I sit on the credit side at Securis, which means I spend most of my week turning salaries into loan amounts. There’s no mystery to it. One ratio does most of the work, and if you understand it before you apply, you’ll know your own answer roughly as well as I do.

That ratio is FOIR — Fixed Obligation to Income Ratio. It’s the share of your monthly take-home that’s already committed to fixed payments, plus the EMI you’re about to add. Broad industry practice, in line with the norms lenders and banking associations work to, is to keep salaried applicants at or under 50%. Under 40% is comfortable. Above 50% and the file usually can’t be written, no matter how good the rest of it looks.

Applicants tend to hear this as an obstacle. It isn’t. A ceiling on how much of your income can be pre-committed is the thing standing between you and an EMI you can’t clear in a bad month. I’ve never met a borrower who was glad, two years in, that someone stretched the rules for them.

What actually counts as an obligation

This is where most of the surprise lives, so let me be specific.

Counted:

  • Every running loan EMI — personal, vehicle, home, consumer durable, top-up. All of it.
  • Credit card dues, usually assessed at a percentage of the outstanding balance rather than the full amount. At a common 5% treatment, a ₹60,000 card balance shows up as a ₹3,000 monthly obligation — even if you clear the card in full every month.
  • Instalment plans on devices and appliances, including the ones that don’t feel like loans because there’s no interest on them. An interest-free instalment is still a fixed monthly commitment, and it occupies the same room in your FOIR as one that charges interest.
  • Loans where you signed as co-applicant or guarantor. If your brother’s EMI bounces, the obligation is legally yours, so it sits in your ratio from day one.

Usually not counted:

  • SIPs and recurring deposits. These are savings, and you can pause them. They’re not obligations.
  • Utility bills, phone plans, subscriptions, UPI spending.
  • Insurance premiums, in most cases.

Rent is the honest grey area. Practice varies across lenders — some include it, some don’t, some include it above a threshold. What doesn’t vary is that a large rent outflow shows up plainly in the bank statement either way, and it shapes how an underwriter reads your closing balances even when it isn’t in the arithmetic.

One thing worth saying out loud, because it stops people from applying who shouldn’t be stopped: existing obligations are not a black mark. If you’re applying to consolidate debt, you’re supposed to have obligations — that’s the entire reason for the loan. What I’m checking is whether the new EMI fits alongside what stays, or replaces what goes.

The arithmetic, on three real-shaped files

The formula is plain: (50% × take-home) − existing obligations = monthly headroom. Headroom divided by the per-lakh EMI gives you the loan amount.

At 15% over 24 months, each ₹1 lakh costs about ₹4,849 a month. Over 36 months, about ₹3,467. Hold those two numbers and you can do this yourself.

File one — ₹48,000 take-home. A bike loan at ₹3,200 and a card balance of ₹40,000 assessed at ₹2,000. Obligations ₹5,200, so current FOIR is about 11%. The 50% ceiling is ₹24,000, leaving ₹18,800 of headroom — roughly ₹3.85 lakh over 24 months (the arithmetic gives ₹3.88 lakh; we’d round down to a clean sanction). Modest salary, clean file, healthy eligibility.

File two — ₹72,000 take-home. A home loan at ₹22,000, a car loan at ₹9,500, a card assessed at ₹1,500. Obligations ₹33,000, so FOIR is already 46%. The ceiling is ₹36,000, leaving ₹3,000 of headroom — about ₹62,000 over 24 months, or roughly ₹86,000 if stretched to 36.

Read those two together. The higher earner qualifies for a fraction of what the lower earner does, and it isn’t a scoring quirk — it’s that most of that ₹72,000 is already spoken for. Eligibility is about unspoken-for income, not income. This is the single most common thing applicants get wrong about their own file.

Considering a personal loan? Apply for a Securis loan — typical disbursement is 1-2 working days, and you’ll see your exact EMI and total repayment before you commit.

File three — ₹55,000 take-home, consolidating. Three obligations: a card converted to EMI at ₹6,000, a device instalment at ₹3,400, an older personal loan at ₹8,600. That’s ₹18,000 a month, FOIR about 33%. Clearing all three needs roughly ₹3.2 lakh. At 15% over 36 months that’s an EMI of about ₹11,094 — and because the three replaced obligations drop out, the post-consolidation FOIR lands near 20%, with about ₹6,900 a month freed up.

That’s the case for consolidation at its strongest, and it’s a real one. The caveat is equally real: stretching a balance you’d have cleared in 14 months out to 36 can raise the total interest even while the monthly number falls. Run both totals — not just both EMIs — before you decide.

How to move the number before you apply

FOIR responds to a handful of levers, and four to eight weeks is enough time to pull them.

  • Close one small obligation. Retiring a ₹2,500 EMI frees ₹2,500 of headroom — about ₹50,000 of extra eligibility at 24 months. Clearing the smallest balance you can afford to clear is usually the highest-leverage thing you can do.
  • Bring down a card balance. At a 5% treatment, every ₹20,000 you pay off releases ₹1,000 of monthly room.
  • Route your salary through one account. Income split across accounts, or paid partly in cash, can only be assessed on the part that’s visibly credited. A strong earner can read as a weak one on paper for no reason other than plumbing.
  • Ask for the tenure that fits, not the maximum. Longer tenure lowers the EMI and raises your eligible amount — and raises the interest you pay. Take the shortest tenure your headroom will carry.

Skip this if…

Your FOIR is above 50% and the plan is to squeeze under it. If the only way the file works is by treating a real obligation as though it isn’t one, the EMI won’t clear. Wait, close something down, and come back.

Your income is genuinely variable. Commission-heavy or irregular earnings and a fixed 24-month EMI are an uncomfortable pair. Borrow smaller than the ceiling allows.

You need tuition disbursed directly to a college. For ₹5 lakh-plus of fees paid to an institution, a bank education loan is the right product and a personal loan isn’t — whatever your FOIR looks like. Your bank’s education loan desk is the right first call.

The number a lender shows you is a ceiling, not a recommendation. Work out your own headroom before anyone quotes you one, then borrow what you need against the shortest tenure that carries it.

If you want a second opinion on your specific situation, WhatsApp us — we’ll be honest about whether Securis fits.