Maharashtra scrapped NA permission. Here is the one-time premium you pay instead

For decades the answer to "can I build on this land" in Maharashtra had two halves, and the second half was the slow one. The planning authority told you what you could build. The Collector, separately, told you whether the land was allowed to stop being farmland. That second file produced a document called a sanad, took months, and then billed you every year afterwards for the privilege. On 31 December 2025 the state deleted it.

What actually changed#

The amending Act was introduced on 8 December 2025 and assented to on 31 December 2025. It substitutes sections 42 and 47 of the Maharashtra Land Revenue Code, 1966, and deletes a long list of others, including sections 42A to 42D, 44, 44A, 45, 46 and 47A. Those were the provisions that carried the conversion permission, the sanad framework, the bona fide industrial use route and the penalties for unauthorised change of use. A Government Resolution of the Revenue and Forest Department dated 10 February 2026 set out how the departments are to work the new regime.

The mechanism is simpler than the paperwork it replaces. If the use you propose is already permissible in the sanctioned Development Plan or Regional Plan under the Maharashtra Regional and Town Planning Act, 1966, then the planning authority's approval of your building plan is treated as the non-agricultural permission. There is no separate application, no separate order and no sanad. The revenue record is corrected on the strength of the same approval.

An operational analogy. The old regime worked like a building that needed two keys held by two different offices, where the second office kept its own queue, its own file and its own annual bill for the same door. The reform did not speed up the second office. It removed the second lock and handed the one remaining key to the office you were already visiting.

Deshmukh recalculates#

Deshmukh, our Nashik land owner, has spent two years weighing a joint venture offer against developing his own parcel. Names and numbers in this story are illustrative. Under the old arithmetic, self-development carried a cost he could not date: the conversion file, an unpredictable number of months, and an annual assessment that ran for as long as he held the land. That uncertainty was quietly one of the strongest arguments for taking the JV and letting a partner absorb it.

The reform does not make his land more valuable. It makes one line of his model computable. The conversion cost is now a number he can work out from his plot size and the ready reckoner before he decides anything, and the timeline collapses into the permission he was applying for anyway. Whether he should still take the JV is a different question, driven by capital and execution capacity rather than by a file in the Collectorate. But he can now answer it without a placeholder.

What you pay: the one-time premium#

The substituted section 47 replaces the whole stack of conversion tax, annual non-agricultural assessment and nazarana with a single payment, banded by the size of the plot and charged on market value as determined by the current Annual Statement of Rates, the document most people call the ready reckoner.

Worked through on a real-shaped parcel. The median published MahaRERA project sits on 1,321 sq m. At an illustrative ready reckoner rate of Rs 30,000 per sq m, that is a market value of about Rs 3.96 crore, and the middle band puts the premium at roughly Rs 99,000. At Rs 60,000 per sq m it is roughly Rs 1.98 lakh. Your own figure moves with the reckoner rate for your survey number, which varies enormously across the state, so treat the arithmetic as the method rather than the answer.

Two things are worth saying plainly about that number. It is one payment, not an annual one. And it is small relative to the cost it used to carry, which was never really the rupees; it was the months.

Where Maharashtra's projects actually sit#

Because the bands are drawn on plot size, and plot size is one of the very few fields Maharashtra developers file almost without exception, the register can answer a question the notification cannot: which band does a normal project land in? Of 55,631 published projects in our MahaRERA corpus, 55,608 declare a usable plot area, a fill rate of 99.96 percent.

The median plot is 1,321 sq m, which puts the median project in the middle band by a margin of about 320 sq m. The quartiles are wide apart: 630 sq m at the 25th percentile, 3,500 sq m at the 75th. So the state does not have one answer to "what will this cost", it has three, and which one applies to you is decided before you file anything.

That split is geographic, and sharply so. A median Nagpur project is more than five times the size of a median Sangli one, which places the two districts in different bands as a matter of course.

What did not change#

This is the part most summaries skip, and it is the part that decides whether the reform helps you at all.

The relief is conditional on the use being already permissible under the sanctioned plan. If your parcel is in a zone where what you want to build is not permitted, nothing here helps: you are back in the older world of seeking a change, and the Collector's route still exists for cases outside the planning-permission mechanism. Establishing which authority holds your parcel and what its plan permits is therefore now the whole question, not a preliminary to it. We covered that separately in who signs your development permission.

Nor does any of this touch the rest of the permission chain. The building permission itself is unchanged, with the same documents, the same 7/12 extract dated no earlier than six months, and the same sequence through to the Commencement Certificate, all of which we walked through in the permission sequence. Tenancy restrictions, tribal land protections and ceiling limits sit in their own statutes and are not swept away by an amendment to the Land Revenue Code.

One quieter consequence is worth flagging for anyone reading old material. Schemes that used to advertise deemed non-agricultural status as a special concession have been overtaken by it becoming the general rule. The Integrated Township regulation still offers exactly that, plus a 50 percent exemption on non-agricultural assessment, and half of an abolished levy is nothing. We have annotated the township article accordingly. If you are pricing a scheme off a benefit sheet written before 2026, re-read it.

Land that is already converted#

The transitional rule sets a valuation year rather than granting an exemption. Where land was converted on or before 31 December 2001, the premium is worked out on 2001 rates. Where it was converted between 1 January 2002 and 31 December 2025, it is worked out on the Annual Statement of Rates for the year in which the conversion actually happened, not on today's. For land converted long ago in a district that has since repriced, the gap between those two bases is the whole cost, which makes the date on your old order a number worth finding before anyone quotes you a figure.

What this changes for a buyer#

Indirectly but genuinely. "Agricultural land never converted" has been a standing item on every title-report risk list, including our own twelve-document checklist, because it could freeze a project for years. For a new project inside a planning authority's area, that specific defect is now largely designed out: the conversion rides on the permission the project must have anyway. It remains live for older title chains and for land outside planning areas, so the check does not disappear. It just stops being the most likely thing to be wrong. For someone buying the ground itself rather than a flat, the order of checks, from the 7/12 extract to the gunthewari question, is in buying an NA plot in Maharashtra.

What the filings tell you that the notification cannot#

The Act tells you the rate. It cannot tell you whether the promoter selling on that parcel has ever finished one. That is what the register is for, and it is the join our Rs 2,999 project analysis makes: the filed plot area and permissible built-up for the parcel itself, the promoter's other registrations with the slip between their original and current completion dates, and the district benchmark those numbers sit against. For a whole pincode rather than one parcel, the area market report is a flat Rs 2,999. If you are weighing a parcel this quarter, the register has already told you what the neighbours did with theirs. Start with the area pages on ReraGenie, which are free to read.

For the wider case on reading the register as supply-side data rather than compliance paperwork, start with what MahaRERA filings tell a developer.

Sources and method#

Statutory position: Maharashtra Land Revenue Code (Second Amendment) Act, 2025, introduced 8 December 2025 and assented to 31 December 2025, substituting sections 42 and 47 and deleting sections 42A to 42D, 44, 44A, 45, 46 and 47A; Government Resolution of the Revenue and Forest Department dated 10 February 2026. Premium bands as summarised from the substituted section 47.

Corpus figures: ReraGenie analysis of 55,631 published MahaRERA project registrations as at August 2026, of which 55,608 declare a usable plot area under the land details block. Band shares, medians, quartiles and district medians are computed on that set. Districts shown are those with 500 or more published projects. Illustrative ready reckoner rates are stated as illustrative and are not drawn from the Annual Statement of Rates for any particular location.

This article is educational and not legal advice. For a specific parcel, consult a lawyer who practises in Maharashtra revenue and planning law.