HDFC Bank

HDFC Bank is a private sector bank headquartered in Mumbai and founded in 1994, and since its 2023 merger with Housing Development Finance Corporation it has been both a bank and the largest private mortgage lender in the country. That merger is the single most useful fact for anyone comparing its rates: the home loan book it now carries came from a housing finance company, and the pricing culture that came with it is visible in the grid.

On the products we track it is not the cheapest lender in any lending category. Its home loan starts at 7.75% against 7.20% at Bank of Baroda and Punjab National Bank, which places it tenth of the twelve home loan lenders in our table. Its personal loan, by contrast, starts at 9.99% and is the lowest advertised personal loan rate of the eight lenders we track — a genuinely competitive number in a category where the ceiling runs to 24%.

The pattern is consistent with how large private banks price in India. Secured lending against property is a volume business where public sector banks compete hard on the headline rate and can afford to, while unsecured lending is priced on the quality of the customer relationship and the data the bank already holds. A salaried applicant whose account is already with HDFC Bank is a known quantity to it in a way that a walk-in is not.

Every lending product HDFC Bank publishes has two numbers, and the gap between them is the part worth studying. The home loan runs 7.75% to 9.65%, a spread of 1.90 percentage points. The personal loan runs 9.99% to 24.00%, a spread of 14.01 points. Those are not the same kind of range.

A secured loan can only vary so much, because the property backs it and the lender can recover. An unsecured loan has nothing behind it, so the entire price of risk is carried by the rate, and a thin credit file can more than double what you are charged. If you are shopping a personal loan, the advertised 9.99% is close to meaningless as a planning number; assume the middle of the range until the bank has actually seen your file.

On deposits the direction reverses and so does the logic. HDFC Bank pays up to 6.50% on a fixed deposit against 8.00% at the small finance banks in our table, which is a 1.50 point gap in the saver's favour at the smaller institutions. What you are buying with the lower rate is a larger balance sheet — though it is worth being precise about that, because DICGC deposit insurance covers ₹5 lakh per depositor per bank regardless of the bank's size. Below that threshold the insurance is identical.

HDFC Bank publishes 19 product families on its own site, from home loans and credit cards to NRI accounts and mutual fund distribution. The breadth matters when you read a fee schedule, because the same product name can carry several different charges depending on how you are classified.

On the home loan the processing fee is ₹3,500 plus GST for a salaried applicant and up to 1.50% of the loan for a self-employed non-professional. On a ₹1 crore loan that is the difference between roughly ₹4,130 and ₹1.77 lakh once tax is added. Any comparison that prints a single processing fee for this bank is describing one applicant type and calling it the bank.

The bank is also a distributor rather than a manufacturer for several of the products it lists. Insurance sold through it is underwritten by an insurer, and mutual funds are third-party schemes. That is not a criticism, but it changes who is accountable for the product and where a complaint goes — and it is worth checking whether a fund is being offered as a regular plan, which carries distributor commission, or a direct plan, which does not.