If you own property in Bengaluru, you need an e-Khata, and the paper Khata you may have had for years no longer does the job on its own. This guide covers how to apply for e-Khata in Bangalore in 2026, what the certificate actually looks like, what it costs, and the part most guides still get wrong — the body that issues it changed in September 2025.

What an e-Khata actually is

A Khata is not a title deed. That is the single most common misunderstanding about it, and it costs people money. Your sale deed proves you own the property. The Khata is the civic record that says the municipal body recognises you as the person responsible for paying tax on it.

An e-Khata is that same record, held digitally and issued through the state’s own portal instead of over a counter. It carries the owner’s name, the property’s dimensions and location, its assessment details and its tax status, and it can be pulled up and verified by anyone in the transaction rather than taken on trust from a photocopy.

The practical effect is what matters. Sub-registrar offices, banks processing home loans, and buyers doing diligence all want to see the digital record now. A property without one is harder to sell, harder to mortgage, and slower to register.

BBMP is gone. It is the GBA now

This is the part that dates almost every other guide you will find on e-Khata Bangalore, so it is worth being precise about.

The Greater Bengaluru Authority was established on 15 May 2025 under the Greater Bengaluru Governance Act, 2024, which passed both houses of the Karnataka legislature in March 2025. The GBA became fully operational on 2 September 2025, and on that date the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike — BBMP, which had run the city since 2007 — ceased its governance functions.

Bengaluru was divided into five city corporations under the GBA, with legal provision for up to seven: Bengaluru Central, North, South, East and West.

What an e-Khata certificate looks like

People search for a picture of one more than they search for the process, which tells you how much confusion there is about what arrives at the end. Here is a real sample.

The fields to check on your own, in order: the owner name spelling exactly as it appears on your sale deed, the property dimensions, the assessment or SAS property tax number, and the status line that tells you whether this is a draft or a final certificate.

A spelling error in the owner name is the most common defect and the most annoying to fix later, because it has to match your deed when the sub-registrar checks it. Read that line before you read anything else.

Two other fields repay a careful look. The dimensions should match your approved plan rather than what was built — if a previous owner enclosed a balcony or added a floor, the numbers diverge and that divergence surfaces here. And the assessment number ties the certificate to a tax record; if it is blank or does not match the receipts you hold, the certificate is describing a different property from the one you think you are looking at.

What you will not find on it is any statement about title. The certificate does not say the ownership is clean, that there is no litigation, or that no bank holds a charge. It is a civic record, not a guarantee, and reading it as one is how people get hurt.

Draft e-Khata versus final e-Khata

These are two different documents and they are not interchangeable.

The draft e-Khata is generated from the records the municipal system already holds about your property. It appears without you doing much, and it is essentially the government showing you what it thinks it knows. It is useful for checking your details, and it is not proof of anything.

The final e-Khata is issued after you apply, upload your documents, and an officer verifies them. That is the one a bank or a sub-registrar will accept.

Who can apply

Four things need to be true before an application will go anywhere.

• The property sits within the corporation’s jurisdiction. Under the GBA structure that now means one of the five city corporations rather than the old single BBMP boundary.
• You are the legal owner, and you can evidence it with a sale deed or title deed.
• Property tax is fully paid and current. Arrears stop the application. Clear them first; nothing else you do will unblock it.
• You hold either an A-Khata or a B-Khata. Both are eligible to be brought onto the e-Khata system. If you have neither, that is a different and larger problem, and worth professional help before you start.

The A-Khata and B-Khata distinction still matters underneath all this. An A-Khata property is fully compliant with municipal regulations. A B-Khata property is recorded for tax purposes but has some irregularity — unapproved layout, deviation from plan, revenue land. Getting an e-Khata does not launder a B-Khata into an A-Khata. It digitises whatever you already have.

How to apply, step by step

The whole process runs on e-Aasthi, the Urban Property Management System run by the Government of Karnataka through the Karnataka Municipal Data Society, built by the National Informatics Centre. No agent has a faster channel, because there isn’t one.

If your details are already clean in the system, you may be able to pull an existing e-Khata straight down using your SAS property tax ID without applying at all. Check that first — it takes two minutes and it saves the whole process.

Documents you need

Have these scanned and legible before you start, because the portal will time you out and a half-finished application is worse than none.

• Sale deed or title deed — the core ownership document
• Encumbrance certificate covering the relevant period
• Property tax receipts, paid up to the current year
• Approved building plan or layout plan
• Identity and address proof for the owner
• Photographs of the property, and its GPS coordinates

The GPS coordinate requirement catches people out. It is not the address — it is the actual latitude and longitude of the property, which you take standing on the plot. Get it wrong and the site inspection will not match your application.

Two of these deserve more attention than they usually get. The encumbrance certificate should cover a period long enough to show the transaction you are relying on, and people routinely pull too short a window to save a little money. The approved plan matters because the dimensions on your application are checked against it, not against a tape measure — so if you do not have a copy, get one before you start rather than halfway through.

Scan everything flat, in daylight, as a PDF rather than a photograph. An officer who cannot read a document does not phone you about it; the application simply comes back. This is the single easiest place to save yourself a fortnight, and it costs nothing but care. Ready-to-move purchases such as Prestige Sunrise Park tend to have this paperwork already assembled by the seller — ask for it in one go rather than document by document.

What it costs and how long it takes

Here we are going to be honest with you rather than confident. Secondary sources report a nil application fee with a small online service charge, and 2026 reporting describes a fast-track approval route for applications that are clean at first review.

If you get stuck, KMDS runs a helpline for e-Khata on 7259585959, Monday to Friday, 10:00 am to 5:30 pm, closed between 1:30 and 2:30. The office is at Karnataka Municipal Data Society, #1-4, 6th Floor, I.T Park, Rajajinagar Industrial Estate, Bengaluru 560010.

Why applications get rejected

Most rejections are not complicated, and nearly all of them are avoidable.

• Property tax arrears. The most common single cause. Clear them before applying, not during.
• Owner name mismatch between the deed and the tax record — an initial, a spelling, a married name.
• Dimensions that don’t match the approved plan, usually because of a deviation somebody built years ago.
• Illegible uploads. A phone photo of a deed at an angle gets rejected.
• GPS coordinates that don’t correspond to the property described.

If yours is rejected, the portal gives a reason. Fix that specific thing and reapply rather than starting a fresh application from scratch. Starting over loses your place and rarely helps, because the same officer will look at the same defect.

The name-mismatch cases are worth dwelling on, because they are the ones that take longest. A tax record carrying an initial where the deed spells the name in full, or a name recorded before marriage, is not something the portal will quietly overlook. Correcting the underlying tax record first, then applying, is slower to begin and far faster to finish than applying and hoping.

Where a deviation from the approved plan is the problem, be realistic: that is a construction issue wearing a paperwork costume, and no amount of resubmitting fixes it. Get advice on regularisation before you spend months on the portal.

What this means if you are buying

For a buyer, the e-Khata is a diligence tool, and a good one. Ask the seller for it before you pay an advance, not after.

Three checks, in this order. Is it a final certificate or a draft? Does the owner name match the seller’s identity document exactly? Is the tax status current? Those three answers tell you more about whether a resale will register smoothly than anything else you can get in five minutes.

On a ready or resale flat — Prestige Sunrise Park is a current example of one — the Khata exists already and there is no excuse for not seeing it before you commit.

For an under-construction purchase the position is different — the Khata comes after the project is complete and the property is assessed, so there is nothing to check yet. What you should look at instead is the project’s RERA registration and the approved plan, and you should budget for the statutory costs properly. We break those down in what buying a plot in Karnataka actually costs.