I sit on the credit side of Securis, and one of the first sentences I find myself saying on a college-student application call goes something like this: “for this loan, we’ll need your father or mother as the primary applicant, with you as co-applicant — not the other way around.” It catches people off guard, especially 19- and 20-year-olds who applied imagining the loan would be entirely in their name. It feels like a small bureaucratic detail until you realise it has real implications for both sides — for the parent’s credit bureau report, their existing EMI room, and what happens if a repayment goes wrong.
This post is the explanation I end up giving on WhatsApp every week, written down once. What “co-applicant” actually means, why a parent typically sits in the primary slot on a college-student file, and what to do if the parent can’t or won’t sign on.
Why the parent is usually primary, not the student
Underwriting any loan boils down to two questions: can the borrower repay, and will they? For a 20-year-old in their second year of B.Tech, both questions are genuinely hard to answer in isolation.
The repayment-capacity side. A college student typically has no salaried income. Internship stipends, freelance work, and family transfers exist but don’t show up cleanly in a bank statement the way a salary credit does. Lending rules don’t let us underwrite a loan against income that isn’t there. So the income side of the file has to come from somewhere — and that somewhere is almost always the parent.
The repayment-willingness side. This is what credit bureaus measure. A 20-year-old usually has either no credit history (a “-1” or “NH” file) or a six-month-old card with one transaction on it. There’s nothing for the model to grade. Once we add a parent with a 750+ score and a multi-year mortgage history, the file becomes underwritable.
Setting the parent as primary applicant and the student as co-applicant lets us price the loan against the parent’s profile while keeping the student legally on the contract — which matters once the student starts earning and we want their credit history to start building cleanly, with the laptop or course-fee EMI already on the trade-line.
What “primary applicant” actually means, in plain language
Both names are on the loan agreement. Both names sit on the CIBIL trade-line. Both are legally jointly and severally liable — meaning if EMIs stop, we can pursue either party for the full outstanding, not a 50-50 split.
In practice, that means three things parents should be clear-eyed about before signing:
The EMI shows up on the parent’s CIBIL. Every month, the payment status is reported under both names. A clean record helps both files. A missed payment hurts both files. The bureau doesn’t differentiate “primary” vs “co” once the trade-line is active.
The EMI counts against the parent’s borrowing room. The fixed-obligation-to-income (FOIR) guideline caps total EMIs at roughly 50% of net monthly income across the system. If a parent is already running a home-loan EMI and a car-loan EMI, a new ₹5,000/month child-laptop EMI might tighten their headroom for a future loan of their own. Worth thinking about if the parent is planning a home-loan top-up or refinance in the next year.
Joint liability is real. If the student takes the loan, moves abroad, stops responding, and EMIs lapse — the parent is legally on the hook for the balance. It doesn’t come up often, but it does happen, and we explain this clearly at the time of signing rather than after.
A worked EMI example, both sides
Take a fairly typical ask: ₹85,000 for a laptop, over 18 months, at 16% APR — about the rate we’d offer a parent with a 760 score and clean salary credit. Standard reducing-balance EMI:
- EMI ≈ ₹5,322/month
- Total payback ≈ ₹95,800
- Total interest paid ≈ ₹10,800
For the parent’s FOIR: the underwriter looks at the ₹5,322/month line and asks whether that, added to existing EMIs, breaches the 50% cap on net income. For a parent earning a net ₹65,000/month with one existing ₹14,000 home-loan EMI, the answer is comfortably yes — total EMI burden of ₹19,322 is about 30% of net. For a parent at ₹35,000 net with the same home-loan EMI, it’s closer to the ceiling and we’d look harder before approving.
For the student: the ₹5,322 EMI shows up under their PAN too. If they later land a job and want their own first credit card or two-wheeler loan, this clean payment record is a positive signal — assuming the EMIs actually got paid on time. So the trade-line is not just a liability for the student; it’s also the first real entry on a credit file that until then was empty.
Considering a student loan and not sure whether the parent should be primary? Apply for a Securis loan — typical disbursement is 1-2 working days, and we’ll walk through the structure on a 10-minute call before you commit.
What to do if the parent can’t or won’t be on the loan
This comes up more often than people expect. Sometimes a parent already runs a thin EMI margin and adding more would push their FOIR over. Sometimes there’s a family-side reason the parent prefers not to be on a formal loan. A few honest paths:
Try a different parent or guardian. Either parent can be primary — the loan doesn’t care which one. A working mother with clean salary credit is just as eligible as a working father; we evaluate the file, not the relationship. A guardian (aunt, uncle, elder sibling on a stable salary) can also work in many cases, with some additional documentation around the relationship and consent.
Wait until you have your own income. If you’re 6-12 months away from finishing college and starting a job, the cleanest path is usually to wait until you have three to six salary credits, then borrow in your own name on your own profile. The maths gets simpler; the family conversation disappears; the trade-line builds on your file alone.
For tuition specifically, look at an education loan. A bank education loan — disbursed to the institution, with a moratorium period during the course and possible interest subvention under schemes like PM Vidyalaxmi for eligible income brackets at NIRF-ranked colleges — is structurally a different product. The parent’s role there is also different (typically a co-borrower, not primary, depending on amount). If your need is large-ticket tuition rather than a laptop or course fee, start at your usual bank’s education-loan desk for that.
When this structure isn’t the right fit
If you’re already 24, working a job for 12+ months, with a 700+ score and a clean bank statement — you don’t need a parent on the file at all. Borrow in your own name. Adding a parent as co-applicant when you don’t strictly need one just clutters their CIBIL with a trade-line they didn’t choose to take on, and makes the underwriting marginally slower. The structure exists because of the credit gap on a college-student file; once the credit gap closes, the structure stops being useful.
Equally, if the parent is hesitant about being on a formal loan and the student can reasonably wait six months for their own income — wait six months. We’d rather see a clean self-borrower file than a family that’s quietly uncomfortable with the contract they’re signing. The loan will still be available; the relationship is the thing worth protecting.
If you want a second opinion on your specific situation, WhatsApp us — we’ll be honest about whether Securis fits.