Long-form guides on the India tax stack, Schedule FA mechanics, broker transfers and repatriation — for engineers who want the math, not the marketing.
Indian FAANG ICs routinely carry 70–90% of their net worth in employer stock. What three recent crashes did to portfolios that looked safe the year before — and how to diversify down without a tax bomb.
The FX leg is a tax-in-disguise. On a ₹1Cr remit, 80 basis points of broker spread is ₹80,000 vanished into a rate you never saw. Here is the math, the channels, and how to route around it.
The 15% discount is a perquisite at purchase, India ignores US qualified-disposition rules, and the 24-month LTCG clock runs from purchase day — the entire ESPP tax stack for Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, and Intel employees in India.
The 24-month clock is the single most important number in Indian RSU strategy — two days can move the same gain from 35.88% STCG to 12.5% LTCG. A deep look at lot selection, cross-FY harvesting, surcharge banding, and loss offsets.
Form 67 is the Foreign Tax Credit form Indian residents file to recover US withholding under the India-US DTAA — and for RSU holders it is almost entirely about dividends, not vests. Here is the actual mechanic.
A practical evaluation framework — seven factors, the questions to ask any vendor, and the failure modes that show up in your ITR season — for picking the platform that actually handles your US equity correctly from India.
Every February, the Union Budget either changes nothing for RSU holders or changes a lot — and recent history says the latter is more common. Anchored on the Finance Act 2024 rewrite, with the annual watchlist for any future Budget.
Two ways to move vested RSUs out of the US: sell-and-remit versus ACATS in-kind transfer. With broker-by-broker steps, the pre-transfer checklist, and the lot-history mistake that costs people lakhs.
The exact rows, the exact rupee figures, the exact dates — Schedule FA filling for Indian residents holding RSUs from US tech employers, walked through line by line.
From the perquisite tax at vest to the LTCG clock to Schedule FA — the entire India-side tax stack for someone holding US RSUs, with every example in rupees.