What Form C is
Form C is the report an accommodation provider makes when a foreign national stays with them. It tells the Bureau of Immigration who is staying where, and it is the mechanism by which foreign visitors are tracked once they are inside the country rather than only at the border.
It sits under the Foreigners Act 1946 and the Registration of Foreigners Rules 1992. Those apply to anyone providing accommodation for consideration, which is broader than most people expect — it is not only hotels.
Who has to file
The obligation follows the accommodation, not the licence category. If somebody pays you to sleep there and they are a foreign national, the report is yours to make.
- Hotels, resorts and guest houses.
- Homestays and short-let apartments, including listings booked through a platform. The platform is not the accommodation provider; you are.
- Hostels, dharamshalas and lodging houses.
- Private individuals hosting a paying foreign guest.
It applies to foreign nationals only. An Indian passport holder does not generate a Form C, though your own guest register and any state-level requirements are separate matters.
The deadline is 24 hours from check-in
Twenty-four hours from when the guest checks in, not from the start of the next working day. The portal is available around the clock, so a two in the morning arrival is filed that night or early the following morning — not when the office opens.
How to file
Described at the level of what you are trying to achieve rather than which button to press. Government portals are redesigned periodically and a click-by-click walkthrough goes stale quietly, which is worse than one that was never written.
- Register your property once on the Bureau of Immigration's Form C portal. You will be asked for the property details and evidence that you operate it, and you receive login credentials once the registration is accepted.
- At check-in, capture the guest's passport and visa details along with the stay dates. These are the fields the form wants, so collecting them properly at the desk is most of the work.
- Log in and submit the arrival report within 24 hours of check-in.
- Keep the acknowledgement. If a filing is ever questioned, the acknowledgement is what you have.
Some properties are also expected to report the departure. Confirm what applies to yours when you register, because practice here is not uniform and it is the part people most often get wrong.
If you do not file
Non-compliance is an offence under the Foreigners Act, and the consequences described in that Act are not trivial — they run from monetary penalties to, in serious cases, action against the person responsible for the property.
The practical risk for most properties is not a dramatic prosecution. It is a routine inspection finding a gap in the filings, at which point the question becomes how long it has been happening.
Making it routine
- Put the filing on the night audit checklist, so it is verified daily rather than remembered per guest.
- Capture passport and visa details at check-in, not at filing time. Chasing a guest for a passport number the next morning is how a deadline gets missed.
- Keep the acknowledgements with the folio, so a stay and its filing can be produced together.
- Give the night desk the credentials and the authority to file. A filing that only one manager can make is a filing that does not happen on their day off.
If your property management system already holds the guest's identity documents from check-in, the report should be assembled from what you captured rather than typed a second time. That is the part worth automating; the submission itself stays where the law puts it.