Occupancy certificate and CC: what to check before you pay

The builder’s office has sent you a letter. The keys are nearly ready, it says, and so is the last payment. You mention it at work, and somebody says one thing back: check the OC, the paper that lets you live there.

You look it up. One page says CC means completion certificate. The next says commencement. A third is busy selling flats. And under all of it sits the worry you don’t say out loud: what if we pay in full, shift the furniture in, and the flat turns out not to be legal?

I’ll do this the way I’d do it for my own family. Two papers, in plain words. Who signs them here in Navi Mumbai. What a missing one costs you every month. Then five checks you can finish this week from your phone.

Three kinds of reader land here. Is your last payment still pending? Then all of it is for you. Keys already yours, and no OC? Start at what it costs you every month. Buying a resale flat? The OC is what your own lender asks for first.

CC lets them build. The OC lets you live there.

The CC (the commencement certificate, your council’s written permission to start building) comes first. The OC (the occupancy certificate, the same office saying the finished building is safe and legal to live in) comes last. Getting both is the builder’s job. Yours is to see them before your money leaves your account.

Think of a bus. The OC is its fitness certificate. Nobody asks for it on an ordinary day. The day something goes wrong, it’s the only paper anyone wants to see.

The law agrees, and it puts the work on them. The RERA Act 2016 (the central law that protects home buyers) is blunt about it. Section 11(4)(b) makes the builder responsible for getting the certificate and handing it to you. Maharashtra’s older flats law, MOFA 1963, asks the same before they give up the flat.

Then a clock starts on your side. Section 19(10) gives you two months to take the keys once the OC is out. So the OC isn’t the end of the paperwork. It’s the signal to move.

Four papers, in the order they reach you

Four papers sit between an empty plot and your name on the society list. They come in a fixed order. Each one proves a different thing.

The paper	Who signs it	When it comes	What it proves to you
Commencement certificate (CC)	The planning authority: CIDCO, NMMC, Panvel Municipal Corporation or KDMC (Kalyan-Dombivli’s)	Before the first brick	The plan was sanctioned, and work is legal. It also says how many floors
Building completion certificate	Your builder’s own architect or engineer	When the work is finished	The architect’s word that the building matches the sanctioned plan. Not the authority’s word
Occupancy certificate (OC)	The planning authority, after its own check	Within 21 days of that filing	The building is safe and legal to live in
Part occupancy certificate	The same authority	Before the whole site is done	One wing, or a set of floors, is cleared. Read exactly which

Along the way your builder will offer possession (the day the keys and the flat become yours to use). A letter offering it is not an OC. Only the office that gave the CC can give you that.

Those timings aren’t a builder’s promise either. They sit in the state’s own building rules, the UDCPR 2020. The architect files the completion certificate, the office then gets 21 days to decide on the OC, and a part OC is allowed before the whole site is done.

One more thing hides inside that 21-day rule. If those 21 days pass with no answer, the rule treats the work as approved for living in. So silence from the office isn’t a refusal. Ask the desk what it actually recorded.

After the OC, one more handover is owed to you. The land and the building must pass from the builder to your society. The law calls that conveyance. Where no local rule says otherwise, Section 17 gives them three months from the OC. The plans are due to you within thirty days.

What a missing OC costs you every month

A missing OC rarely ends in a bulldozer. It ends in a bill, and the bill repeats. No brochure carries this part.

The Supreme Court wrote the figures down. In a Mumbai case decided in January 2022, a society’s flats had no OC for years. The judgment records what its members paid instead.

The court held that a builder who skips the OC has failed the buyer. They can be made to pay for it. The case is called Samruddhi. The name is worth keeping, because it is the thing you quote when a builder shrugs.

Beyond the bills, five ordinary things get harder:

• Water and power You stay on a temporary line, often one shared meter for the whole block.
• Your tax bill You’re taxed because you live there. Paying it doesn’t make the building legal.
• Your buyer’s loan Lenders ask for the OC on a ready or resale flat. No OC, no loan, so no buyer. Buying resale? Then it’s your own loan.
• Your society The hand-over stalls, so nobody clearly owns the lift, the pump or the roof.
• A notice NMMC, Navi Mumbai’s municipal corporation, has named 2,111 buildings here that are lived in without an OC, and warned every one of them.

And this isn’t only a Navi Mumbai worry. In Nagpur, about 88% of the city’s buildings are recorded as having no OC at all.

Want a rough figure for your own home? From that one case, take your last water bill and add about half. Take the tax bill and add about a quarter. No court has fixed those shares for your home. Treat it as a guide, not a bill.

Who signs the OC in your own area

Whoever signed your CC will sign your OC too. Which office is that? Most pages skip the question, and the answer is already printed on your own paper.

Navi Mumbai is split between four offices, by area:

• Kharghar and Taloja CIDCO, the state body that built Navi Mumbai, for most of its own sectors.
• Panvel and Kamothe Usually Panvel Municipal Corporation.
• Vashi up to Airoli, and Nerul NMMC, whose own site carries the occupancy certificate desk.
• Dombivli KDMC, that city’s own corporation.

Which office is in charge is genuinely mixed here, so please don’t guess. Read the letterhead on the CC, then call that office. The CC and the OC may name two different offices. If so, ask why before you pay.

Five checks you can finish this week

1. Ask in writing One email: please send the OC, or the part OC covering my wing. Keep the reply, whatever it says.
2. Read the paper, not the cover note A real OC sits on the authority’s letterhead, with an outward number and a date. Below that comes a schedule of the floors it clears. Does it name your wing and your floor? A part OC may cover a tower that isn’t yours.
3. Open the project on the register MahaRERA (the state’s own register of approved projects) lists each project’s uploaded papers. Search the project on MahaRERA’s site and look for the OC there.
4. Call the office on the letterhead Ask its town planning desk to confirm the number and the date on your copy.
5. Hold the last slice Tell your builder, politely and in writing, that the final payment follows the OC. Then ask your own bank what it needs before the last instalment. A bank may release against a possession letter alone. That is the bank’s rule, not proof the building is legal.

If step 3 is new to you, we wrote the long version of it: how to check a project’s MahaRERA registration yourself, screen by screen.

Buying a new flat? Then ask for all of these together, once, rather than one at a time over six months.

Paper to collect	What it proves
Agreement for sale, registered	Your price, your carpet area and your handover date, in law
Registration receipt, and Index II (the registrar’s own summary of the deal)	The agreement is on the state’s record
MahaRERA registration certificate	The project is on the state register, with its own dates
Commencement certificate (CC)	Building was allowed, and up to how many floors
Sanctioned plan	Your flat matches what the office approved
Building completion certificate	The architect’s word that the build matches the sanctioned plan
Occupancy certificate, full or part	The building is legal to live in
Payment schedule and receipts	What you’ve paid, and what is still due

Costs sit outside this list. Stamp duty (the state’s tax on a property sale) and the registration fee are a separate bill, and we worked both out rupee by rupee on a real Navi Mumbai flat.

A register number is not a legal building

A number proves a project is registered. It doesn’t prove the building is legal. Our own work rests on that register, so I’d rather say it than let you find out later.

In Kalyan and Dombivli, 65 buildings went up on forged approvals. Their builders held proper-looking certificates all the same. A certificate in a brochure is not the same as a certificate on an office’s own file.

About 6,500 residents were living in those buildings when the Bombay High Court ordered them demolished. The first police cases had been filed years earlier. That is the part worth knowing: trouble surfaces long after the money is paid.

The regulator tightened its grip after that. MahaRERA Order 45/2023, dated 15 May 2023, makes it compare the CC a builder files against the copy the planning office sends in directly. Old files are being re-read too. Letters went out asking offices to verify the OCs of 3,699 projects whose registration had run its course.

Nearly half of those letters came to our own region, 1,819 of them. So if you feel awkward asking your builder for a paper, please don’t. The state is asking that very same question of the very same files.

“OC applied for” is not an OC. Neither is a possession letter, a photo of the keys, or a line in the society group. Ask for the certificate’s number and date, then check both with the office that signed it.

Green lights, and the lines that mean stop

Which column is your own flat sitting in today? If it’s the right-hand one, you still have time, because the money hasn’t moved.

Then comes the pressure, and you will feel it. The office may say the slot closes, or that the price moves, or that another family is waiting. Pay on the schedule your own agreement sets, and no faster. Asking to see a paper is not a reason to lose anything.

And if they’ve already handed you the keys with no OC? Don’t shout, and don’t sign a clean receipt either. Write down that you’re taking the flat without the OC, ask for the date they expect it, and keep their reply. That letter is what a complaint later stands on.

The rule I’d give my own family: no OC, no last payment and no shifting date. Ask for it by name in writing, then confirm it with the office whose letterhead is on the CC.

What we can’t tell you

We hold no OC for a single one of the 463 projects on this site. What we do hold, for every one, is a register number, a builder’s name and a recorded handover month. That’s the first limit, and it’s about us.

That’s not carelessness, it’s the calendar. Every one of them is still being built. An OC only exists at the end of a build. So when we say a project is MahaRERA-checked, we mean exactly that. We have read its registration on the state’s own site. We don’t claim to have read a paper that doesn’t exist yet.

Your own OC question already has a date on it. The handover month on a project’s page is the month the builder gave the state. Two of ours sit at opposite ends of that line.

A month that has already gone past is your cue to ask. Ask for the OC by name, in writing. Then read the register for an extension before you judge anyone.

One more limit, and this one is about the law: this is a guide, not legal advice. Your own agreement has its own words about payment and hand-over. Before you hold money back, show those words to a lawyer.

How we checked: every legal point above links to the Act, the state’s rules, the Supreme Court or MahaRERA. The handover months and the count are our own register entries, read on 29 October 2026. The share of those MahaRERA letters adds the five other regions together.

And if you’re holding a builder’s letter you can’t read, send it over. Our advisor will go through the papers with you and name the one that’s missing. The short form on this page reaches them. Let’s get your OC in writing before the furniture moves.

Questions buyers ask

Is CC the commencement certificate or the completion certificate?

In Maharashtra, the CC in your own file is almost always the commencement certificate. Plenty of national pages use CC for the completion certificate instead, which is why two articles can seem to contradict each other. Read the title printed on your own paper and trust that.

Can a flat be registered without an OC?

Registration and the OC come from two different offices. A sale can be registered while the OC is still pending. So your registration receipt says nothing about whether the building is legal to live in.

What if our builder never gets the OC?

Then they’ve failed you in law, and the Supreme Court has said so plainly. You can complain to the regulator under Section 11(4)(b). A formed society can also claim back the extra tax and water charges it has paid.

We already live in a building with no OC. What now?

You’re in a large group. Press your society to apply, ask your builder in writing, and keep every reply. A state plan to let societies apply for the OC themselves was reported in January 2026, though the full order wasn’t out at the time.

Does a part OC mean we can move in?

Only if it covers your wing and your floor. Read the schedule attached to it, not the covering letter. A part OC for Tower A does nothing at all for a flat in Tower B.

Buying your first home here? Our six steps to buying a flat in Navi Mumbai put this in order, from the loan to the keys.