The Indian Contract Act, 1872

§5 — Revocation of proposals and acceptances

A proposal may be revoked at any time before the communication of its acceptance is complete as against the proposer, but not afterwards. An acceptance may be revoked at any time before the communication of the acceptance is complete as against the acceptor, but not afterwards. Illustration A proposes, by a letter sent by post, to sell his house to B. B accepts the proposal by a letter sent by post. A may revoke his proposal at any time before or at the moment when B posts his letter of acceptance, but not afterwards. B may revoke his acceptance at any time before or at the moment when the letter communicating it reaches A, but not afterwards.

State amendments

This section has been amended in its application to Uttar Pradesh. The text above is the central provision and is what applies everywhere else — these amendments are law only in the State that made them.

Uttar Pradesh[Vide Uttar Pradesh Act, 57 of 1976, s. 2]Read →Hide
Uttar Pradesh Amendment of section 5 of Act (9 of 1872).—In section 5 of Indian contract Act, 1872, hereinafter in this Chapter referred to as the principal Act, at the end of the first paragraph, the following explanation shall inserted, namely:-- “Explanation—Where an invitation to a proposal contains a condition that any proposal made in response to such invitation shall be kept open for a specified time and a proposal is thereupon made accepting such condition, such proposal may not be revoked within such time.”

Reproduced from the same official PDF as the section above, as the amending Act words it — not a consolidated State version of the section. Check the source before relying on it.

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Source & version

Official text: India Code (official) ↗

Official India Code text: The Indian Contract Act, 1872 (9 of 1872), English PDF (bitstream 123456789/2187/2/A187209.pdf, 568,075 bytes) fetched directly from indiacode.nic.in (Akamai edge, DNS via dns.google) on 2026-07-16. Extracted via pdftotext 26.07 -bbox and @nexlex/ingest inline parser. Automated parse; footnotes/amendment history excluded; illustrations restored via illustration-aware re-extraction on 2026-07-19; spot-verified; full clause-level proofread pending. Sections 2-3 repaired 2026-07-25 by re-extraction from the same source PDF (568,075 bytes, sha256 d756d45a…): a page-10 footnote block had been absorbed into s.2, splitting definitions (b)-(j) into s.3 and leaving s.3's own provision missing (D-027).

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