Property Affordability Calculator

What FOIR is and why banks live by it

FOIR — Fixed Obligation to Income Ratio — is the share of your net monthly income already committed to fixed repayments. Lenders add your proposed home-loan EMI to every existing obligation (car loan, personal loan, the minimum due on credit cards, and often rent for non-salaried applicants) and check the total against a ceiling. Most Indian banks cap FOIR between 40% and 55% depending on income band: higher earners are allowed a larger share because their residual income after EMIs is still comfortable. Below ₹1 lakh monthly income, expect 40–45%; above ₹3 lakh, some lenders stretch to 55%. This calculator defaults to 40% deliberately — it is the level at which a home loan remains survivable through a job change, a rate cycle, or a year of school fees you did not plan for.

Eligibility is not the same as affordability

A bank's sanction letter tells you the maximum it is willing to risk, not the amount you should borrow. Two applicants with identical salaries can have entirely different capacity: one supports elderly parents and pays ₹4 lakh a year in school fees, the other does not. Before accepting a sanction, subtract from your take-home pay the things a bank never asks about — SIPs you intend to keep, insurance premiums, dependant support, annual travel — and check that the EMI still fits. The most common regret we hear from buyers in Gurgaon is not that they bought the wrong project; it is that they bought at the top of their sanction and spent the next five years unable to invest anything else.

The 20–25% you must have in cash

Banks fund at most 90% of the agreement value for loans up to ₹30 lakh, 80% for ₹30–75 lakh and 75% above ₹75 lakh — and the LTV is calculated on the agreement value alone. Stamp duty, registration, GST on under-construction purchases, brokerage, interiors, CAM deposits and the corpus fund all come from your own pocket. Realistically, plan for 20–25% of the all-in cost in liquid funds. On a ₹2 Cr Gurgaon purchase that means ₹40–50 lakh of margin money plus roughly ₹16–20 lakh of one-time charges — and you should still keep six months of EMIs as an emergency buffer after all of it.

Ways to genuinely raise your budget

Four levers actually work. Add a co-applicant with income — a spouse's salary is fully clubbed, and if the property is in her name in Haryana you also save two percentage points of stamp duty. Clear a small personal or car loan before applying; retiring a ₹20,000 EMI can add roughly ₹23 lakh of loan eligibility at current rates. Lengthen the tenure to reduce the EMI (accepting more total interest, which you can offset with prepayments later). And improve your credit score above 750 before you apply — the spread difference between a 720 and a 780 score is commonly 25–50 basis points, worth several lakh over the loan. Run the result through our EMI calculator and stamp duty calculator to convert this budget into an actual monthly and one-time cash plan.