The difference between A-Khata and B-Khata decides whether a Bengaluru property can be mortgaged, extended, or sold without a discount — and an e-Khata is neither of those things, it is the digital form both of them now take. Roughly seven lakh properties in Bengaluru sit in the B register. If yours is one of them, the difference is worth real money.

The short answer

Two of these describe a property’s legal standing. One describes a file format. Confusing the three is the most common mistake in Bengaluru property paperwork.

Put plainly: A-Khata and B-Khata answer “is this property regular in the eyes of the civic body?”. e-Khata answers “is that record digital?”. Getting an e-Khata for a B-Khata property gives you a digital B-Khata. Nothing about the property’s standing changes.

The confusion is understandable, because the e-Khata rollout was the loudest thing to happen to Bengaluru property records in years, and a lot of coverage described it as though it were a new category of ownership. It is not. It is the same two categories, moved from a paper register into a database, with a certificate you can verify online instead of a photocopy you have to trust.

Why does the distinction matter so much in practice? Because almost every consequence people care about — whether a bank will lend, whether a plan can be sanctioned, what the property fetches on resale — hangs on the A or B question, and none of it hangs on whether the certificate is digital.

What A-Khata actually gets you

An A-Khata property is one the municipal body treats as fully regular: built on properly converted land, within an approved layout, to a sanctioned plan, with no material deviation.

That regularity is not an abstraction. It is the reason a bank will lend against the property, the reason you can get a building plan sanctioned if you want to add a floor, the reason a trade licence can be issued at the address, and the reason a buyer does not knock a chunk off your asking price during negotiation. Nearly every new apartment project from an established developer is A-Khata, because the approvals were obtained before construction rather than argued about afterwards.

If you are buying a ready or resale flat, this is a question to ask on the first call, not the fifth. Projects such as Prestige Sunrise Park in Electronic City are ready-to-move and will have the Khata position settled — ask to see it alongside the sale deed and the encumbrance certificate rather than on its own.

What B-Khata actually costs you

A B-Khata property is recorded in a separate register kept for properties that do not meet the full compliance standard. The irregularity varies: an unapproved layout, land that was never formally converted from agricultural use, a deviation from the sanctioned plan, or construction that outran its approval.

Owners of these properties pay property tax exactly like everyone else. What they do not get is the rest of it.

The resale discount is the part owners underestimate. A buyer who cannot raise a loan against your property is a cash buyer, and cash buyers are a much smaller pool who know they are a smaller pool. That shows up in the price you get, every time.

Converting a B-Khata to an A-Khata

B-Khata has not been abolished, and conversion is possible. Karnataka permits B-Khata to A-Khata conversion through the e-Khata system, subject to document verification, scrutiny and payment of a conversion fee. Roughly seven lakh Bengaluru properties sit in the B register, which is why the state has run campaigns to move them across.

One of those campaigns matters to your budget, and its timing has been widely misreported.

Whether conversion is worth it depends on arithmetic you can actually do. Work out the likely resale uplift from moving to A-Khata, subtract the conversion fee and the cost of fixing whatever irregularity caused the B status in the first place, and see what is left. For a property you intend to hold for twenty years and never mortgage, the answer is sometimes no. For one you plan to sell or borrow against, it is usually yes.

Why B-Khata exists at all

It helps to know where these properties came from, because the answer explains why the problem is so large and why the state keeps running campaigns at it.

Bengaluru grew faster than its approval machinery. Land on the edges was subdivided and sold as layouts before conversion from agricultural use had been completed. Buildings went up a floor taller than the sanctioned plan. Villages were absorbed into the city boundary carrying records that predated the municipal system entirely. None of this was usually fraud — it was a city expanding faster than its paperwork.

The civic body still needed to collect tax on all of it. The B register was the answer: a way to record a property and bill it without certifying that it was fully regular. That is the whole logic of the B-Khata. It is a tax record, not a blessing.

Which leads to the thing owners find hardest to accept. A B-Khata is not a defect in your paperwork that better paperwork will cure. It usually reflects something physical — the land, the layout, the building — and conversion means addressing that underlying condition, not just paying a fee. Where the irregularity is a construction deviation, you are looking at a building question wearing a paperwork costume, and it is worth getting advice before you spend money on either.

Where e-Khata fits

From November 2025 the e-Khata became central to property registration, tax record verification and municipal approvals in Bengaluru. It is the digital certificate carrying the owner’s name, the property’s dimensions, its assessment number and its tax status, issued through the state’s e-Aasthi portal.

What it does is make the record checkable. Before it, verifying a Khata meant trusting a photocopy. Now a buyer, a bank or a sub-registrar can pull the current record and see it for themselves, which removes a whole category of forgery and stale-document problems from the market.

What it does not do is change your property’s status. If you want to see exactly what arrives and how to read every field on it, we have laid out a real Bengaluru certificate in the e-Khata sample walkthrough, and the application itself is covered step by step in how to apply for an e-Khata in Bangalore.

One piece of 2026 context that trips people up: the authority behind all of this changed. The Greater Bengaluru Authority replaced BBMP on 2 September 2025, and the city is now organised as five corporations. Your certificate, your property tax ID and the portal all carried across unchanged.

How to find out which one you have

Most people assume rather than check, and assumption is expensive here.

1. Look at the certificate itself. A Khata extract or certificate states the register the property sits in. If you hold a recent e-Khata, the status is on it.
2. Check the property tax receipt. B-register properties are typically identifiable from how the assessment is recorded.
3. Pull the record from e-Aasthi using your SAS property tax ID, rather than relying on a document from years ago.
4. If you are buying, ask directly and in writing. “Is this A-Khata or B-Khata?” is a fair question and any hesitation in answering it is itself information.

And read the Khata alongside the other documents rather than on its own. The sale deed establishes ownership, the encumbrance certificate reveals loans and disputes, the occupancy certificate confirms the building is fit to occupy, and the Khata tells you the civic position. Four documents, four different questions. A seller who produces three of them cheerfully and goes quiet on the fourth has told you which one to read carefully.