Every other page on this site asks which country you live in. A seafarer's answer is neither India nor anywhere else — you were on a ship. Income tax has a rule written for precisely that, and it is one of the shortest rules you will ever have to rely on.
Your voyage days do not count as days in India
The rule says that for an individual who is a citizen of India and a member of the crew of a ship, the period of stay in India "shall, in respect of an eligible voyage, not include" the voyage period.
Not "counts as days abroad". Not included. Those days come out of the count altogether, which is what tips many seafarers under the threshold and makes them non-resident for the year.
The Continuous Discharge Certificate sets the dates
The rule does not ask you to estimate. The excluded period runs from "the date entered into the Continuous Discharge Certificate in respect of joining the ship" to "the date entered into the Continuous Discharge Certificate in respect of signing off."
So the CDC is not a formality — it is the evidence. Sign-on and sign-off dates are what the count is built from. Keep it, keep it legible, and keep every page of it.
Not every voyage is an eligible voyage
The rule defines the term, and the definition is narrower than "time on a ship". An eligible voyage is one by a ship carrying passengers or freight in international traffic, where a voyage starting at an Indian port ends at a port outside India, or a voyage starting outside India ends at an Indian port.
Coastal work between two Indian ports is not that. Neither is a vessel that is not carrying passengers or freight in international traffic. If your year mixes both kinds, only the eligible legs come out of the count.
FEMA is a separate question with a separate answer
The rule above is income tax. Your bank is not asking about income tax — it is asking about FEMA, which does not count days the same way at all. FEMA asks why you went and what you intend: someone who has gone abroad for employment, or in circumstances showing an intention to stay away for an uncertain period, is not resident.
The two can disagree in the same year, and both be right. That is not a seafarer's problem specifically — it happens to every NRI — but it lands harder here, because a seafarer's contract pattern makes the day count move year to year.
NRI, RNOR or ROR — which one are you?
Where the salary lands matters
The account your pay arrives in is not cosmetic. An NRE account takes money from abroad and goes out freely again; an NRO account is for Indian-source money and runs into the USD 1 million a year limit. Which one is right depends on where the money is coming from, not on which one your branch opened fastest.
Choosing between NRE, NRO and FCNR(B)
What to keep
Three things, and all three are ordinary record-keeping rather than anything clever:
- Your CDC, complete, with every sign-on and sign-off date readable.
- Your contracts and the vessel's trade, so you can show a voyage was international rather than coastal.
- Your account paperwork — which account the salary reached, and when you told the bank your status had changed.
None of it helps at the time. All of it helps the year somebody asks.
Source: Rule 126, "Computation of period of stay in India in certain cases", read on the Income-tax Department's own site (rule 126, uploaded 13 December 2025), including its Explanation for "eligible voyage" and "Continuous Discharge Certificate". The Income-tax Act 2025 renumbers the 1961 Act throughout, so check the current numbering before quoting it anywhere that matters. The FEMA test is section 2(v) of FEMA, 1999. Checked 22 September 2026.
