DPT-3: the Annual Return of Deposits and Exempt Borrowings, Due 30 June

Ask a room of directors what DPT-3 is and most will say the same thing: a deposits return, for companies that take deposits. We have never taken a rupee of public deposits, so it cannot be ours.

That reading was defensible once. It has not been right since 2019. Form DPT-3 today is the annual return in which a company reports two things to the Registrar of Companies: the deposits it holds, and the borrowings that the law says are not deposits at all. Your director's loan, your bank's term loan, the money your holding company put in — all of it sits in the second half of this form. In the filings that travel with the annual package, DPT-3 is the one with a fixed calendar date of its own: 30 June, every year, with nothing to do with your AGM.

The rule, in one paragraph

Section 73 of the Companies Act, 2013 governs how a company may accept deposits. Rule 16 of the Companies (Acceptance of Deposits) Rules, 2014 made under it requires a return in Form DPT-3, filed with the Registrar on or before 30 June every year, carrying the position as on 31 March of that year, duly audited by the company's auditor.

Then came the Companies (Acceptance of Deposits) Amendment Rules, 2019 — G.S.R. 42(E), dated 22 January 2019. That amendment inserted an Explanation into Rule 16 clarifying that Form DPT-3 is to be used for filing a return of deposits, or particulars of transactions not considered as deposits, or both, by every company other than a government company. One form, two stories. The same amendment also asked, through Rule 16A(3), for a one-time return of old exempt receipts going back to 1 April 2014 — that exercise closed in 2019 and is history now; what survives is the annual filing.

Who files — and who is genuinely out

Start from the wide end. Every company other than a government company files DPT-3 for the deposits and exempt borrowings it carries. Private limited companies file. Public companies file. One Person Companies and small companies file — there is no size exemption tucked into Rule 16, and a dormant company with a director loan on its books files like anyone else. A wholly-owned subsidiary gets no pass either: the rules give it no carve-out, so it files, and the loan from its holding company appears in its return as an exempt borrowing.

The genuine outs sit one level higher, in Rule 1(3). The Deposit Rules do not apply at all to:

• a banking company;
• a non-banking financial company registered with the Reserve Bank of India;
• a housing finance company registered with the National Housing Bank;
• a company the Central Government specifies under the proviso to Section 73(1).

Put the two together and the filing population is plain: government companies are carved out of the DPT-3 filing itself, the Rule 1(3) classes are outside the Deposit Rules altogether, and every other company with deposits or exempt borrowings outstanding on 31 March is in. If your company has neither — no deposit, no loan, no exempt receipt of any kind outstanding on 31 March — there is nothing for the form to report. The obligation follows the balances, not the mere existence of the company.

What goes into the return

The dividing line is Rule 2(1)(c), the long list of receipts the rules say are not deposits. DPT-3 reports your deposits in one part and your outstanding Rule 2(1)(c) receipts in the other. For a typical private company, the second part carries some or all of these, as they stood on 31 March:

• Loans from directors. Money a director lends the company is not a deposit if the director gives a written declaration that the amount is not being given out of borrowed funds, and the amount is disclosed in the Board's report. For a private company, money from a relative of a director carries the same treatment. No declaration on file means the exemption itself is shaky — get the paper before you file, not after a query.
• Bank and financial institution loans. Loans and facilities from banking companies, the State Bank of India and its subsidiaries, notified banking institutions, co-operative banks, and specified financial institutions are outside the deposit definition — and inside this return.
• Inter-company loans. Any amount received from another company is excluded from "deposit". Loans from your holding company, a fellow subsidiary or an unrelated company are all reported here.
• Advances and other exempt receipts. Advances received against goods or services and dealt with as Rule 2(1)(c) requires, security deposits from employees, and similar receipts on the rule's list, to the extent they remain outstanding on 31 March.

Think of your balance sheet as a harbour register. The Registrar is not asking whether each boat was allowed into the harbour — that question belongs to the deposit rules themselves. DPT-3 asks a simpler thing: list every boat that was sitting in the water on 31 March, and say which berth it occupied, deposit or exempt. A boat left off the register is what draws attention, not the boat itself.

The auditor's part — read it precisely

Rule 16 says the information in the return is duly audited by the auditor of the company. Since the 2022 amendment to the Deposit Rules, the auditor also gives a declaration within Form DPT-3 itself on the particulars being reported. That is the position for every filing.

The separate auditor's certificate, attached to the form, is narrower. Under the form's own instructions, that certificate is called for where the filing reports deposits — the purposes named "return of deposits" or "return of deposits and exempted deposits". A filing that reports only exempt borrowings does not carry the same attachment requirement. Companies get this wrong in both directions: certificates chased for weeks for a borrowings-only filing that never needed one, and deposit filings sent in without the certificate they did need. Know which of the two filings yours is before the auditor is briefed.

Missed 30 June? The fee is a slab, not a daily meter

Here is the point on which the internet is loudest and wrongest. DPT-3 is not AOC-4, and it is not MGT-7. The ₹100-per-day additional fee under Section 403 attaches to forms under Section 92 and Section 137 — the annual return and the financial statements. DPT-3 is neither, and no daily meter runs on it.

Delay on DPT-3 is priced by the table for other forms in the Companies (Registration Offices and Fees) Rules, 2014, as multiples of the normal filing fee:

The normal fee itself is modest, so even a badly delayed DPT-3 costs a fraction of what a year of AOC-4 delay costs at ₹100 a day. Cheap, though, is not the same as harmless. A missing DPT-3 is one of the first gaps a lender's or an investor's due diligence pulls up, precisely because the form is the Registrar's own index of what the company owes and to whom. Our month-by-month annual compliance calendar for a private limited company places DPT-3 in that wider year, so the June date stops competing with the September season for attention.

And the penalty question, kept in proportion

Directors who read about deposits quickly reach Section 76A, and its numbers are frightening: a company fine of at least ₹1 crore or twice the amount of deposit accepted, whichever is lower, rising to ₹10 crore, and for every officer in default, imprisonment up to seven years with a fine between ₹25 lakh and ₹2 crore.

Read what Section 76A actually punishes. It punishes a company that accepts or invites deposits in breach of Section 73 or Section 76 or the rules under them, or that fails to repay a deposit or its interest in time. A late DPT-3 is neither of those acts. Filing this return late does not, by itself, put a company inside Section 76A, and any adviser who prices a late DPT-3 off those figures is frightening you with the wrong section.

What a late return does carry, beyond the additional fee above, is the residuary penalty the Deposit Rules keep for contraventions that have no separate punishment of their own — Rule 21, a fine of up to ₹5,000 and, while the default continues, a further fine of up to ₹500 a day. Small numbers, honestly stated. The real cost of skipping DPT-3 is not the fine. It is the diligence question you cannot answer cleanly, the lender who prices the gap, and the exempt-borrowing story of your balance sheet never having been told to the Registrar at all.

A short June routine

DPT-3 rewards companies that treat it as a data job, not a form job. Pull the loan and deposit balances as on 31 March straight from the audited or audit-ready books. Match every director loan to its declaration, and collect any missing declaration while the year is still young. Split the list into deposits and exempt receipts using Rule 2(1)(c), not habit. Brief the auditor early if deposits are being reported, because the certificate takes their time, not yours. Then file well before 30 June, while the portal is quiet.

If this June has already gone by with no DPT-3 on record, file it now at the slab fee and close the gap before diligence finds it. And if you would rather the whole travelling set — DPT-3 in June, the AGM-season forms after it — ran off one calendar owned by someone else, our ROC annual filing team prepares, certifies and files the full package, and chases you before each deadline instead of after it.