The biggest EMI of your life
A home loan is the largest, longest debt most salaried Indians ever take — 15 to 30 years of a single monthly commitment. The arithmetic deserves respect: ₹50 lakh at 8.5% for 20 years is an EMI of ₹43,391, and the interest over those 240 months adds up to about ₹54.1 lakh — more than the loan itself. This page runs the same engine as our general EMI calculator, tuned to home-loan numbers, with the amortization schedule and prepayment planner that matter most at this scale.
What banks will actually lend
Banks fund a percentage of the property (loan-to-value): RBI caps allow up to 90% for loans up to ₹30 lakh, 80% up to ₹75 lakh, and 75% above that — the rest is your down payment. Two costs the loan does not cover: stamp duty and registration (typically 5–7% of the deal, state-dependent) and interiors. Lenders also size the EMI to roughly 40–50% of net monthly income — check what is left of yours with the take-home calculator before you commit. Nearly all new loans float on repo-linked rates, so your EMI (or tenure) moves when the RBI moves; budget slack for that.
The tax angle (old regime)
Under the old regime, a self-occupied home earns Section 24(b) deduction on interest up to ₹2 lakh a year, and the principal repaid counts toward 80C (within its ₹1.5 lakh cap). The new (default) regime offers neither for self-occupied homes — for many borrowers the home loan is exactly what tips the old-vs-new comparison. A let-out property plays by different rules (full interest against rent, loss capped at ₹2 lakh set-off) — worth a chartered accountant’s hour once rent enters the picture.
Prepayment: the quiet fortune
Floating-rate home loans to individuals carry zero prepayment penalty (RBI rule), which makes the extra-payment box above the most valuable input on this page. Early in a 20-year schedule almost the whole EMI is interest — the amortization table below the calculator shows it — so even ₹5,000 extra a month in the early years knocks off years of tenure and lakhs of interest. The classic salaried playbook: prepay with every bonus, keep the EMI constant when rates fall (shortening tenure instead), and compare a balance transfer whenever your bank drifts ~0.5% above the market — on a ₹40 lakh balance, half a percent is roughly ₹12,000 a year.