Casual taxable person under GST: who needs it, the advance deposit, and when a virtual office is the better route

You have a stall at a trade fair in Delhi next month. Your business is registered in Karnataka; in Delhi you have no office, no warehouse and no staff. You will be there six days, sell what sells, and come home. Do you need a GST registration in Delhi — and if so, what kind?

Yes, and the kind is a casual taxable person registration: a temporary registration in a state where you have no fixed place of business, granted for a stated period, in exchange for depositing the tax you expect to collect before you begin. There is no turnover threshold to cross first — the obligation applies from the first rupee of supply.

This guide covers what a casual taxable person is under Section 2(20) of the CGST Act, who must register and who need not, the five-day rule, how to apply, how to work out the advance deposit, what happens when the period ends, and when a normal registration backed by a virtual office address beats doing all of this again next quarter. Everything here is stated as of September 2026.

What a casual taxable person is

Section 2(20) of the CGST Act, 2017 defines a casual taxable person as someone who occasionally undertakes transactions involving supply of goods or services, in the course or furtherance of business, as principal or agent or in any other capacity, in a state or union territory where he has no fixed place of business.

Two tests sit in that sentence, and both must be met:

• Occasional. A one-off or an episode, not an ongoing operation. A six-day fair is occasional; a shop that opens every winter for four months is becoming something else.
• No fixed place of business in that state. If you already have premises there — an office, a godown, a registered address — you are not a casual taxable person, you are a registered person supplying from your own place.

Notice what the definition leaves out: nothing about how much you sell, nothing about goods versus services. A trainer running a paid workshop in another state, a caterer taking one wedding contract outside the home state and a handloom seller at a Diwali exhibition are all in the same box.

Who must register as a casual taxable person

Section 24 lists the categories that must register irrespective of turnover, and casual taxable persons are on it. The ₹20 lakh and ₹40 lakh thresholds under Section 22 do not help you: registration is due before the first sale, whether the stall turns over ₹15,000 or ₹15 lakh.

The line that decides most cases is simple: is anything actually handed over, or performed, from a place inside that state? Marketing without supply is not supply. If your presence is a banner and a laptop, you are almost certainly outside this.

The five-day rule

The proviso to Section 25(1) requires a casual taxable person to apply for registration at least five days prior to the commencement of business. This is not the ordinary 30-day window a normal applicant gets after becoming liable. There is no equivalent here: you register before you start, or you are trading unregistered.

Five days is the legal minimum, not a plan. Three things eat it: the organiser’s allotment letter, without which you cannot complete the application; the deposit challan, since nothing moves until the advance tax is paid and reflected; and Aadhaar authentication, because since 2024–25 many applicants are sent to a GST Suvidha Kendra for biometric verification by appointment. A slot in another city days before your event is the fastest way to lose the fair.

Work back from the first day of trading and start three to four weeks out. Plan for the pace of an ordinary registration, set out step by step in our GST registration process guide.

How to apply: REG-01 with the casual option

There is no separate form. You apply in FORM GST REG-01, the application everybody else uses, with the casual option selected and a period stated.

1. Part A. On gst.gov.in choose New Registration and select Casual Taxable Person. Enter PAN, legal name, state, district, mobile and email, verify the OTPs, and collect the Temporary Reference Number, valid for 15 days.
2. Declare the period. Part B asks when the registration should take effect and when you expect to finish. Take the event dates and add a margin at each end for set-up and unsold-stock movement — the validity is built from these dates.
3. Business details. Constitution, promoters, authorised signatory, the address in that state with its nature of possession and proof, the goods or services with HSN or SAC codes, and the state-specific fields.
4. Estimate the liability. Enter the turnover you expect for the period and the tax on it. The portal computes the advance deposit and generates a challan.
5. Pay the challan and submit. Under Rule 8 the temporary reference number is issued so the deposit can be made, and the acknowledgement follows only after payment; the amount is credited to the electronic cash ledger for this registration. Sign with a Digital Signature Certificate if you are a company or LLP (Rule 26), otherwise with EVC, and an Application Reference Number arrives by email and SMS.
6. Query, then certificate. Rule 9 gives the officer seven working days, stretching to 30 where physical verification is ordered or Aadhaar authentication was not done. A query comes in REG-03, answered in REG-04 within seven working days. Approval produces the certificate in FORM GST REG-06, downloaded from the portal — nothing is posted to you.

There is no government fee. The only money that moves is the advance deposit, which is your own tax paid early.

The advance deposit under Section 27: how to estimate it

Section 27(2) requires an advance deposit of tax equal to the estimated tax liability for the period for which registration is sought, made when the application is submitted. Section 27(3) puts that money into the electronic cash ledger, where it is used against liability like any other cash balance under Section 49.

This is the part people misread. The deposit is not a fee, a security or a bond — it is your GST, paid before you collect it. Sell what you expected and it is consumed by the tax on your sales; sell less and the balance is refundable; sell more and you top it up in the return.

The estimate, in variables

The split between heads matters too. Goods handed to a walk-in buyer at the stall are supplied within that state, so the tax is CGST plus SGST; goods sold at the fair but shipped to a buyer in another state are IGST. Estimate the mix, because the challan is paid head-wise.

A worked example, without prices

Take a six-day fair. You expect to sell U units at an ex-GST price of P, all at one rate r. Stock moves in from your home-state GSTIN, and because the two registrations share a PAN they are distinct persons under Section 25(4): the transfer is a supply under Schedule I, on a tax invoice with IGST and an e-way bill. Call that stock’s value S, so the IGST on it is S × r — credit in the fair-state registration.

• Expected sales value: V = U × P
• Expected output tax: T = V × r
• Provable credit: C = S × r, plus tax on the stall fee if the organiser invoices this GSTIN
• Advance deposit: D = T − C

If you expect to sell only part of the stock you carry, C is large relative to T and the deposit is far smaller than the tax on the whole consignment. Plug your own numbers into the same four lines before you touch the challan.

Validity, and the one extension you get

Section 27(1) fixes the life of the registration: the certificate is valid for the period specified in the application, or 90 days from the effective date, whichever is earlier. Ask for 30 days and you get 30; ask for a year and you get 90. The proviso lets the officer extend by up to 90 further days on sufficient cause, and Rule 15 sets out how.

Returns during the period, and getting your money back

A casual registration is a working registration. While it is alive you issue tax invoices with the temporary GSTIN and the right place of supply; display the certificate and the GSTIN on a name board, because Rule 18 applies to a stall as much as to an office; file GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B for the period on the normal due dates; and pay any shortfall, the cash-ledger balance being used first. Composition is not an option — Section 10 excludes casual taxable persons from the levy, so you charge the ordinary rate throughout.

When the period ends the registration lapses on its own. What needs doing is the refund. Section 54(13) is unambiguous: the balance of advance tax is not refunded until all the returns due for the entire period the registration was in force have been furnished. So: final GSTR-1, final GSTR-3B, then claim the remaining cash-ledger balance on the portal in FORM GST RFD-01. Treat that money as working capital out of reach for weeks after the event, and price accordingly.

Documents for a temporary place of business

There is no special casual list — it is the ordinary REG-01 set, described in full in our GST registration documents guide. What differs is that your “place of business” is a stall or site held under an allotment rather than a lease.

Two cautions. Ask the organiser early and in writing for both the allotment letter and their venue document, and check the legal name on them against your PAN — a mismatch between letter and application is the most common query. And if the officer asks for something beyond the REG-01 list, such as the venue owner’s PAN, photographs of the stall or originals, CBIC Instruction No. 03/2025-GST dated 17 April 2025 tells officers to ask only for the documents listed in the form and not to raise irrelevant queries. Cite it politely in your REG-04 reply; the same instruction anchors rented and shared premises generally, covered in our guide to the NOC and rent agreement for GST registration.

One thing an address provider cannot do: no virtual office, SimplySetup included, can issue the allotment letter for someone else’s exhibition hall — that comes from the organiser. A provider’s kit answers the next section’s question instead.

Casual registration versus a normal registration with a virtual office

This is the real decision. Both routes give you a lawful GSTIN in the state. They differ in cost pattern, in how long they last, and in how much of your time they consume.

The break-even is behavioural rather than arithmetic. Do it once and it feels manageable. Do it three times in one state in a year and you have re-run the same application, tied up cash and chased a refund three times over — while one normal registration would have sat there doing the job.

A virtual office is what makes the second column possible when you have no premises in the state: a real commercial address you are licensed to use, with the agreement, owner’s NOC and recent utility bill REG-01 asks for, a name board in your business name, and staff to receive your post and a visiting officer. SimplySetup’s GST Registration package is that kit and the address behind it at ₹799 a month billed annually, plus 18% GST; the cheaper Business Address plan at ₹399 a month is mail handling and a name board only, with no agreement or NOC, so it will not carry a GST application. Premises are owned by SimplySetup or an exclusive partner, so an officer’s visit finds a signposted, staffed address. Coverage is listed state by state with GST codes, and city by city for Bengaluru and the other metros.

The handicraft exemption

One carve-out is worth knowing. Notification 56/2018-Central Tax exempts casual taxable persons making inter-state taxable supplies of specified handicraft goods, and certain specified hand-made products, from registration, provided aggregate turnover stays within the Section 22 threshold — ₹20 lakh, or ₹10 lakh in Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura.

Treat it carefully rather than gratefully. “Specified” means a list: the exemption covers goods described in the notification against particular HSN codes, not anything that looks handmade, so match your actual codes first. The threshold still binds. And conditions attach — the notification requires a Permanent Account Number and movement of the goods with an e-way bill where the rules require one.

If your goods are on the list and your turnover is comfortably inside the threshold, this is a genuine saving. If either fact is arguable, register: being found unregistered attracts a penalty under Section 122(1)(xi) of ₹10,000 or the tax evaded, whichever is higher, plus 18% interest under Section 50.

Common mistakes

1. Applying the day before. The five-day rule is a floor, and the challan and a possible biometric appointment sit inside it.
2. Treating the deposit as a fee — and then forgetting to reclaim the balance, which is what makes it genuinely expensive.
3. Estimating at a token figure, or missing the credit for stock transferred in. One invites a query and leaves the shortfall payable anyway; the other inflates the deposit for nothing.
4. Trading past the validity date. The certificate ends on the date printed on it; supplying after that is supplying unregistered.
5. Applying for the extension after expiry. Rule 15 requires REG-11 before the period ends, with the extra deposit.
6. Not filing the final returns. Section 54(13) blocks the refund until every return for the period is in — the single biggest cause of deposits that never come back.
7. Using the casual route as a permanent arrangement. Repeat registrations in one state, or a “seasonal” presence running most of the year, draws attention.
8. Skipping Rule 18 — the certificate goes up at the place of business and the GSTIN on a name board; at a fair, a print and a sticker on the fascia settle it.
9. Getting the place of supply wrong. Counter sales are intra-state; goods shipped from the fair to another state are IGST. Keep the state code list open.
10. Assuming a casual GSTIN can hold a warehouse. Marketplace and fulfilment-centre arrangements run on a normal registration with an additional place of business — see the VPOB and APOB guide.

What to do next

Test yourself against Section 2(20) first: are you supplying from a place inside that state, and is this genuinely occasional? If the first answer is no, you need nothing beyond your existing GSTIN. If both are yes, file three to four weeks before the event, ask the organiser for the allotment letter and their venue document in the same email, and work the deposit out on the lines above. Diary the validity end date and the final return date the day the certificate arrives, because the refund waits on those returns. If you already know you will be back in that state, register normally instead. Tell us the state and what you are planning, and we will send back which route fits and the document list for it.