GST for hotels: a working guide to GSTR-1, invoices and the 12%/18% slabs

If you run a hotel in India, GST isn’t optional paperwork you deal with once a year — it touches every single booking, from the tariff you quote to the invoice you hand a guest at checkout. And unlike a shop selling one product at one rate, a hotel’s GST treatment depends on the room tariff, the guest’s location, and sometimes the guest’s nationality. This is a working guide to the parts that actually trip up front-desk teams and owners.

Why GST is different for hotels

Most retail businesses charge one GST rate on one kind of transaction. A hotel doesn’t get that luxury. The rate applied to a room night depends on the declared tariff, which means the same hotel can be issuing invoices at two different GST rates on the same night, for two different room types. On top of that, every stay is a service, so the invoice has to correctly identify where that service is being supplied from — which decides whether you charge CGST+SGST or IGST. None of this is unique to any one property; it’s just the nature of hospitality billing, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that’s easy to get slightly wrong when it’s being calculated by hand or copied between a rack register and an accounting spreadsheet.

The room-tariff slabs

Hotel accommodation is taxed under a tariff-threshold structure — broadly, lower-tariff rooms sit at one GST rate and higher-tariff rooms sit at a higher rate. The exact threshold and rates have been revised by the GST Council before and can be revised again, so confirm current rates with your CA or the latest GST Council notification before you rely on a specific number for a live invoice. What matters operationally is that your system needs to know, room type by room type, which slab applies — and needs to keep applying it correctly as tariffs change, seasonal rates shift, or a room is sold at a discounted rate that crosses the threshold in either direction.

What a compliant tax invoice must show

A GST tax invoice for a hotel stay isn’t just a bill — it’s a legal document with a defined set of fields. At minimum it needs:

• Your hotel’s GSTIN, name and registered address.
• The guest’s details, and their GSTIN if they’re a registered business claiming input tax credit.
• The place of supply — for a hotel, this is the location of the property itself, which is what decides intra-state versus inter-state tax treatment.
• A clear tax breakup: CGST + SGST for an intra-state supply, or IGST for inter-state.
• The applicable HSN/SAC code for accommodation services.
• A sequential invoice number, the tax rate, and the taxable value versus the tax amount, shown separately.

The rule of thumb is simple: if the hotel is in the same state as the place of supply (which for lodging is almost always the property’s own state), you charge CGST+SGST; if it’s genuinely a cross-state supply scenario, IGST applies instead. Getting the split right matters both for your own filings and for a business guest trying to claim input credit correctly.

GSTR-1: what you file and when

GSTR-1 is the outward-supply return — it’s where every taxable invoice you’ve issued in a period gets reported to the GST system, broken down by rate, buyer type, and place of supply. For a hotel, that means every room-night invoice, every restaurant bill if you run an in-house F&B outlet, and any other taxable service you’ve billed. The filing cadence and due dates follow the standard GSTR-1 schedule set by the GST portal for your registration type, and the return is generated from the sum of the invoices you’ve raised — which is precisely why invoice accuracy at the point of billing matters so much. A wrong tax split or a missing GSTIN on day one becomes a correction exercise at filing time.

Form C for foreign-national guests

If you host foreign nationals, many states require a Form C (also called a Foreigner Registration form or C-Form depending on the state) to be filed with the local police or FRRO, separate from GST entirely — but it draws on the same guest and passport information you’re already capturing at check-in. The practical challenge isn’t the form itself, it’s re-keying the same guest details into a second system after you’ve already typed them once at registration. The fewer times a passport number gets manually retyped, the fewer chances there are for a transcription error that causes a rejected filing.

How Cnykra does it

This is the part where GST compliance stops being a separate accounting exercise bolted onto the end of the month, and becomes a by-product of running the front desk. Every folio you post to in Cnykra already carries the room type, the tariff, the guest’s state and GST details if they’ve provided them — so the same record that runs checkout also generates the tax invoice, with the CGST/SGST-versus-IGST split applied automatically based on the place of supply. GSTR-1 export data is drawn from those same posted folios, so there’s no separate reconciliation step against a second ledger. Form C for foreign guests is filled from the identical guest record captured at check-in — no re-typing a passport number into a different form. And when something needs correcting after the fact, credit notes are generated the same way the original tax invoice was: from the folio, not from a standalone accounting tool.

None of this replaces your accountant — you should always confirm current rates and filing specifics with your CA, especially around slab thresholds and any exemption categories. But the invoice, the export, and the paperwork should come out of the same system that ran the stay, not a parallel spreadsheet you’re keeping in sync by hand. That’s what GST Compliance in Cnykra is built to do.