How Credsir Rates Financial Products

Every rating on Credsir is produced by a formula, not an opinion. Here is the formula.

The principle

Most product rankings in Indian personal finance are commercial arrangements described as editorial judgement. The tell is that the method is never published — you are asked to trust a number whose derivation you cannot check.

We publish ours. Every score below is computed from structured fields in our database. The same code runs on every product. There is no editorial override, no partner adjustment, and no field that says “featured”.

Credit card scoring

Cards are scored out of 5 across four dimensions, then combined with fixed weights. The same four weights are applied to every card in the credit cards section.

Dimension	Weight	What it measures
Rewards	40%	Effective return in rupees on a realistic blended spend — not the accelerated headline rate on one category
Perks	25%	Lounge access (domestic weighted 1×, international 1.5×) and forex markup relative to the 3.5% market standard
Fees	20%	Annual fee, halved where a realistically achievable spend waiver exists
Accessibility	15%	Minimum income and minimum credit score — a card you cannot get is worth nothing

What “effective reward rate” means

Issuers advertise the best case: 5% on one merchant, capped at ₹1,000 a quarter. We estimate the blended return across a typical spending mix, applying the caps. A card advertising “5% cashback” with a ₹1,000 quarterly cap and 1% elsewhere lands nearer 2.4% for most people — and that is the number we score. It is why our list of the best cashback credit cards is not simply ordered by advertised percentage.

Fees include GST

An 18% GST applies to credit card annual fees. A ₹2,500 card costs ₹2,950 a year. Almost no comparison site includes this. Every fee figure and every break-even calculation on Credsir does.

Bank ratings

Every institution page carries a rating out of 5, and so does each product on it. Like the card score, it is arithmetic — the same code runs on every bank, and you can recompute any figure on this site from the rate table printed beneath it.

A bank’s overall rating is the plain mean of its product ratings. Breadth earns nothing: a bank is not rewarded for selling more products, and not penalised for a product it does not sell. Where a component cannot be computed, it is dropped and the remaining weights renormalise, rather than a missing figure being scored as a bad one.

Component	Weight	What it measures
Headline rate	55%	How far the advertised rate sits from the best rate in the set of lenders we track. On a deposit, how far below the best payer
Rate consistency	25%	The distance between the advertised floor and the published ceiling, ranked against the same product at every other lender. On a deposit, the senior-citizen premium
Cost to take it out	20%	The processing fee as published, read against the same fee at every other lender in the table

Fixed deposits carry no processing fee, so they are scored 70% on rate and 30% on the senior premium — which is the ordering you see on the best FD interest rates. Credit cards are scored by the card formula above, averaged across the issuer’s catalogue.

Why the gap, and not the rank

The rate component is scored on the gap in percentage points from the best rate in the market we track — five stars at the market floor, one rating point off per half percentage point above it — rather than on league position. Rank hides magnitude. Tenth of twelve sounds damning when the whole field sits inside 0.6 points, and flattering when it does not. The gap is the number that reaches your EMI.

Consistency and fees are scored the other way, against the peer set, because a “wide” spread means something different on a secured loan than an unsecured one. The only fair comparison is the same product at other lenders — which is why every ranking, including the best home loans, is computed within one product at a time.

What a rating is not

It is not a view on service, an app, a branch network or how a bank treats you in a dispute — none of which we measure, and none of which we will imply from data we do not hold. It is a price rating, and it says so.

Rate tables

Scoring a bank on its rates does not change how the rates themselves are handled. A figure is never estimated, and never inferred from a competitor. Each table — the home loan interest rates board included — shows the date the figure was captured, the source it came from, and a confidence marker:

Verified — cross-checked against the institution’s own published rate card or an official government notification.
Reported — taken from a credible published comparison rather than the institution’s own rate card. The page says so, next to the figure, so you can weigh it accordingly.

Advertised rates are the floor, offered to the strongest applicants. We say so on every rate page rather than implying that the lowest number is the one you will be quoted.

Calculators

Every one of our calculators runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter — income, loan amount, PAN, salary — is transmitted to Credsir or to anyone else. Tax constants live in a single file that is updated once per Union Budget, so every tax-aware calculator moves together and none is left stale.

What would change a rating

A rating changes when the underlying data changes: an issuer devalues a reward programme, a bank moves a rate, a fee waiver threshold shifts. It does not change because of a commercial conversation. If a partner asked us to move a product up the list, the only honest answer available to us is that the formula does not have an input for that.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, it is a defect and we want to know. Write to us and we will correct it, note the correction on the page, and re-verify the source. Financial data that is quietly fixed is barely better than financial data that stays wrong.