How we calculate

Every rate, limit and date a calculator uses is recorded once, with the official source it comes from (an Act, a gazette notification, or a circular or FAQ from the Income Tax Department, EPFO, ESIC or RBI), the date it takes effect and the date we last checked it. A page may only use a rule we have confirmed on the official source itself.

When a rule changes, we add the new value with the date it takes effect. The old value stays for the dates it applied to, so a calculation for an earlier period uses that period’s rules.

Before a calculator goes live, its results are tested against worked examples from official sources wherever they exist: the Income Tax Department’s tax, HRA and gratuity calculators, EPFO’s and the Labour Ministry’s FAQs, and the Indian Banks’ Association’s deposit charts. The plain formulas (EMI and SIP) are tested against a bank’s and a broker’s published calculators. The site’s owner checks those examples by hand, and the tests run again on every change to the site.

We round where the rule says to round, and say so on the page. Each page lists what it leaves out, such as fees, other income or a lender’s charges.

IFSC and MICR codes: RBI’s lists of bank branches taking part in NEFT and RTGS, as published in Razorpay’s open IFSC dataset. Each page shows the release and its date. Districts come from the Department of Posts’ PIN code directory on the Open Government Data Platform India.

Bank holidays: RBI’s Holiday Matrix, with the date we last checked it on each page.

Bank FD rates: copied by hand each month from each bank’s own rate page, with the date the bank says they apply from and the date we read them. A bank whose terms do not allow its rates to be republished is not shown. If a bank’s rates are not checked again within 75 days, they come off the page.

Every change in this data is checked automatically before it is published. A change in bank holidays or FD rates is published only after the site’s owner has reviewed it, and so is any IFSC update that changes more than 1 in 100 branches.

Every number on a page comes from a calculation, from a rule in our register, from a dataset the page names or from a source quoted beside it. Each page says what it assumes and what it leaves out, shows the date its rules were last checked and what has changed, and never recommends a fund, a stock, a bank or a lender.

Every calculator and page design goes live only after the site’s owner has reviewed it, data updates follow the checks described above, and any later fix is listed on Corrections with its date.

AI tools help us write the site’s code, find and read official documents, run reviews and draft page text. They never decide a number. Every rule is quoted word for word from its official source and checked again against that source in a separate review before a page may use it; every calculator is tested against worked examples the owner has checked by hand; and the owner reviews each calculator and page design before it goes live.

Tell us through Contact. We check it against the source, and every fix is listed on Corrections.