Compliance
There is no upper limit, and it runs per day, per form, for as long as the filing stays outstanding.
Check your DPDP readiness — free More on the blogEvery private limited company files a set of forms with the Registrar of Companies every year — the annual return, the financial statements, board resolutions for certain decisions — and most founders learn how the penalty for missing one actually works only after they have already missed it.
s.403 of the Companies Act, 2013, read with the additional-fee rules, sets the standard late fee at ₹100 per day of default, per form. It starts the day after the due date and runs for every day the form stays unfiled — there is no monthly cap and, on the additional-fee scale, no fixed upper ceiling the way a fine under some other statutes has. A form filed 200 days late has accrued ₹20,000 in fees on that form alone, before anyone has looked at whether the underlying disclosure was even accurate. The penalty does not wait for anyone to notice. It is already running on every day nobody has looked at the filing calendar.
File the form. The additional fee stops accruing the day it is actually filed, not the day someone decides to deal with it — so the only lever that matters is closing the gap, and every day spent deciding whether to deal with it is a day still on the meter. This site's ROC late fee calculator and compliance calendar track every ROC due date against your entity type and compute what is already overdue with the actual ₹/day accruing — the same number a company secretary would compute by hand, before it becomes a bigger one.
Section 403 of the Companies Act, 2013 charges an additional fee of Rs 100 per day, per form, for every day the filing is late, with no upper limit. The clock does not stop until the form is actually filed, so the amount is bounded only by how long the delay runs.
No. The Rs 100 per day under section 403 has no ceiling, and MGT-7 (annual return) and AOC-4 (financial statements) are separate filings with separate due dates and separate clocks. Two forms a year late accrue two independent penalties running side by side.
Yes. A company that has not commenced operations still owes its annual filings, and "we had no business this year" is not an exemption anywhere in the Act. Companies formed and then left idle are the most common source of large accumulated section 403 penalties, because nobody is watching the dates.
Published 8 August 2026. Founder & CEO at VidhiSar. I have watched four companies pay for the same mistake, and it was never the mistake anyone expected. VidhiSar is software, not a law firm: every answer names the section it relies on so you can check it, and anything turning on your specific facts is worth putting to a professional. More about who builds this
Maintains the law explainers, calculators, templates and blog posts on vidhisar.in: checks them against the statute text and updates them when the law changes. Errors and changes in the law can be reported to legal@vidhisar.in.