Personal loan on ₹30,000 salary: what you can actually borrow

Take the ceiling at 50 percent, which is a common middle of the range. On ₹30,000 that is ₹15,000 a month of total EMI, new and old together. The loan you can get is simply whatever principal that leftover EMI can service at the lender's rate and tenure.

Here is what the room looks like at an illustrative 13 percent, depending only on what you already pay each month. Read down to your row.

Suppose you owe ₹40,000 on a card at the moment your report is pulled. Five percent of that is ₹2,000, and the lender treats it as though you had a ₹2,000 EMI. Out of a ₹15,000 ceiling, that is a seventh of your room gone to a balance you may have cleared the week after.

In borrowing terms, ₹2,000 of notional EMI is about ₹59,000 of loan over 36 months at 13 percent, or ₹88,000 over 60. A ₹60,000 balance costs you ₹89,000 to ₹1.32 lakh of sanction; an ₹80,000 balance, ₹1.19 lakh to ₹1.76 lakh.

Pages targeting this search routinely promise ₹4.5 lakh to ₹7 lakh. Run the top of that range through the same sum. Seven lakh over 60 months at an illustrative 13 percent needs an EMI of ₹15,927. The ceiling is ₹15,000. It does not fit with zero existing EMIs, with a perfect score, and with the longest tenure most lenders offer at this income.

To carry a ₹15,927 EMI at a 50 percent cap you would need a take-home of about ₹31,900, and that is before you pay anything else. The figure is not a stretch target; it is a number from a different salary.

The cap is where a lender stops. It is not where you should. An EMI of ₹15,000 on a ₹30,000 salary leaves ₹15,000 for rent, food, transport, phone, a parent's medicine, and every unplanned thing that happens in a month. In most Indian cities a shared room alone takes a third of that. There is no line in that budget for a bad month, and over a 60-month loan you will have several.

A more survivable ceiling is 35 to 40 percent. At 40 percent your total EMI is ₹12,000 and you keep ₹18,000; at 35 percent it is ₹10,500 and you keep ₹19,500. That extra ₹3,000 to ₹4,500 a month is the difference between a missed EMI in a bad month and a tight one.

Take ₹3 lakh at an illustrative 13 percent. Over 36 months the EMI is ₹10,108 and total interest is ₹63,895. Over 60 months the EMI is ₹6,826 and total interest is ₹1,09,555.

The longer tenure gives you ₹3,282 a month of relief and costs ₹45,661 more in interest. That is ₹13.91 of extra interest for every rupee of monthly relief. Whether that is worth it depends on what the relief buys you: on ₹30,000, ₹3,282 a month is the difference between a ₹10,108 EMI that leaves ₹19,892 and a ₹6,826 EMI that leaves ₹23,174, and the second one survives a bad month.

The loan itself is neither good nor bad. What decides it is what the money replaces. Two cases make the sum work at this income, and two make it worse.

The clearest case is replacing card debt. A ₹60,000 balance revolving at an illustrative 3.5 percent a month costs ₹2,100 in interest before GST and ₹2,478 after it, every month, for as long as it sits there. That is ₹29,736 a year for the balance to stand still. The same ₹60,000 as a personal loan at 14 percent over 24 months has an EMI of ₹2,881 and total interest of ₹9,139. The EMI is only ₹400 more than what the card was already taking, and after 24 months the debt is gone instead of intact. Even after a 2 percent processing fee with GST, ₹1,416, and the ₹6,654 of interest the loan charges in its first year, you are about ₹21,700 ahead of the card in that year alone.

The second case is a defined, one-off, unavoidable cost with a known amount: a medical bill, a deposit on a rented house you are actually moving into, a course with a start date. Known amount, known end.

Four things, in order, each of which a lender will check whether or not you do. Here is the sum for someone on ₹30,000 with a two-wheeler EMI of ₹2,800 and a card that showed ₹40,000 outstanding on the last statement.