Budget 2024: Selling your property now may attract higher tax

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a standard long-term capital gains (LTCG) tax during yesterday's (July 23, 2024) finance budget. Previously, different LTCG rates were applied to various financial and non-financial assets. For example, selling an equity investment held for over a year attracted a 10 per cent LTCG tax, while non-financial assets such as real estate and gold were taxed at 20 per cent. Now, a flat LTCG tax of 12.5 per cent has been introduced. This has been done to "simplify taxation", according to Sitharaman. So far, so good. Standardisation can help in avoiding confusion when calculating LTCG tax. However, the budget's fine print reveals that the government has done away with indexation benefits, a key feature that allowed property and gold sellers to reduce their taxable gains. How indexation worked Imagine you bought a property for Rs 50 lakh in 2014-15 and sold it for Rs 1 crore before yesterday's budget. You'd have been able to adjust the cost price o