RERA at Ten: What a Decade of the Real Estate Regulator Has Actually Delivered

By Bhaskar Subramanian, Advocate, S&S Co. Advocates & Solicitors

Published 24 October 2026 · Law stated as on 19 October 2026 · Informational content, not legal advice: see our disclaimer

The Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act took partial effect on 1 May 2016 and came fully into force a year later. Ten years on, the Supreme Court itself has asked aloud whether some states should keep the authority at all. Between that remark and the Act's genuine achievements lies a more useful question: where has RERA actually worked, and where does a homebuyer still need a different forum entirely.

Ten Years On: The Numbers and the Doubts

The Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 came into force in two tranches, the bulk of its sections on 1 May 2016 and the remainder, including the sections requiring project registration, on 1 May 2017, after states had a year to frame and notify their own rules. Most states missed that first deadline; by early May 2017 only nine states and a handful of union territories had notified rules, and full national coverage took longer still. Ten years from the Act's substantive commencement, RERA now operates in effectively every state except Nagaland.

The scale is not in dispute. Reported figures place national project registrations at roughly 1.5 lakh and complaint disposals at a similar number by the latter part of 2025, a sharp rise from just over one lakh of each as recently as 2022 and 2023. These figures come from government statements reported secondhand rather than a single verified consolidated dataset, so they are best treated as indicative of substantial and growing throughput rather than exact to the last complaint. What they do not capture, and what homebuyer advocates have pointed out repeatedly, is how many of those disposed complaints actually resulted in money paid, possession handed over or an order enforced, as against an order that simply closed the file.

That gap between activity and outcome is exactly what the Supreme Court, through a bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant, put bluntly in February 2026 while otherwise deciding an unrelated dispute over Himachal Pradesh's RERA office location. The bench observed that, except for facilitating builders already in default, the institution was doing nothing, called RERA's intended beneficiaries disappointed and disgusted, and said it was high time states reconsidered whether to constitute the authority at all. These were oral remarks in open court, not a formal direction, and no state has in fact moved to abolish its RERA. But a sitting Chief Justice is not a casual critic, and the remark crystallised a complaint that had been building in commentary for several years: that RERA's registration and disclosure architecture works reasonably well, while its enforcement architecture, the part that actually gets a homebuyer their money, remains the weak link.

The remainder of this piece works through where that weakness sits most concretely, in recovery certificate enforcement and in the institutional gaps that have opened at the appellate level, before turning to two areas where RERA's boundaries with other law, the IBC and the carve-out for redevelopment, remain genuinely unsettled a decade in.

Delay Compensation: The Part of RERA That Has Actually Settled

It is worth starting with what has gone right, since the criticism above should not obscure it. Section 18's right to delay compensation or a refund with interest, where a promoter fails to hand over possession by the date committed in the agreement, is the single most litigated and now most settled part of the Act. A decade of orders across state authorities, appellate tribunals and High Courts has produced a reasonably stable body of interpretation: interest runs from the committed date rather than some later extended date the promoter unilaterally sets, taking possession under protest or under paperwork pressed on the buyer does not itself waive the right to later claim delay interest, and the rate of interest a promoter owes a buyer for delay is generally read as the mirror image of what a buyer would owe the promoter for default, rather than a lower, promoter-friendly figure fixed by a one-sided agreement clause.

The authorities have also been reasonably consistent in refusing to let a builder's possession offer close out a delay claim simply because the buyer eventually moved in. Courts have held that accepting delayed possession does not itself bar a buyer from separately claiming the interest that accrued for the period of delay, and that an occupancy certificate obtained after possession was already handed over does not retroactively cure the underlying delay.

None of this is to say Section 18 litigation has become mechanical. Disputes continue over what counts as force majeure, over whether a registration extension of up to one year, which authorities can grant only once, properly accounts for the delay already caused, and over the quantum due when a project is abandoned rather than merely delayed. But compared to where the law stood five years into the Act, when every one of these questions was open, Section 18 jurisprudence now gives both sides of a transaction a reasonably predictable basis to settle without litigating each point from first principles. That predictability, more than any single ruling, is what a decade of RERA adjudication has actually delivered on the compensation side.

The Recovery Certificate Problem: Orders Without Enforcement

Where the picture turns genuinely weak is not in getting an order, but in collecting on it. Section 40(1) of RERA lets an authority or its adjudicating officer issue a recovery certificate for amounts due under an order, which the district collector is then meant to recover as though it were an arrear of land revenue, using the state's ordinary revenue recovery machinery. The Supreme Court confirmed in Newtech Promoters and Developers Pvt Ltd v. State of U.P. (2021) that this power exists and is valid. What the decade since has shown is that having the power and exercising it promptly are two different things.

Haryana's own records illustrate the gap starkly. Recovery certificates sent to the Collector, Gurugram remained unexecuted for years; one Haryana RERA order itself records that, after the state transferred the Collector's recovery powers to the Adjudicating Officer in 2024 and the certificates were sent back for want of action, no amount had actually been recovered through the Collector's office up to that point. Punjab RERA has had to attach the assets of GMADA, a government development authority, to recover roughly 26 lakh rupees owed to a buyer over delayed plot possession, a telling illustration that even a recovery certificate against a state instrumentality does not guarantee payment without further enforcement steps. In April 2026, the Karnataka High Court had to issue a writ of mandamus directing the authorities to execute two outstanding K-RERA recovery certificates, dated October and December 2025, within a fixed eight-week period, because the ordinary revenue recovery process had simply not moved despite the certificates having already been issued.

None of these are isolated administrative lapses; they describe a structural problem. A RERA recovery certificate depends entirely on a separate executive machinery, the revenue department, that was not designed around RERA's timelines or its typically smaller individual claim amounts, and that machinery has no particular institutional incentive to prioritise a homebuyer's certificate over its ordinary land revenue work. A buyer who wins an order and then a recovery certificate can still be years away from actual payment, and in some reported instances has had to return to a High Court merely to get the recovery certificate itself acted upon. This, more than any single substantive ruling, is the gap the Chief Justice's February 2026 remarks were almost certainly pointing at: an authority that disposes of complaints and issues orders in large numbers, while the machinery that is supposed to turn those orders into money in a buyer's hands lags years behind.

RERA, Consumer Fora and Civil Courts: A Decade of Boundary-Drawing

A homebuyer with a delayed or defective flat has, in principle, at least three forums available: RERA, a consumer commission under the Consumer Protection Act, and a civil suit. A decade of litigation has drawn the boundaries between them more sharply than the Act itself did. The Supreme Court has held that once a homebuyer elects to proceed under RERA for a given grievance, they cannot later switch to a consumer forum on the same cause of action, treating the choice as an election of remedies rather than a set of cumulative options to be tried one after another. RERA's own jurisdiction bar under Section 79 keeps genuine title disputes, and claims for a declaration or an injunction of the kind only a civil court can grant, outside the authority's reach altogether, a point High Courts have reiterated when RERA authorities have strayed into adjudicating ownership questions dressed up as regulatory complaints.

The practical effect is that the choice of forum has become a strategic decision made once, early, rather than a fallback to be revisited if the first forum disappoints. A buyer whose real grievance is about delay and money is generally better served going to RERA directly, given its summary procedure and the Section 18 jurisprudence discussed above; a buyer whose grievance is about possession quality, deficiency of service in a broader sense, or facts that genuinely require examining title or ownership may still need a consumer forum or a civil court respectively, and should make that choice before filing rather than treat RERA as a first attempt that can be abandoned.

This body of law, developed almost entirely through litigation rather than amendment, is one of the quieter successes of RERA's first decade: a buyer and their counsel can now predict with reasonable confidence which forum will actually entertain a given grievance, which was far from true in the Act's early years when overlapping jurisdiction between RERA, consumer fora and civil courts generated a large volume of purely procedural litigation over which forum was even competent to hear the case at all.

RERA Meets the IBC: Parity in Theory, Collective Resolution in Practice

The most consequential and least settled overlap, a decade in, is with the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. The Supreme Court held in 2023, in a matter concerning a Bulland Buildtech project, that a homebuyer who has obtained a RERA decree is not thereby converted into a different, lesser class of creditor under the IBC; Section 5(8)(f) does not create any sub-classification among financial creditors, and the IBC's overriding effect under Section 238 does not strip a decree-holding buyer of the parity other financial creditors enjoy in a resolution process. Read on its own, that ruling suggested a RERA decree strengthens rather than weakens a buyer's position once the promoter enters insolvency.

A 2026 ruling from the NCLT Mumbai complicates that picture considerably. In the Spenta Enclave matter, a bench approved a roughly 1,049 crore rupee resolution plan under which around 300 homebuyers, holding admitted claims of about 264 crore rupees, were to receive their flats rather than a cash refund. Four homebuyers sought reconsideration or a refund mechanism instead; the tribunal dismissed the application, holding that insolvency resolution proceeds on collective resolution of claims and the balancing of stakeholder interests, and relying on Section 238 to hold that the Code's collective process could not be reshaped around individual buyers' Section 18 refund rights once a resolution plan, approved by the requisite majority of the homebuyer class itself through its authorised representative, was otherwise in place.

The two rulings are not strictly inconsistent, but they sit in real tension. The 2023 ruling protects a buyer's standing and voting weight as a financial creditor against being treated as something lesser; the 2026 ruling confirms that standing does not translate into an individual veto or an individual exit right once the class as a whole has voted for a plan that gives flats rather than refunds. For a buyer in an insolvent project, the practical lesson a decade of this interplay teaches is that a RERA decree secures a seat at the table as a financial creditor on equal terms with other financial creditors, not a guarantee that the buyer's preferred remedy, refund over possession or vice versa, will survive a resolution plan the majority of that same creditor class has approved. Where the homebuyer class is divided on what it wants, the outcome increasingly turns on which side carries the voting weight within that class, a dynamic RERA's own text does not address at all.

Redevelopment Projects: RERA's Uneasy Fit

Redevelopment of ageing housing societies, a particularly active segment of the market in cities like Mumbai, exposes a genuine gap in how RERA defines its own scope. Section 3(2)(a) exempts a project from registration where the land involved does not exceed five hundred square metres, or where the number of apartments proposed does not exceed eight, whichever is applicable. Whether that exemption applies when either condition alone is met, or only when both are met together, has itself been read differently by different state authorities; a Rajasthan RERA order in 2022 treated the two limbs as independent triggers for registration rather than cumulative conditions, meaning a project exceeding even one of the two thresholds needed registration, a stricter reading than some developers had assumed.

Separately, Section 3(2)(c) exempts renovation, repair or redevelopment work that does not involve marketing, advertising, selling or a new allotment of any apartment, plot or building. A straightforward structural repair to an existing building plainly falls within that carve-out. A society redevelopment that demolishes an existing building and constructs a larger one, with additional flats sold to new buyers to cross-subsidise the free flats given to existing members, does not; the moment new apartments are marketed and sold to anyone outside the existing membership, the project falls back within RERA's registration requirement regardless of the redevelopment label attached to it. Existing members who receive a free or discounted flat as part of the redevelopment, rather than a new buyer who pays full price, have themselves been treated by at least one state authority as allottees within RERA's protection, extending the Act's remedies to a category of beneficiary the statute did not obviously have in mind when it was drafted around conventional sale transactions.

The practical consequence, a decade in, is that redevelopment remains an area where the registration question has to be worked out project by project rather than read off the statute directly, with real consequences for both developers, who risk proceeding on an assumed exemption that a state authority later rejects, and for existing society members, whose status as RERA allottees determines whether they can invoke Section 18 delay compensation against a redeveloper who misses the new possession date, a right that matters increasingly as redevelopment timelines slip in the same way fresh-construction projects' timelines always have.

Institutional Strain: Tribunal Vacancies and a Decriminalisation Trend

A regulator is only as effective as the appellate machinery sitting above it, and that machinery has visibly struggled to keep pace with RERA's caseload in several states. In Maharashtra, the Bombay High Court had to rule in 2026 that the Maharashtra Revenue Tribunal retained jurisdiction to hear RERA appeals for as long as the state's own Real Estate Appellate Tribunal, MahaREAT, had not become functional in the fuller sense, holding that appointing a chairperson and members alone did not mean the tribunal had actually been established. In West Bengal, the Calcutta High Court was, as of September 2026, still pressing the state's Chief Secretary for a status report on filling the posts of the Appellate Tribunal's chairperson and judicial member, years after the vacancies first arose, on a public interest litigation tracing back to a February 2026 recruitment advertisement that had still not concluded. These are not isolated administrative delays; an authority whose orders cannot be meaningfully appealed in a reasonable time functions, for the party who loses at first instance, much like one whose orders are simply final by default.

Against that backdrop, the one significant legislative change of the decade's later years has gone in a different direction entirely: decriminalisation rather than stronger enforcement. The Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act's changes to RERA took effect on 7 May 2026, and among other things replaced Section 68's one-year imprisonment term for an allottee's non-compliance with an Appellate Tribunal order with a calibrated monetary penalty instead. Several states have had to follow with consequential rule changes; Dadra and Nagar Haveli's amendment rules, notified on 1 July 2026, removed a penalty provision tied to the imprisonment clause the central amendment had just abolished. The change reflects a broader, government-wide decriminalisation push across regulatory statutes rather than anything specific to RERA's own performance, but its practical effect on RERA is to soften consequences for allottees precisely while builders' own promoter-side obligations remain enforced mainly through recovery certificates that, as the previous section showed, do not always get enforced promptly either.

Several states have gone further and introduced their own amendment bills rather than wait for central action: Himachal Pradesh has proposed changes to the eligibility and selection process for its authority's chairperson and members, and Maharashtra has a pending bill aimed at making RERA the primary compliance code for post-2016 projects, addressing conveyance obligations the Maharashtra Ownership Flats Act had left ambiguous. Neither had been notified as law as of the most recent reporting available, which is itself a small illustration of how slowly structural reform to RERA moves even when a state legislature has decided reform is needed.

What a Decade of RERA Teaches a Homebuyer Today

For a buyer entering a transaction today, ten years of RERA jurisprudence gives a clearer map than existed even five years ago, provided the map is read for what it actually shows rather than for the protection the Act's preamble promises. Delay compensation under Section 18 is now the most reliable remedy RERA offers, with settled interest principles and a well-tested refusal to let possession under protest or a belated occupancy certificate defeat a genuine delay claim. Choice of forum, RERA against a consumer commission or a civil court, should be made deliberately and early, since the law no longer tolerates treating one forum as a trial run for another.

Two areas call for real caution rather than reliance on the Act's general promise. Where a promoter's insolvency is even a plausible risk, a buyer should understand that a RERA decree secures parity as a financial creditor, not a guaranteed individual outcome, since a resolution plan the majority of the buyer class approves can still leave an individual dissenting buyer without the refund that an RERA order, taken alone, might have suggested was secure. And where redevelopment is involved, whether as an existing society member or a buyer of a newly built flat in a redeveloping project, the registration and allottee-status questions should be checked against the specific project's facts rather than assumed either way, given how unsettled the exemption's boundaries remain.

The honest assessment the Chief Justice's remarks forced into the open is that RERA's registration, disclosure and first-instance adjudication functions have matured into a reasonably effective regime, while its back end, turning an order into actual recovery, and its appellate layer in several states, has not kept pace. A buyer who treats a RERA order as the end of the matter, rather than as the start of what can still be a lengthy recovery process, misunderstands what the Act, ten years in, is actually able to deliver.

RERA's first decade is not the story of a failed statute, whatever the Supreme Court's February 2026 remarks might suggest read in isolation. It is the story of a regulator whose front end, registration, disclosure, and the adjudication of straightforward delay and refund claims, now works with real predictability, sitting uneasily alongside a back end, recovery enforcement and appellate capacity, that several states have simply not built out to match the caseload the front end generates. The overlaps with the IBC and with redevelopment, neither of which the original Act anticipated in any detail, have been worked out through litigation rather than amendment, and both remain genuinely unsettled in ways a buyer should not assume away.

A statute ten years old should not still need a Chief Justice to say, in open court, that an institution appears to help only the parties it was created to restrain. Whether that remark produces the enforcement reform RERA's complaint-disposal numbers have never required, but its recovery numbers plainly do, is the question the next few years of this Act's life will actually answer.

Frequently Asked Questions

References & Further Reading

The provisions, rulings and official documents below were relied on for this article, which states the law as on 19 October 2026. The position can change with amendments, rules and later decisions, so check the current text before acting on any of it.

1. Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016, Sections 3(2)(a) and 3(2)(c) (registration exemptions), Section 18 (delay compensation and refund), Section 40(1) (recovery certificate), Section 68 (as amended) and Section 79 (bar on civil court jurisdiction)
2. Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016, Sections 5(8)(f) and 238
3. Newtech Promoters and Developers Pvt Ltd v. State of U.P., (2021) 11 SCC 718 (validity of RERA recovery certificate power under Section 40(1))
4. Supreme Court of India, October 2023 ruling on homebuyers holding RERA decrees as financial creditors under the IBC (Bulland Buildtech matter), reported 2023-10-15
5. In re Spenta Enclave resolution plan, NCLT Mumbai, order dated 9 September 2026 (homebuyer refund claims and Section 238 IBC override)
6. Supreme Court of India, oral observations on RERA's effectiveness, bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant, hearing of 12 February 2026 (Himachal Pradesh RERA office relocation matter)
7. Karnataka High Court, writ petition directing execution of K-RERA recovery certificates within eight weeks, order of April 2026
8. Bombay High Court, ruling on jurisdiction of the Maharashtra Revenue Tribunal pending MahaREAT's full functioning, June 2026
9. Rajasthan Real Estate Regulatory Authority, order dated 8 March 2022, on the disjunctive reading of the Section 3(2)(a) registration exemption
10. Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2026, RERA-related amendments brought into force with effect from 7 May 2026
11. Dadra and Nagar Haveli Real Estate (Regulation and Development) (General) Amendment Rules, 2026, notified 1 July 2026
12. Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, reported RERA registration and complaint-disposal figures, Central Advisory Council meeting, September 2025

Related reading on this site

• Rera section 18 delay interest calculation guide
• Rera recovery certificate enforcement guide
• Rera vs consumer forum jurisdiction guide
• Ibc homebuyers financial creditors section 5 8 f guide
• Housing society redevelopment state policy guide
• Cji surya kant states rethink rera
• Nclt mumbai spenta enclave rera refund resolution plan