How to calculate apartment maintenance charges in Bengaluru
Karnataka apportions common expenses by undivided interest, not equally per flat. What KAOA Section 10 means for a mixed-size Bengaluru complex.
Written by the Societly team
Last verified 28 July 2026 · 3 sources
Most of the guidance on Indian apartment maintenance charges you will find online is written about Maharashtra, where a state model bye-law splits the bill into heads and directs that some — security, housekeeping, administration — be shared equally by every flat, while structural contributions go by area.
If you are in Bengaluru, do not copy that. Karnataka says something different, and it says it in one sentence.
What the Act actually says
Karnataka Apartment Ownership Act, 1972, Section 10:
"The common profits of the property shall be distributed among and the common expenses shall be charged to, the apartment owners according to the percentage of the undivided interest in the common areas and facilities."
That is the rule. Common expenses are apportioned by percentage of undivided interest — not equally per flat, and not by whichever basis the committee finds convenient.
Two consequences follow immediately, and both surprise committees:
- There is no "equal share" component by default. The Maharashtra approach
of splitting security and housekeeping equally has no basis in the KAOA. A Bengaluru association that adopts it is departing from the statute.
- "Per square foot" is an approximation, not the rule. The Act says
undivided interest, which is a defined percentage in your Declaration. It is often derived from area and therefore often close to a per-sq-ft split — but the operative number is the percentage in the Declaration, not the area figure in your spreadsheet.
Where your undivided interest percentage lives
In the Deed of Declaration registered under Section 13, and repeated in each apartment's Deed of Apartment. Every apartment has a stated percentage of undivided interest in the common areas and facilities, and those percentages sum to 100%.
If your association cannot produce the Declaration, that is the first problem to fix — see which Act should your association be registered under. Without it you are apportioning by custom rather than by entitlement, and a member who challenges the bill has a straightforward argument.
A worked example
The numbers below are illustrative — a constructed example to show the method. Use your own Declaration percentages and your own approved budget.
Take a Bengaluru complex of 40 apartments in two sizes, with an approved annual budget of ₹38,40,000 (₹3,20,000 a month).
| Apartment type | Count | Super built-up | UDI % each | UDI % total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 BHK | 28 | 1,150 sq ft | 2.03% | 56.84% |
| 3 BHK | 12 | 1,650 sq ft | 3.60% | 43.20% |
| Total | 40 | ~100% |
Monthly charge per apartment = monthly common expenses × that apartment's UDI %.
- 2 BHK: ₹3,20,000 × 2.03% = ₹6,496/month
- 3 BHK: ₹3,20,000 × 3.60% = ₹11,520/month
Check: (28 × ₹6,496) + (12 × ₹11,520) = ₹1,81,888 + ₹1,38,240 = ₹3,20,128. The small overage is rounding in the percentages and should be absorbed rather than chased.
Compare that to what the Maharashtra method would have produced on the same budget — roughly ₹7,600 and ₹9,000 — and you can see why this is not a cosmetic difference. Under the Maharashtra approach the larger apartment pays 18% more; under the KAOA it pays 77% more. Adopting the wrong one materially misbills every flat in the building.
What goes into "common expenses"
The Act does not enumerate a head list the way Maharashtra's model bye-law does, so your registered bye-laws carry that detail. In practice a Bengaluru association's common expenses include:
- security and housekeeping contracts
- common-area electricity, DG set fuel and AMC
- lift AMC and lift electricity
- water — including tanker purchases, which in much of Bengaluru is a
significant and volatile line
- STP and WTP operation and maintenance
- landscaping and pest control
- association administration, accounting and audit
- insurance
- contributions to the reserve or sinking fund, where the bye-laws provide
Two Bengaluru-specific notes. Tanker water can swing the budget hard between a good and a bad monsoon, and associations that budget it as a flat monthly figure end up under-collecting in summer — budget it against actual consumption history and build a buffer. STP compliance is a real recurring cost that committees routinely under-budget.
What is not a common expense
Individual property tax is not a common expense. In Bengaluru each apartment owner is separately liable for property tax on their own unit — now under the Greater Bengaluru Authority, which superseded the BBMP under the Greater Bengaluru Governance Act, 2024, with the city split into five city corporations. The association is not the taxpayer for individual units.
Where an association does collect a statutory levy purely to pay it onward, itemise it separately. It matters for GST, where amounts collected as a pure agent are treated differently from the association's own charges.
Can the association charge on a different basis?
This is where committees want a yes and the honest answer is "carefully".
Section 10 states the statutory position. Section 16(3) lets bye-laws deal with administration and accounts. Associations do adopt variations — a flat rate per apartment for a specific facility, metered charging for actual consumption, a separate charge for a second parking slot — and there are reasonable arguments for some of them.
But a variation from Section 10 should be: written into the registered bye-laws, approved by the general body, applied consistently, and taken to an advocate first. What you should not do is quietly bill on a basis that differs from both the Act and your bye-laws because it is what the previous committee did.
Making the bill defensible
- Publish the budget by head, with last year's actuals alongside.
- Print the UDI percentage on the bill so each owner can verify their own
apportionment.
- Itemise pure-agent collections separately from association charges.
- Re-derive the rate annually from the approved budget rather than carrying
last year's number forward.
- Reconcile the UDI schedule to the Declaration once, and fix discrepancies
properly rather than adjusting individual bills.
That last point is the one that bites. Many Bengaluru associations bill on super-built-up area from the builder's original sheet, which does not always match the registered UDI percentages. Where they diverge, the Declaration wins — and an association that discovers this after five years has a genuinely uncomfortable decision about the past.
Related: what your association's accounts should show and recovering arrears.
To work out what the s.10 apportionment means for your own flat, use the free maintenance charges calculator.
Sources
Every statutory claim above was checked against the text of the Act itself, not against secondary commentary.
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