E-Way Bill Limit in Tamil Nadu: ₹1,00,000 Intra-State

₹1,00,000 of consignment value, for movement that begins and ends inside Tamil Nadu. The test is whether the value exceeds that figure, so a consignment of exactly ₹1,00,000 still needs no bill. Anything crossing the state border is tested at the national ₹50,000 limit instead.

No. ₹90,000 is below the ₹1,00,000 threshold and both Chennai and Coimbatore are inside Tamil Nadu, so the movement falls outside the requirement. The invoice still travels with the goods — being exempt from the e-way bill is not the same as being exempt from paperwork.

That one needs an e-way bill. Crossing into Karnataka makes it an inter-state movement, and inter-state movement is tested at ₹50,000 regardless of which state it started in or what that state's own intra-state threshold is. This is the mistake state thresholds cause most often: ₹1,00,000 is remembered as the answer, when it is only the answer for movement that stays inside Tamil Nadu.

Certain classes of goods are exempt from the requirement altogether under the same notification, so the ₹1,00,000 figure is the general rule rather than a complete answer. The exemption is separate from the value threshold rather than part of it, so the question for an exempt category is what the notification says about that category, not what the consignment is worth. Confirm against the notification before relying on it at a check post.

Validity is national rather than state-specific, so a bill for goods moving from Chennai to Coimbatore follows the same rule as anywhere else: one day for up to 200 km and one additional day for every 200 km or part of it, counted from generation and expiring at midnight of the day after generation. Over-dimensional cargo, and multimodal shipments with at least one leg by ship, get one day per 20 km. The distance that counts is the PIN-to-PIN distance the portal computes between the dispatch and destination PIN codes — not the road distance the transporter quotes — so a route that looks like two days on the highway can still be billed as three.

The consignment value declared on the invoice, bill of supply or delivery challan, including CGST, SGST, IGST and cess. Where one invoice covers both taxable and exempt goods, the exempt line comes out of the figure. For a Tamil Nadu movement the number to compare against the threshold is therefore the document total, not the taxable value alone and not what the goods would fetch if resold — and because it is a document test, it is the figure a check-post officer reads off the paperwork rather than the one in your head.

Tamil Nadu is GST state code 33, the first two digits of every GSTIN issued there. It matters because the code on the supplier's GSTIN has to match the place of supply for the tax split to be right, and a mismatch is one of the things that turns a routine check-post stop into a longer one.