Not sure if CETA changes anything for you?
Short answer: not your GST position. Read on for why.
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Executive summary
Genuinely major UK-India trade news is landing right now — and none of it changes whether you need to register for OIDAR GST. Worth being precise about why.
What you need to know
- The UK-India Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) enters into force on 15 July 2026 — the UK's most significant bilateral trade deal since leaving the EU. It's about goods tariffs, services market access, and business mobility. It does not touch consumption taxes like GST.
- If your company already handles post-Brexit UK VAT on digital services to non-UK consumers, you already understand a regime built on the same underlying logic as OIDAR.
- The UK's own £90,000 VAT registration threshold has no equivalent in India's OIDAR framework, which has no threshold at all — a genuinely easy assumption to carry over incorrectly.
- The UK-India Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement governs direct tax (income tax, withholding), and — as with the US treaty — has no bearing on your OIDAR/GST position.
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CETA: what it changes, and what it doesn't
This is worth addressing directly, given the timing — CETA is dominating UK-India business news right now, for good reason.
What CETA actually does
Signed 24 July 2025 and entering into force 15 July 2026, CETA is described as India's most comprehensive trade agreement with a G7 nation and the UK's most economically significant bilateral deal since Brexit. It eliminates duties on 99% of Indian tariff lines for UK goods exports, reduces Indian tariffs on 90% of UK product lines (64% duty-free immediately), and includes chapters on business mobility, government procurement, and digital trade facilitation. A companion Double Contributions Convention (DCC) removes dual social security contributions for professionals on temporary cross-border assignments.
What it doesn't do
CETA is fundamentally a goods-tariff and services-market-access agreement. It does not modify, exempt, or otherwise touch India's domestic consumption tax regime — GST, including OIDAR, sits entirely outside its scope. Free trade agreements generally don't touch VAT/GST-type domestic taxes, since these apply equally to domestic and foreign suppliers and aren't considered a trade barrier in the tariff sense. If your OIDAR obligation existed before 15 July 2026, it exists identically afterward.
Professional tip
If CETA has prompted a broader review of your company's India market strategy — and for many UK companies, it reasonably should — make sure OIDAR GST is on that review's checklist as its own line item, not assumed to be addressed by the trade deal's other provisions.
2
The concept you already know: UK digital VAT
UK companies have a real advantage here — you likely already operate a regime built on the same logic as OIDAR, just aimed at different countries.
The parallel
The UK has taxed digital services supplied by non-UK businesses to UK consumers since 2015, with no registration threshold for overseas suppliers — a destination-based model where the customer's location, not the supplier's, determines the tax. Post-Brexit, UK businesses selling digital services to EU consumers separately navigate the EU's One-Stop-Shop (OSS) regime, another destination-based system. If your finance team manages either of these, the underlying architecture of OIDAR will look familiar: no threshold, recipient-location-based liability, registration required before the first sale, not after reaching a revenue milestone.
The specific mechanics differ — India's two-indicator place-of-supply test, the 18% flat rate, monthly GSTR-5A filing — but the conceptual model (tax follows the customer's location, registration is mandatory regardless of scale) is one your team has almost certainly already built processes around, just for a different set of countries.
Professional tip
Whoever owns your UK digital-VAT and EU OSS compliance is the natural internal owner for assessing OIDAR too — the skill set transfers directly, even though the specific rules and forms are unique to India.
3
Your £90,000 threshold does not apply here
This is a specific, easy mistake worth naming directly.
Common mistake
The UK's domestic VAT registration threshold is currently £90,000 in taxable turnover. Some UK companies, on first encountering OIDAR, reasonably assume something similar applies — that a small volume of India revenue falls under a comparable de minimis exemption. It does not. OIDAR has no registration threshold whatsoever — a single Indian customer paying a single dollar creates the obligation.
This mistake is specific to companies from jurisdictions that do have a domestic threshold (like the UK's own VAT system) — the assumption is reasonable, just incorrect when applied to India. Note that the UK's own digital-services VAT rules for overseas suppliers into the UK also have no threshold, so this is genuinely an "different rules for outbound vs a reasonable inbound assumption" mismatch, not a contradiction in how the UK itself treats the same scenario in reverse.
Professional tip
If your company's internal India risk assessment ever concluded "our India revenue is too small to matter," revisit that conclusion specifically — it's very likely importing a UK VAT-threshold mental model that doesn't exist in the Indian framework at all.
4
The UK-India tax treaty is a separate matter too
The same distinction that applies to CETA applies to the UK-India Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement — just for direct tax rather than trade.
The UK-India DTAA governs income tax — withholding rates on royalties, fees for technical services, and permanent establishment questions. It's genuinely important if your company has India-sourced income streams, but it operates on an entirely separate track from OIDAR GST, which is an indirect consumption tax. Being fully compliant on your DTAA position — claiming the right treaty rates, managing PE risk — tells you nothing about your OIDAR position, and vice versa.
Professional tip
If your India tax advisory relationship is scoped around direct tax and treaty matters (a common scope for a UK company's India-facing tax advisor), confirm explicitly whether OIDAR/GST was ever separately assessed. It's a frequent gap precisely because direct and indirect tax are usually handled by different specialists.
5
Checklist
Work through this specifically
- Don't let CETA's tariff and mobility provisions create a false sense that your GST position has also been addressed
- Loop in whoever manages your UK digital-VAT and EU OSS compliance — their existing skill set transfers directly
- Explicitly discard any assumption based on the UK's own £90,000 VAT threshold — OIDAR has none
- Confirm OIDAR has been assessed separately from your DTAA/direct-tax compliance
- Use our applicability checker if you haven't yet confirmed OIDAR applies to your specific service
Glossary
CETA
The UK-India Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, entering into force 15 July 2026 — a goods-tariff and services-mobility agreement, unrelated to GST.
DCC
Double Contributions Convention — the companion social security agreement to CETA, addressing dual social security contributions for cross-border assignees.
UK digital VAT
The UK's own destination-based VAT regime for digital services from overseas suppliers, in place since 2015 with no registration threshold — the closest UK analogy to how OIDAR works.
UK-India DTAA
The bilateral income tax treaty governing direct tax matters — separate from and unrelated to OIDAR GST.
CA Parmod Bindal, FCA
Founder & Lead OIDAR Specialist, OIDARIndia™
A finance leader with over three decades in taxation, corporate governance, and cross-border advisory. Former Independent Director of Steel Authority of India (SAIL), a Maharatna PSU, and Independent Director of CSL Finance Limited, a listed NBFC. Read full profile →
About this guide & sources: This guide reflects the position as at July 2026, including the UK-India CETA entering into force on 15 July 2026. It is provided for general information and does not constitute professional tax, legal, or trade advice — CETA, DTAA, and OIDAR GST each warrant their own dedicated assessment.
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