it shows the project's construction percentage each quarter against its booking numbers, its extension history and disclosed litigation, so you know whether the demand letters ahead of you are likely to match reality. Buyers who sign up on ReraGenie before the booking amount get the timeline's riskiest decision, whether to enter at all, made with the project's own filed numbers.

The one-line summary#

A flat purchase is not one price but a sequence of tolls: capped booking, early stamp duty, GST on every instalment, staged loan disbursement, and a settled final gate. Map the gates before the first token, and none of them can ambush you.