GST Council’s New Rule 14B: What Saree Sellers Should Know

What the Council recommended

The 57th meeting of the GST Council was held in New Delhi on 8 October 2026. Its press release recommends inserting a new rule 14B in the CGST Rules for "small suppliers making supplies of goods through ECOs, in States/UTs, where they do not have physical presence". An ECO is an e-commerce operator, meaning a marketplace such as Amazon, Flipkart or Meesho. Such a seller would declare the marketplace's warehouse in that state as their principal place of business, and the portal would grant the registration automatically, subject to conditions.

The Council's FAQs on the meeting fill in those conditions. You must sell those goods only through marketplaces that collect TCS (the 0.5% tax marketplaces deduct from GST-registered sellers), the marketplace must consent to its warehouse being used, and the GST you charge on sales to GST-registered buyers must not exceed ₹2.5 lakh a month.

Is it law yet?

No. As of 22 October 2026, I could find no notification inserting rule 14B. The GST Council's site lists only the press release and FAQs for October 2026, and I found no announced start date. The release itself is clear that its recommendations take effect through notifications and law amendments "which alone shall have the force of law". Until then today's rules apply, and the final text may differ from the FAQs.

How it works today

Section 25(1) of the CGST Act says a business must register "in every such State or Union territory in which he is so liable". For a Surat saree seller with a regular Gujarat GSTIN, shipping an order from Surat to a buyer in Kolkata is an inter-state sale on the Gujarat registration and needs nothing more. Keeping stock in a marketplace warehouse in West Bengal is different: the goods now leave from a place of business in that state, so the seller needs a registration there, through the normal process.

Sellers without a regular GSTIN are further back. If you sell on Meesho with an Enrolment ID under Notification 34/2023-Central Tax, or as a composition seller, you can sell only inside your own state. The Meesho selling guide covers those routes in detail.

What rule 14B would change

The press release puts the aim plainly: to let small sellers grow into other states through e-commerce "without having to set up a place of business in each State". Here is how the proposal compares with today, based on the FAQs.

A few mechanics from the FAQs: the marketplace gets 7 working days to consent, or the application is treated as rejected; you get one such registration per PAN in each state; and if the marketplace later withdraws consent, you have 30 days to change the address before the registration is treated as cancelled.

The ₹2.5 lakh cap is easy to misread. It is not a turnover limit. It counts only the GST on sales to GST-registered buyers, leaving out sales to shoppers and to your own registrations under the same PAN. As a sense of scale only, assuming every such sale is a saree taxed at 5%, ₹2.5 lakh of tax corresponds to about ₹50 lakh of sales to businesses in a month. A seller selling mostly to consumers is unlikely to come near it.

Who it helps, and who it does not

Picture a Surat seller with a regular Gujarat GSTIN who sells sarees on a marketplace that runs warehouses in other states, and who wants stock nearer buyers in Bengaluru for faster delivery. (Every detail of this seller is an assumption for illustration.) Today that means a Karnataka registration through the normal process. Under rule 14B as recommended, the seller would apply on the portal, name the marketplace's Karnataka warehouse, wait for the marketplace's consent, and complete Aadhaar and verification in Gujarat, if not already done. Whether a marketplace has a warehouse in a given state, and agrees to this, is its call: the rule gives it a veto.

It does not help sellers on an Enrolment ID, because the FAQs require a regular home-state GSTIN. Sellers registered through the automatic route under rule 14A would first have to withdraw from it. The FAQs say nothing about composition sellers, so ask a CA. And stock under a 14B registration can be sold only through the marketplace, so the same sarees cannot also go out through Instagram, WhatsApp or your shop.

Other changes from the same meeting

None of the meeting's rate clarifications touch sarees or apparel, so the 5% rate on sarees stands. A few process recommendations do matter to small sellers, and they too wait on notifications or amendments to the Act:

• No late fee on a delayed GST return for businesses with turnover up to ₹5 crore, if the return is filed by the end of the month in which it was due.
• In-principle approval of a concept note for an optional Annual Return Quarterly Payment scheme, for businesses up to ₹5 crore that sell only to consumers. It is a concept, not yet a scheme.
• Vehicles carrying goods could be stopped only on specific intelligence and with a senior officer's authorisation, and not in states the goods are merely passing through.

What to do now

Nothing changes until rule 14B is notified. If you want stock in another state soon, register there under the current process. If you can wait, keep your home-state GSTIN and returns clean, since everything under 14B rests on them, and ask your CA to flag the notification when it lands on the CBIC and GST portals. This post will be updated when it does.

Frequently asked questions