Designing a corporation’s policy for meeting corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an important strategic decision for the firms. Studies have investigated the role of CSR in firms’ financial reporting process, but a few papers, like Chen et al. (2016), LópezPuertas‐Lamy et al. (2017), Du et al. (2020), Yuan (2025) and Li et al. (2025) have looked at how the auditors have reacted to the firm’s CSR/Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) policy by changing its audit pricing. However, the above stream of research examines firms that voluntarily engage in CSR activities. In 2013, India implemented mandatory CSR regulation under their new Companies Act 2013 (CA2013), requiring companies that are above a certain profit, net worth and turnover threshold to spend two percent of their average past three years’ profits before taxes, on CSR activities scheduled under Section 7 of Clause 135 of CA2013 [1]. The objective of this study is to examine the effect of a firm’s CSR compliance on its audit fees and the factors that are likely to drive the effect.