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India: FOIR, and it is measured on take-home pay

Indian lenders assess the fixed obligation to income ratio, FOIR: every fixed monthly obligation, the proposed EMI, existing EMIs, card minimums, as a share of net monthly income. The name matters, because it is what a bank will say to you, and the basis matters more: FOIR is a take-home-pay ratio, so entering a gross salary makes it look roughly a third healthier than the bank will find it.

Most lenders cap FOIR somewhere between 40% and 55%, with the higher end reserved for larger incomes on the same logic the Dutch use: a household on a high salary can commit a bigger share of it before the essentials are at risk. This calculator uses 50% as the middle of that range.

The ceiling is set by each lender, not by the regulator. The Reserve Bank of India's housing-finance rules cap the loan-to-value ratio, how much may be advanced against the property, but publish no numeric income ratio, so FOIR is a market convention and is labelled as such here. Two banks can quite properly give you two different answers on identical figures.

That also means the deposit and the FOIR bind separately. Clearing a personal loan improves FOIR immediately, because the EMI leaves the numerator, but does nothing for the loan-to-value limit.

For how the calculation works, the formula behind it and what it leaves out, see the full guide.

Data sources

  • Indian FOIR lending conventions

    Effective 2020-10-09 onward · retrieved 2026-08-30

    The RBI sets loan-to-value limits but no numeric income ratio, so FOIR is a market convention.

    How we checked these figures

    RBI housing finance rules set loan-to-value ceilings; FOIR itself is set by each lender and is labelled indicative here.

    Current

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