UP circle rates: the DM-set floor, district by district

What is the UP circle rate, and who sets it?

The circle rate (सर्किल रेट) is the minimum value the government assigns to land and property for charging stamp duty and the registration fee. In UP it is set by the District Magistrate of each district — this is the point that trips people up: there is no single statewide circle rate, there are seventy-five district schedules, each with locality (mohalla/colony) and sometimes road-category granularity. A circle-rate figure from Haryana or Rajasthan tells you nothing about a UP plot, and even a figure from the next UP district may not apply to yours.

Where do you look it up?

On the state's registration portal, IGRSUP (igrsup.gov.in), through the Valuation List service — "मूल्यांकन सूची विवरण". The official flow begins with a district (जनपद) selection, then the sub-registrar office (उप निबंधक कार्यालय), and returns that SRO's valuation list. That drill-down is the whole method: the rate lives in the per-SRO list, and reading the right locality row for your land is the skill. District registration offices and district websites also publish the schedules.

• IGRSUP → Valuation List (मूल्यांकन सूची).
• Select the District (जनपद).
• Select the Sub-Registrar Office (उप निबंधक कार्यालय).
• Read the locality/road-category row for your land use.

How does the circle rate drive stamp duty?

The rule that costs money when it is missed: stamp duty and the registration fee are computed on the higher of the price stated in your deed or the circle-rate value — the IGRSUP stamp calculator explicitly takes both a transaction value and a market value from the latest valuation list. If a deed is written below the circle-rate value, the department still charges on the circle-rate value. So the circle rate sets the floor the government will tax you on, whatever the two parties privately agree; the stamp-duty guide carries the rates that ride on top.

What vintage are the rates, and how often do they change?

They change by district, on the District Magistrate's notification — so there is no single statewide "last revised" date or fixed cycle we would assert. A district may revise its circle rates while a neighbour has not. The honest form of a UP circle-rate figure is therefore three items — the number, the district-and-locality it came from, and the "effective from" date printed on that SRO's list — and you read the current one from IGRSUP at the time of the deal.

Why does this guide quote no rupee figure?

Because there is no single UP circle rate to quote, and the per-locality figures are computed behind the portal's district-and-SRO selection rather than printed as a plain table. Lifting a rupee-per-square-metre number from a blog and presenting it as "the UP circle rate" would mislead in both directions, exactly as a district-wide market rate would. What we publish is the method — where the official list lives, how to read your SRO's row, and the higher-of rule that makes that row the floor. The number for your parcel is a one-message request, read from IGRSUP, dated.

Does the circle rate matter beyond stamp duty?

Yes — it quietly anchors more than the deed. The circle-rate value is the floor the department taxes the transaction on, but it also shapes what a bank will lend against the property, and it is a reference point when income-tax provisions compare a declared consideration to a "stamp-duty value" (a gap between the two can have tax consequences for buyer and seller alike). So reading the correct SRO row is not only about the duty on registry day — it affects financing and the tax posture of the deal. That is one more reason a UP circle-rate figure is worth pulling fresh from IGRSUP for the specific locality, rather than assumed from a neighbouring district.