Project Extended by MahaRERA? Your Interest Claim Still Stands

"MahaRERA extended my project, so I've lost my interest claim" — no, you haven't

This is the fear doing the rounds among buyers this month: MahaRERA Order 66/2026 pushed thousands of project completion dates forward by four months, and people assume that means their delay-interest clock has been reset to zero. It hasn't.

The extension changed one thing: how long the project stays validly registered on the MahaRERA portal. It did not touch what your builder personally promised you in your signed contract. Those are two different dates governed by two different parts of the RERA Act, and the money you may be owed hangs entirely on the second one.

So before you tear up your claim, understand which date actually matters. The portal date is the builder's deadline to the regulator. The date in your agreement is the builder's deadline to you. When the second one passes without your keys, interest starts running, extension or no extension.

Section 6 versus Section 18: the portal date is not your date

Section 6 of the RERA Act deals with registration validity, essentially the licence a developer needs to keep selling and building a project legally. When MahaRERA grants an extension, it is extending this registration under Section 6. That is what moves on the portal.

Section 18 is a completely separate right. It says that if the promoter fails to hand over possession by the date written in your Agreement for Sale, the signed contract between you and the builder, you can either walk away with a full refund plus interest, or stay in the deal and claim interest for every month of delay. The Agreement for Sale, usually just called the AFS, is the registered document you signed at booking. It carries your specific possession date.

An analysis of Order 66/2026 published on realnewsofindia.com put it plainly: the extension moves the registration validity forward, but liability that has already built up does not automatically move with it. The portal changing does not amend your contract.

A concrete example of how the two dates split apart

Say your AFS commits the builder to possession by 31 December 2025. That date came and went with no keys handed over. From 1 January 2026, your Section 18 interest clock is already ticking.

Now Order 66/2026 lands in August 2026 and grants the project an automatic four-month extension because its completion date fell on or after 28 February 2026. On the MahaRERA portal, the project's completion date now reads four months later than before. A buyer glancing at that page might conclude the builder has until mid-2026-something and owes nothing yet.

Wrong reading. Your contractual date was December 2025. The portal date has nothing to say about the promise the developer made to you on stamp paper. The interest that accrued from January 2026 onward is yours to claim. If you want to see how the running total builds month by month, the Section 18 delay interest calculator works it out at the prescribed rate.

What MahaRERA has actually ruled: the AFS date wins

This is not a theory buyers are hoping is true. MahaRERA has said it repeatedly.

In the Urban Space Creators matter in June 2026, MahaRERA Chairperson Manoj Saunik held that statutory extensions granted by the Authority are administrative in nature and do not alter the possession date committed in a registered Agreement for Sale. The same order rejected the argument that regulatory delays and stop-work orders were force majeure, calling temporary disruptions like labour shortages and strikes ordinary commercial risks a developer carries.

On 19 August 2026, Member II Ravindra Deshpande dismissed a developer's force majeure defence in the Riverview City Constructions case (project P52100032051), reasoning that if statutory approvals had genuinely caused the delay, the builder should have revised the possession date in the agreement itself, not leaned on it after the fact. Back in December 2025, in the Hari Vasant project at Nashik, MahaRERA said an extension it had granted did not dilute buyers' rights under their individual agreements, and that interest becomes payable only once the AFS possession date expires. The line has been consistent.

The one honest caveat: the extended four-month window itself

There is a genuinely unsettled corner here, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Order 66/2026 was issued under Sections 6 and 37 of the RERA Act, on the basis of a Ministry of Finance office memorandum dated 29 April 2026 that treated the West Asia conflict as 'War' for force majeure purposes.

What no one has confirmed is whether MahaRERA or the appellate tribunal, MahaREAT, has yet ruled on the narrow question of whether Order 66/2026 shields a promoter from Section 18 interest for that specific extended four-month stretch. Multiple sources describe this as an untested question as of now.

So the safe position: interest that accrued before the extension is on solid ground, backed by the orders above. Whether the four extra months themselves are interest-free is unresolved, and any builder telling you it definitely is has decided a question the regulator hasn't. The broader force majeure background is covered in this guide to the four-month extension.

What to do next: check your date, do the maths, file if you're owed

Start with the document, not the portal. Pull out your registered Agreement for Sale and find the clause naming your possession date. That single date, not anything the MahaRERA website now displays, is what decides whether interest is running.

If that date has passed and you still don't have possession, work out roughly what you're owed. Section 18 interest runs at SBI's MCLR plus 2% per month on the amount you've paid, for each month of delay. Keep every payment receipt and your handover-status correspondence. If you want to understand how promoters try to wriggle out of this, the practical breakdown in this Section 18 interest guide and the record of developer defences MahaREAT rejected are worth reading.

To claim, you file a complaint under Section 31 of the RERA Act on the MahaRERA portal. The fee is Rs 5,000 per complaint. Before filing, verify your project's current status and your own figures against the official MahaRERA portal, and put your possession demand to the builder in writing so there's a dated paper trail. The extension on the portal changes none of this.