Ask anybody about forming a charitable trust and you will be told about the Indian Trusts Act, 1882. It is in every article, every quotation and every conversation at the sub-registrar’s office. Now read section 1 of it. After the short title comes a savings paragraph, and in it the Act says that nothing contained in it applies to public or private religious or charitable endowments. Which means the statute everybody names is the one statute that does not govern the trust most people are actually forming. There is no central law for a public charitable trust in India. It rests on its own deed, on the principles courts apply to anybody holding property for somebody else, and on a State public trusts law where the State happens to have one. The second thing nobody separates is this: trust registration is two different exercises sharing one name. Registering the deed is the registration of a document, at the sub-registrar’s office. Registering the trust is an entry in a State register of public trusts, kept by a charity authority — and that one exists in Maharashtra and Gujarat and does not exist in Delhi at all. And neither of them brings the trust into being. Section 6: a trust is created when the author indicates with reasonable certainty an intention to create a trust, the purpose, the beneficiary and the trust property — and then transfers that property to the trustee. Four things said, and the property actually handed over. The handing over is the step most often skipped, and no amount of registration repairs its absence. Tax is a third question again, and the most oversold. Section 12AB of the Income-tax Act is what an institution needs to claim exemption, and it is granted for a limited period and has to be renewed. Section 80G is about the deduction available to a person who donates — not about whether your trust exists or is charitable. Where we stop: we print no stamp duty rate, registration fee, charity authority fee, tax form, validity period or deadline, because every one of those is State or rule-made and has moved. We do not certify that any object is charitable, and we do not choose your trustees.
What this guide covers
Which Act your matter runs under. The Income-tax Act, 2025 came into force on 1 April 2026, with the Income-tax Rules, 2026 notified on 20 March 2026, and it replaces the Income-tax Act, 1961. Section 536 of the 2025 Act carries the repeal and savings, and the Income Tax Department reads it this way in its own transition FAQs: under section 536(2)(c) a proceeding pending at commencement, an appeal included, continues under the 1961 Act for a tax year beginning before 1 April 2026; under 536(2)(e) a registration application pending on 31 March 2026 is disposed of under the 1961 Act; under 536(2)(j) a provisional approval granted under the old Act stays in force; and an existing approval or registration that is not inconsistent with the 2025 Act is treated as granted under the corresponding new provision. Anything the savings do not reach is covered by section 536(4), which applies section 6 of the General Clauses Act, 1897. The section numbers printed on this page are the 1961 Act numbers, because that is what the papers in an older matter will say. We do not substitute a 2025 Act number for a 1961 Act number unless the Department has published that mapping, and we tell you in writing which Act your own matter runs under before we start. For a charitable institution the practical line is this: an application for fresh provisional registration made on or after 1 April 2026 goes in on Form No. 104 under the new Rules, while an application that was already pending on 31 March 2026 is decided under the old Act.
Start with the sentence you will hear in every conversation about this, because it is the sentence that sends people in the wrong direction.
A trust in India is governed by the Indian Trusts Act, 1882. It appears in articles, in quotations, in the explanations given at a sub-registrar’s office, and in the covering note that comes with most trust deeds anybody is sold.
It is said with complete confidence and by people who are not trying to mislead anybody. It is also, for the trust most readers of this page are forming, wrong — and the Act itself is where you find that out.
Open the Act at the beginning and the exclusion is in the very first section, after the short title.
Section 1 carries a savings paragraph. It is short, it is easy to read past, and it is the most consequential sentence in the whole subject.
Nothing contained in the Act affects the rules of Mohammedan law as to waqf, or the mutual relations of the members of an undivided family as determined by any customary or personal law, or applies to public or private religious or charitable endowments, or to trusts to distribute prizes taken in war among the captors.
Take the one limb that concerns this page and read it on its own.
The Act does not apply to public or private religious or charitable endowments. Not partly, not subject to exceptions, not unless otherwise provided. It simply does not reach them.
A public charitable trust — a trust for a school, a dispensary, a temple, a relief fund — is a charitable endowment. Which means the Act everybody cites for it is the Act that was drafted to exclude it, and that exclusion is in the Act’s own opening section rather than buried in a schedule.
Which raises the obvious question, and the answer tidies the whole picture up.
The Indian Trusts Act, 1882 governs private trusts: a trust for named individuals, a family arrangement, a settlement for identified beneficiaries. For those, the Act supplies a full code — how the trust is created, what the trustee may and may not do, what the beneficiary may demand, how the trust ends.
Public charitable trusts were left out because they were already dealt with differently — by the law relating to charitable and religious endowments, by the courts applying equitable principles to anybody holding property for a purpose, and in several States by legislation of their own. Not an oversight. A deliberate division.
None of which decides whether a trust is the right form in the first place. That choice — between a trust, a society with its bye-laws and elected managers, and a section 8 company with company-law filings — is argued out on our NGO registration page on governance grounds rather than tax grounds, and we have not run it again here. Everything below takes the trust route as already settled.
And here is the practical consequence, which matters more than the legal history.
When a statute governs an arrangement, it fills gaps. Leave something out of a partnership deed or a company’s articles and the Act supplies the default. There is a provision for what happens when the document is silent.
For a public charitable trust there is no such central Act filling gaps. What the deed does not say is not supplied for you by a section somewhere. It has to be argued from general principles, or settled by a court, or lived with. Which is why the drafting of a trust deed deserves more care than the drafting of almost any other founding document in Indian practice.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
One question, asked at the start, prevents most of the disappointment in this area.
Not whether a trust has been registered. What exactly was registered, and by whom.
Because the phrase trust registration covers two different exercises, before two different authorities, with two different meanings — and in many States only one of them is available at all. People buy one and believe they have both.
Put the first of the two in its plainest form.
Registering a trust means getting the trust itself entered in a register of public trusts maintained by a State charity authority, after an inquiry, with a number against the trust’s name.
That is a registration of an institution. It presupposes that a State has a law establishing such a register and an officer to keep it. Where no such law exists, there is nothing of this kind to apply for — and no amount of money paid to anybody produces one.
And the second, which is what almost everybody actually buys.
Registering the deed means presenting a document at the sub-registrar’s office so that it is recorded in the public register of documents, with its own registration particulars.
That is a registration of paper, not of an institution. It is genuinely valuable, it is what a bank and a sub-registrar will want to see, and in a State with no public trusts law it is the whole of your documentary standing. It is simply not the same event as the first one, and saying so is most of what this page is for.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Before either registration, the prior question, and it is the one hardly anybody is taken through.
What actually creates a trust. Not what proves it, not what records it — what brings it into existence, so that from that moment the property is held for the purpose and not for its former owner.
And for this the Trusts Act is worth reading even though it does not govern your trust, because its statement of what creation requires is the clearest in Indian law and is what practice follows in any event.
The provision is short and worth having in front of you.
Section 6: a trust is created when the author of the trust indicates with reasonable certainty, by any words or acts, an intention on his part to create thereby a trust, the purpose of the trust, the beneficiary and the trust property, and, unless the trust is declared by will or the author of the trust is himself to be the trustee, transfers the trust property to the trustee.
Read it as a list and it is four statements followed by one act. The four are what people put in the deed. The one act is what they forget.
Each of the four does separate work, and each is capable of failing on its own.
Intention: that a trust is what was meant, rather than a gift, a loan or a promise to spend money on something. Purpose: what the property is to be used for. Beneficiary: who is to benefit, which for a charitable trust is a section of the public rather than named people. Property: what, exactly, is being settled.
Reasonable certainty is the standard for all four, and the one most often missed in practice is the last. A deed reciting that the author settles his property at Mathura on the trust has not identified anything with reasonable certainty if he owned three things there.
Now the limb at the end of the section, which is where this part of the page has been heading.
Unless the trust is declared by will, or the author is himself to be the trustee, the author must transfer the trust property to the trustee. That is not a recital in the deed. It is a transfer of the property.
So the deed saying that a plot is hereby settled upon the trust is a statement of intention; the plot moving out of the author’s name and into the trustees’ hands is the creation. Where money is concerned, it is the money leaving a personal account and entering an account held by the trustees for the trust.
It is worth saying why the law insists on this, because once the reason is clear nobody skips it.
A trust is an obligation attached to the ownership of property. If no property has moved, there is nothing for the obligation to attach to. The trustees have duties about something they do not hold, and the author continues to hold, use and deal with what he has described as trust property.
Which is exactly the state of affairs the whole structure exists to prevent. The point of settling property on trustees is that it stops being available to the person who settled it. Until the transfer happens, that has not occurred in any sense a court would recognise.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
And this produces the single commonest defect we see in trusts brought to us for review.
A properly drafted, properly registered deed. A trust with a name, a PAN and a set of trustees. And the property described in the deed still standing in the name of the person who formed it, or in the name of a deceased parent whose estate has never been dealt with.
The trust has a purpose and no property. It is not a fraud and usually nobody intended anything by it — the file simply stopped at the point where everybody thought the work was finished. And it surfaces at the worst moment: when a donor’s diligence asks what the trust owns, or when the trustees try to deal with the asset and discover they cannot.
Which lets the central proposition of this page be stated flatly.
No certificate makes a trust. Not a registration receipt from the sub-registrar, not an entry in a State register, not a PAN, not a tax registration, not a letter from anybody.
A trust is made by a declaration with the four certainties in it and by the property actually changing hands. Everything issued afterwards is evidence about an event that either happened or did not. Paper cannot reach backwards and supply the event.
Said fairly, because this page is not an argument against registering anything.
A registered deed proves, from a public record, what was declared, by whom, over what property, on what date. That is a great deal. It is what lets trustees deal with banks, with revenue offices and with donors as trustees rather than as a group of individuals making claims about themselves.
So register the deed, always, whatever your State requires. The caution in this part is not against registration. It is against believing that registration is the creation, because that belief is what leaves property sitting in a dead man’s name for six years.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Compress this part and it reduces to three sentences worth carrying into the next one.
The Act everybody names does not govern a charitable trust. What creates the trust is four certainties plus a real transfer of property. And registration records what was done rather than doing it.
Which sets up the question the next part answers: if registration is a record rather than a creation, what exactly are the different registrations available, who keeps each one, and which of them applies to you. There are two, and most readers of this page can only do one.
Separate them properly now, because from here on the page depends on the distinction holding.
One is the registration of an instrument under the general law relating to the registration of documents. The other is the registration of an institution under a State law relating to public trusts.
Different statutes, different authorities, different registers, different purposes, different consequences for not doing it. The only thing they share is the word registration and the fact that both get described on the phone as trust registration.
And for a trust of immovable property, the statute makes it a condition of validity rather than a good idea.
Section 5: no trust in relation to immovable property is valid unless declared by a non-testamentary instrument in writing signed by the author of the trust or the trustee and registered, or by the will of the author of the trust or of the trustee. For movable property: unless declared as aforesaid, or unless the ownership of the property is transferred to the trustee.
Read the two halves against each other. For land, writing plus registration. For movable property, writing and registration, or simply handing the property over. The machinery of what registration of a document achieves generally is set out on our notary agreement page, and we have not repeated it here.
Practically, this is an afternoon at a specific office.
The deed is presented at the office of the sub-registrar having jurisdiction, duly stamped, with the parties attending as the office requires, and it comes back with its registration particulars endorsed on it.
The stamp position has to be settled before execution rather than discovered at the counter, and it varies by State and by whether immovable property is being settled. That is one of several reasons this page prints no amount: the office that will charge it is the only reliable source for it.
Two practical things usually run alongside that afternoon. The trust needs its own tax identity, so a PAN is applied for in the trust’s name rather than anybody else’s. And it needs an address it can actually evidence, which where the premises belong to somebody else means a rent agreement and usually an owner’s no-objection letter, and in a building run by an association sometimes a society no-objection as well.
A fair question from somebody settling only money, where section 5 offers the alternative of simply transferring ownership.
Because the trust will have to prove itself repeatedly for decades, to people who were not present and have no reason to take anybody’s word. A bank opening an account. A revenue office. A tax authority considering exemption. A donor’s diligence. A successor trustee in 2050.
An unregistered deed asks every one of them to accept a private piece of paper. A registered one hands them a public record of the same thing, and certified true copies of it can be obtained again if the original is ever lost — which, over the life of a trust, is a real risk rather than a theoretical one.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Now the other one, which is a different kind of thing altogether.
Some States have their own legislation about public trusts, and under it a public trust is registered as an institution: an application, an inquiry, findings recorded, and an entry made in a register of public trusts kept by a charity authority.
This one carries continuing supervision with it. A trust on such a register is a trust whose accounts, changes of trustee and dealings with property are the business of an authority on an ongoing basis — which is the real difference between the two registrations, and it is rarely explained to anybody before they apply.
And the part that cannot be generalised, which is why so much written about this subject is useless to the reader who finds it.
Whether this second registration exists at all depends entirely on which State the trust belongs to. Some States have such a law and a charity authority to run it. Several have none.
Delhi has no public trusts Act of its own. So a reader in Delhi who has been told to get the trust registered with a Charity Commissioner has been told to do something that does not exist there — and a reader in Maharashtra who has only registered the deed has left a statutory duty undone.
Take the clearest example, because it shows what this second registration actually involves.
Maharashtra operates the Bombay Public Trusts Act, 1950, now the Maharashtra Public Trusts Act, and Gujarat has legislation of the same pattern. Under it the definition of a public trust is wider than people expect.
Section 2(13) covers an express or constructive trust for a public purpose of a religious or charitable character, and expressly includes a temple, a math, a wakf, a church, a synagogue, an agiary or other place of public religious worship, and also a society formed for a religious or charitable purpose and registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860.
Note the last limb. In such a State a registered society formed for charitable purposes can be a public trust for that Act as well, with the obligations that follow — which surprises a great many society office-bearers.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
And the obligation is framed as a duty on a person rather than as an option for the institution.
Section 18 places on the trustee of a public trust the duty of applying for its registration, within three months of the creation of the trust, to the Deputy or Assistant Charity Commissioner of the region concerned. An inquiry follows under section 19, findings are recorded, and the trust is entered in the register kept by the Charity Commissioner.
Three months, from creation. Which is a short window, and it starts from the event discussed in the previous part — the declaration and the transfer — rather than from whenever the trustees get around to thinking about registration.
Closing this part with the only honest instruction a general page can give on it.
Establish the position for your own State before you accept a quotation from anybody, and get it in writing. Not whether trusts are registered in India. Whether your State has a public trusts law, and if it does, what it requires and by when.
We deliberately do not print a State-by-State list here. A list on a web page is exactly how a reader ends up applying to an office that does not handle it, or skipping a duty that carries a three-month clock. The two States named above are named because we have read their law; for yours, ask somebody who will read yours.
Here is the structure that makes the whole subject manageable, and it is the most useful thing on this page for somebody holding a file they do not understand.
There are four separate questions anybody can ask about a charitable trust. Each one is answered by a different authority, on different material, under a different law. None of the four answers any of the others.
Does the trust exist? Is its deed registered? Is it entered on a public trusts register? Is it exempt from tax? Four questions. Four doors. And a file that satisfies one of them tells you nothing about the other three.
The first question, and the only one with no office attached to it at all.
Nobody issues an answer to this. There is no authority that certifies that a trust exists. It is a conclusion drawn from the deed and from what was actually done with the property, and the people who draw it are a court, a tax officer, a bank or a donor’s adviser, each for their own purposes.
Which is why the deed is the asset and not the certificate. The question with no certificate against it is the one everything else depends on, and it is answered by the quality of the document and the reality of the transfer.
The second, and the one with the clearest answer of the four.
This is answered by the sub-registrar’s record. The deed either bears registration particulars or it does not, and a copy can be obtained from the office that holds it.
It is a clean, verifiable, binary fact, which is exactly why it gets used as a proxy for the other three. Somebody asks whether the trust is registered, somebody produces a registered deed, and everybody moves on satisfied — having established the easiest of the four questions and none of the rest.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
The third, and the one whose answer may be that the question does not apply.
In a State with its own public trusts law, this is answered by the charity authority’s register, and the trust has a number there. In a State without such a law, the honest answer is that there is no such register to be on.
Both answers are complete answers. The error is to treat the second as a gap in the file — a trust in Delhi is not missing a registration it was never able to obtain, and nobody should be sold one.
And the fourth, which is the question most people actually came to ask without knowing it was separate.
This is answered by the income tax authority and by nobody else. It depends on registration under the Income-tax Act, on the objects as that authority reads them, and on continuing compliance by the institution.
No registration under any other law produces this answer, and no amount of paper from the first three doors influences it. Which is why a trust can be properly formed, properly registered, properly on a State register, and taxable.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
The whole of it in one place, because this is the page people will come back for.
| The question | Who answers it | What it rests on | What it does NOT tell you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Does the trust exist? | No authority. A court, a bank or an officer decides it when it matters | The four certainties, and the actual transfer of the property | Nothing about registration or tax |
| Is the deed registered? | The sub-registrar’s office | Presentation of the instrument, duly stamped | Whether the trust holds any property, or is exempt |
| Is it on a public trusts register? | A State charity authority — where the State has such a law | An application, an inquiry, an entry in the register | Whether the objects qualify for exemption |
| Is it exempt from tax? | The income tax authority, and nobody else | Registration under the Income-tax Act and continuing compliance | Whether a donor gets a deduction — that is a further approval again |
Read the last column downwards. Every row has something it cannot tell you, and in practice each row is routinely offered as though it told you everything.
Worth explaining rather than treating as carelessness, because the confusion has a structure.
All four happen in the same few weeks, often arranged by the same person, and all four produce a piece of paper with a number on it. From the outside they look like four stages of one process, because that is exactly how they are experienced.
And one of them genuinely is a prerequisite of another, which makes the sequence feel like a single chain. You cannot sensibly apply for tax registration without a deed. But a prerequisite is not the same as a stage, and the tax authority is not continuing work the sub-registrar began.
A point about how this is sold, made without accusing anybody of dishonesty.
A person offering trust registration for a fixed sum is usually offering the deed and its registration. That is a real piece of work, and it is often done competently and quickly. What is not included — and what he is under no obligation to mention — is the State position, the actual transfer of the property, and the tax registrations.
So the family that paid and received a registered deed received what was sold. The gap is in the explanation rather than in the work, and the right response is to complete the file rather than to pursue the person who did the first part of it.
Where somebody genuinely was not given what they paid for, the ordinary route is a legal notice setting out what was agreed and what was delivered, and if one arrives in the other direction, a reply to it. We would say honestly that for the sums usually involved this is rarely worth the months it consumes.
One question to ask anybody quoting for this, and it does more than reading a proposal.
Which of these four does your fee cover: the deed, its registration, the State public trusts application, or the tax registrations? Asked in that form, in advance, it is almost impossible to answer vaguely.
An honest quotation will name one or two of them and say who does the others. Our own answer is on this page further down, and it is the first two, with the fourth handed to whoever does your accounting.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Now the tax door on its own, because it generates more wrong belief than the other three together.
Registration under section 12AB of the Income-tax Act, 1961 is what an institution needs in order to claim exemption. It replaced the older registration under sections 12A and 12AA, and it is granted for a limited period rather than in perpetuity, so it has to be renewed.
It is a tax recognition of an institution that already exists. It does not create the trust, confirm that it was validly created, or say anything about whether its deed was registered. The tax authority is answering its own question, for its own purposes, under its own Act.
And it is worth being precise, because people speak of a trust being tax-free as though it were a status.
It is not a status conferred once and kept. It is a conditional treatment of income, which depends on the institution continuing to do what it said it would do with its money, and on filing what it is required to file.
So a trust can hold the registration and still find a year’s income taxed, because exemption is tested against conduct rather than against paperwork. That is a matter for the institution’s chartered accountant year on year, and a trust that keeps proper books from its first month rather than its fourth year has a much easier conversation with him.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
The one everybody asks for by name, and almost nobody describes correctly.
Approval under section 80G concerns the deduction available to a person who gives money to the institution. It is a benefit aimed at the donor, administered through the institution.
Which is why a trust can be entirely valid, properly registered and doing excellent work with no 80G approval at all. What it will notice is that donors who were expecting a deduction behave differently — and that is a fundraising fact rather than a legal defect in the trust.
And here is the dividing line we apply on every compliance page on this site.
Some of what governs a trust is written into statute and some of it is left to be prescribed below the statute, and the two age at completely different speeds. In the first group: the section numbers, the four certainties, the writing-and-registration requirement for land, the three-month duty where a State imposes one. In the second: every form, every validity period, every renewal date, every fee and every stamp rate.
And the tax registrations are the part of this subject that has been reorganised most recently, which makes them the part most likely to have moved since this page was last touched. A deadline printed here would not be read as background. It would be relied on, diarised and missed. A provision quoted above will still read the same way in five years. A procedure described here might not survive the next financial year.
Which brings this part to the drafting itself, and to the clause that deserves more attention than all the others together.
Remember that no central Act fills the gaps in a charitable trust deed. The objects clause is therefore not a description of what the trust does. It is the boundary of what the trust may lawfully do with its property, for as long as it exists.
It is also the clause that will be read, decades from now, by somebody who never met the person who wrote it. Everything else in a trust deed can be standard without harm. This one cannot, and a template is the worst possible source for it.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
The companion point, and the one that converts a drafting decision into money years later.
A trust deed should say how it can be amended, by whom, by what majority and subject to what limits. Where it is silent, or where it restricts amendment severely, altering the purposes of a charitable trust is not something trustees can agree among themselves.
It becomes an application to a court or to the appropriate authority, with everything that implies in time and cost. Drafting a workable amendment machinery at the start costs nothing at all. Discovering its absence costs a proceeding, and the proceeding happens at the least convenient moment, because that is when the need to amend is noticed.
And the decision that matters more than any clause, which is not a legal decision at all.
Trustees hold the property, apply it to the objects, and answer for both. The deed can define their powers precisely and still not protect a trust from a badly chosen trustee, because what the deed constrains is authority rather than judgement.
What the deed can do is make an exit possible. Appointment, resignation, removal, what happens on death, what happens when the trustees cannot agree, and how a resolution of theirs is recorded. A trust that can replace a trustee cleanly has absorbed a bad appointment. A trust that cannot has acquired a permanent problem.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Which is the structural failure we are asked to fix most often, and the one most resistant to fixing.
A trust formed in the nineteen-eighties by three people. Two have died, one is very old, and the deed says nothing about how a trustee is replaced. There is property, there is a purpose, and there is nobody with clear authority to act for it.
At that point the trust is not broken, but it is frozen, and unfreezing it is an application to a court rather than a meeting. The clause that would have prevented it would have been four lines long. This is the single strongest argument against taking a trust deed from a template, and it is why we ask about succession before we ask about objects.
Closing this part with the honest limits of drafting, because a well drawn document is not a solution to everything.
A deed cannot create certainty about property whose title is unclear. It cannot transfer what the author does not own. It cannot settle a deceased parent’s property without the heirs executing something. And it cannot make a purpose charitable that is not.
Each of those has to be dealt with before or alongside the deed rather than inside it: title verification where the property is immovable, the right transfer instrument executed by the right people, and an honest conversation about the purpose. A deed drafted over an unresolved title is a tidy document describing an unresolved title.
Nor can a deed govern what the trust later does with other people. Where a trust runs a programme jointly with an institution, a school or a funder, that relationship is set out in a memorandum of understanding, and drafting one is a separate exercise from the deed. And where the trust must advertise a change — of trustees, of premises, of name — that is a society and trust public notice, which is published rather than registered.
From here on this page is about our own work, set out plainly so that nothing has to be asked twice.
Four kinds of people. A family wanting to put a building or a sum of money permanently behind a school, a dispensary or a temple. A group of friends who have been running something informally for years and have reached the point where a donor wants to see a document. Somebody told by a funder that only a trust will do. And somebody who already paid for a trust last year and cannot work out what they actually got.
The fourth conversation is the longest and we do not charge for having it. Usually the answer is that a deed exists, it is registered, and nothing further was done — which is a recoverable position rather than a loss, and it is worth half an hour of somebody’s time to say so.
If that is the position you are in, an online legal consultation or a video consultation with the deed in front of us is the cheapest way to find out what is actually missing, and it is a better first step than paying anybody to redo work that has already been done once.
Before any drafting, four things, and the order is deliberate.
What the trust is actually meant to do, in the words of the person setting it up rather than in charitable boilerplate. What property is going into it on day one. Who the trustees are to be, and how many. And which State the trust will have its office in, because that last one changes the whole registration position.
The State question is asked first in our office and almost nowhere else, and it is the one that decides whether there is a second registration to do at all. A reader who has already been quoted for a trust without being asked which State it will sit in has been quoted for an unknown.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
What we actually produce, described as a document rather than as a package.
A trust deed built around the four certainties, with the objects written narrowly and in your own language, the trust property identified exactly, the trustees named with their powers and their limits, and the machinery for succession, meetings, accounts, amendment and dissolution set out rather than assumed.
And the objects clause drafted last, after the conversation, never first from a template. Everything else in a trust deed can be standard without harm. The objects cannot, because they are the one clause that will still be governing a decision in thirty years when nobody involved in writing it is available to explain what was meant.
A limit worth stating, because the usual commercial practice is the opposite.
We will not write a long list of charitable objects you do not intend to pursue in order to make a trust look impressive or to keep options open. Education, medical relief, relief of the poor, environment, animal welfare and the advancement of any other object of general public utility all strung together is a drafting habit, not a purpose.
A wide objects clause is not a free option; it is a standing invitation to a dispute about whether a particular expenditure was within the trust at all. If an object genuinely belongs, it goes in. If it is there because it might be useful one day, it is doing harm rather than waiting quietly.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Named precisely, because this is the part most often described loosely by whoever is selling it.
The deed is presented for registration at the office of the sub-registrar having jurisdiction, with the author and the trustees attending as the office requires and with the stamp position settled beforehand. Where the trust will sit in a State with its own public trusts law, a separate application follows to that State’s charity authority, and that is a second filing with its own timeline rather than a step in the first one.
Where tax recognition is wanted afterwards, that is a third exercise, before a third authority, and it belongs with whoever does your accounting rather than with us. We will say what is needed and hand it over cleanly.
One decision that is never ours and that people try to hand over.
Who the trustees are is the single most consequential choice in the whole exercise, more consequential than any clause we will draft, and it is a judgement about people rather than about law.
We will tell you what a trustee is accountable for, what a bad appointment costs, how many is workable and what the deed should say about removal and replacement. We will not tell you whether to appoint your brother. That is not reticence; it is the honest edge of what a drafter can know.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
The refusals on this page are specific, and each exists because somebody has asked for it.
We do not certify that a trust is charitable. We do not confirm that its objects will qualify for any exemption. We do not state that a particular expenditure is within the objects. And we do not give any opinion on whether a trust will be approved by any authority, before that authority has looked at it.
The reason is the same in each case: every one of those is a determination somebody else makes, and a drafter who pre-empts it is selling a comfort rather than an assessment. A letter from us saying a trust is charitable would carry exactly as much weight as the paper it was typed on, which is none.
Set out properly, since a reader who already works with an accountant usually reads a page like this wondering whether he is about to be told to replace him.
They are not being asked. The tax side of a charitable trust — the exemption registration, the annual return, the accounts, the audit where one is required, the statements that decide whether donors get their deduction — sits with a chartered accountant, and it is the larger part of the work over the life of the trust.
What we do is the founding document and the registrations that give it standing. A trust whose deed was drafted carefully and whose accounts are kept properly is in good order. A trust with a beautiful deed and no books is a problem that will arrive later, and bookkeeping from the first month is cheaper than reconstruction in the fourth year.
And the honest limit of the whole exercise, because it is routinely oversold.
Registering the deed does not make the trust tax-exempt. It does not entitle it to foreign donations. It does not open a government grant, qualify it for corporate funding, or protect the trustees from liability for what they do with the property.
What it gives you is a document of title to a purpose: proof, in a public record, of what was declared, by whom, over what property, on what date. Everything else is built on top of that, by other means, before other authorities. Anybody suggesting that one registration delivers the rest is describing a product that does not exist.
Some trust matters stop being drafting and become litigation, and it is better to know the boundary in advance than to discover it.
A dispute between trustees. A beneficiary alleging that trust property has been applied outside the objects. An application to vary objects that have become impossible. A challenge to the trust by a family member of the author. An order of a charity authority that has to be appealed. All of those are representation.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.
Where it reaches that point, the useful thing we can hand over is a complete file: the deed as registered, the receipt, every resolution, every account. A trust that can produce its own record is in a different position from one whose trustees are reconstructing six years from memory, and the difference is paid for in counsel’s time either way.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
A small habit, and in this category it matters more than in most, because a trust outlives the people who set it up.
One folder, kept permanently: the registered deed with its registration particulars, the stamp receipt, the list of trustees with the resolution appointing each, the property documents, and the minutes and accounts year by year.
The point is not tidiness. It is that in twenty years somebody who never met you will have to establish what this trust is and what it may do, and that folder is the whole of what they will have. A certified true copy of the registered deed, obtained once and kept separately, is the cheapest insurance in this entire guide.
Two things belong beside it from the first year rather than from the fourth. The trust’s annual return, which is the income tax filing in the institution’s own name and not in anybody’s personal name. And a keeper for the file itself, which is what a legal file management arrangement exists for in families where the papers have historically lived in a cupboard. Where somebody wants to give to a purpose only after their death rather than settle property now, that is will drafting and not this page at all.
Printed here so it can be compared before anybody writes to us.
Our figure for the trust registration work is ₹9,999, and the usual turnaround is 10 – 25 days from the day the facts and the property details reach us. Where only the document is wanted and the registration will be handled by somebody else, trust deed drafting is listed separately and costs less.
The figure is for our work, not for the money that passes through the exercise. Stamp duty and the registration fee are paid to the government at the sub-registrar’s office, not to us, and nothing on our invoice is either of them.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Printed next to the figure rather than discovered afterwards.
It leaves out stamp duty and the registration fee. It leaves out the State charity authority’s own fee where that second registration applies. It leaves out the tax registrations entirely, which are a separate exercise with your chartered accountant. It leaves out bookkeeping, audit and annual filings. And it leaves out representation anywhere.
It also leaves out anything that is really a different job: verifying title to property being settled on the trust, which is property title verification; drafting the instrument that actually transfers it, which may be a gift deed or a conveyance deed; or sorting out an existing trust whose records are incomplete. Those are quoted once we have seen what is there.
This page carries no stamp duty rate, no registration fee, no charity authority fee and no tax threshold, and the omission is the considered position rather than an oversight.
Stamp duty on a trust deed is fixed by each State, and it often turns on whether immovable property is being settled and on its value. The registration fee follows the State’s own schedule. The tax registrations have their own forms, validity periods and deadlines, all of which have been changed more than once in recent years.
A figure on a page like this is not read as a guide, it is relied on and budgeted against. Somebody who sets aside a stamp amount found here, executes on that basis and arrives at the sub-registrar’s office short has been given a wasted day by this page. Statutory language can be set down here without that risk. Amounts cannot be, and the only reliable source for one is the office that is going to charge it.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Written for the reader who has a file from two years ago and a growing suspicion that something is missing.
Take it out and establish four things in order, without paying anybody for an opinion first. Does the deed identify an intention, a purpose, beneficiaries and specific property. Was it registered, and does it carry the registration particulars. If your State has its own public trusts law, was an application made to that authority. And was any tax registration ever applied for.
Most people find the first two are in order and the second two were never done, and that is a position to complete rather than a disaster to undo. The deed is the hard part and you already have it. What follows is applications, and applications can still be made.
An institution with its paperwork in order can still receive a notice proposing to reopen an earlier year, and the correspondence that follows is governed by its own provisions rather than by anything in the registration file. The two are easy to conflate because both arrive on the same letterhead. Our guide to a section 148 reassessment reply explains what such a notice has to rest on and the periods inside which it has to come.
If a single sentence survives everything above, let it be this one — and notice that registration does not appear in it.
No certificate makes a trust. What makes a trust is that somebody said clearly what they wanted done, for whom, with what — and then actually handed the property over to the people who would do it.
Which is why the hour spent on the objects clause is worth more than every filing that follows it. The filings prove what was declared. They cannot improve it, and they cannot rescue a purpose that was never written down properly in the first place.
The opposite problem arises with an LLP: there, a Schedule in the Act supplies defaults wherever the agreement is silent, and the defaults are the trap rather than the absence of them. Our LLP registration guide sets out all fourteen of them.
The members-and-votes alternative has a statute of its own and a surprise in it. Seven subscribers, a memorandum of three items, an annual list nobody chases you for, and a bar on anything ever coming back to the people who built it. See society registration.
Update to the note above: the mapping has now been published. The Income Tax Department publishes a navigator setting its 1961 Act section numbers against the 2025 Act numbers, so for the provisions it covers a mapping no longer has to be inferred. Among them, the provision for correcting a mistake in an order moves from section 154 of the 1961 Act to section 287 of the 2025 Act, with other amendments to orders moving from 155 to 288, assessment from 143 to 270, the notice of demand from 156 to 289 and the income-tax authorities from 116 to 236. That does not change which Act governs an older matter — section 536(2)(c) still keeps the 1961 Act applying to a tax year that began before 1 April 2026, and the Department names rectification among the proceedings so continued. Our correction application work sets that question out in writing before any provision number is put on paper.
Tell us what the trust is meant to do, what is going into it, who the trustees will be and which State it will sit in. We will draft the deed around those four things, tell you plainly whether your State has a second registration to make, settle the stamp position before execution and lodge the deed for registration. We will also tell you what the tax side needs and hand that part to your chartered accountant rather than quoting for it ourselves.
The provisions this page was written against. Every provision below was read rather than recalled, and the first of them is why this page is shaped the way it is. The Indian Trusts Act, 1882 is the statute everybody names in this context, and section 1 of it contains a savings paragraph providing that nothing contained in the Act affects the rules of Mohammedan law as to waqf, or the mutual relations of the members of an undivided family as determined by any customary or personal law, or applies to public or private religious or charitable endowments, or to trusts to distribute prizes taken in war among the captors. From the same Act we have taken the vocabulary that practice uses in any event: section 3, defining a trust as an obligation annexed to the ownership of property and arising out of a confidence reposed in and accepted by the owner, and naming the author of the trust, the trustee, the beneficiary, the trust property and the instrument of trust; section 5, under which no trust in relation to immovable property is valid unless declared by a non-testamentary instrument in writing signed by the author of the trust or the trustee and registered, or by the will of the author or of the trustee, and no trust in relation to movable property is valid unless so declared or unless the ownership of the property is transferred to the trustee; and section 6, under which a trust is created when the author indicates with reasonable certainty, by any words or acts, an intention on his part to create thereby a trust, the purpose of the trust, the beneficiary and the trust property, and, unless the trust is declared by will or the author is himself to be the trustee, transfers the trust property to the trustee.
On the second registration, which exists only in some States, we have worked from the Bombay Public Trusts Act, 1950, now the Maharashtra Public Trusts Act, whose section 2(13) defines a public trust to include an express or constructive trust for a public purpose of a religious or charitable character and brings a temple, a math, a wakf, a church, a synagogue, an agiary or other place of public religious worship, and a society formed for a religious or charitable purpose and registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, within that definition; and whose section 18 places on the trustee the duty of applying for the registration of the public trust, within three months of its creation, to the Deputy or Assistant Charity Commissioner of the region concerned, followed by an inquiry under section 19 and an entry in the register kept by the Charity Commissioner. Gujarat has legislation of the same pattern. Several other States have their own public trusts legislation and several, including Delhi, have none at all, which is why this page tells every reader to establish the position for their own State rather than printing a list that would mislead somebody.
On tax we have gone only as far as the structure, deliberately. Registration under section 12AB of the Income-tax Act, 1961 is what an institution needs in order to claim exemption, it replaced the older registration under sections 12A and 12AA, and it is granted for a limited period and has to be renewed rather than held in perpetuity. Approval under section 80G is a separate approval, and it concerns the deduction available to a person who donates rather than the existence or validity of the trust itself. We have not printed the forms, the validity periods or any deadline, for the reason given on the page: that part of the law has been reorganised more than once in recent years and is the part most likely to have moved since this page was last touched.
What we have not done. We have not reproduced the Registration Act, 1908 at length, because the compulsory-registration machinery and the consequences of non-registration are set out on another page of this site and belong there rather than in a second copy. We have not printed any stamp duty rate, registration fee, charity authority fee or tax threshold. We have not said whether any particular object is charitable, whether any trust will be registered or approved, or whether any expenditure falls within any objects clause, all of those being determinations made by authorities and courts on the documents in front of them. And we take no position anywhere on this page about whether a reader should form a trust at all rather than a society or a non-profit company.
Related work on this site. The choice between the three forms — trust, society and non-profit company — is argued out on our NGO registration page and is not argued again here; everything on this page follows from that choice already having been made in favour of a trust. For the company route, see section 8 company registration. For what registration under the Registration Act does and does not achieve for any document, see notary agreement, where that machinery is set out. For the instruments by which property is actually moved into a trust, see gift deed and conveyance deed, and for checking what is being moved, property title verification.
Two doors, both free. Clients search a factual directory of enrolled advocates. Advocates apply to be listed on it — no fee, no commission, nothing paid in either direction.
Search Bar Council enrolled advocates by what your matter is about, by court, or by city. Searching and sending a request are both free.
Enrolled advocates anywhere in India can apply to be listed. Your entry is published only after we verify your enrolment number with your State Bar Council.
Would rather not pick anybody? Tell us the matter instead — one form goes to every advocate at once, and the first to take it up calls you.
This directory carries no ratings, no reviews, no rankings and no fees — only the factual particulars the Bar Council of India permits, published at each advocate's own request. Browse the network · Terms for Advocates