Emergency Fund Calculator

It depends on how stable your income is. A stable-salaried employee typically needs 3-4 months of essential expenses, someone with variable pay or a contract role needs closer to 6 months, a freelancer needs 6-9 months, and a business owner needs 9-12 months, since business income is the hardest to replace quickly if something goes wrong.

This calculator asks for your essential expenses separately from your EMI obligations, and only uses EMI to check whether your debt load looks risky. If you want your emergency fund to also cover EMI payments during a job loss, add your EMI amount into the essential expenses field instead.

A medical emergency without insurance can wipe out savings fast. This calculator adds a flat Rs 1,00,000 buffer to your target if you mark yourself as uninsured, as a starting cushion, not a substitute for actually getting a health insurance policy. Check the Health Insurance Cover Calculator for a proper sum-insured recommendation.

Since this calculator does not collect your income directly, it approximates it from your expenses and EMI added together, then flags your EMI if it is more than 40% of that combined figure. This is a conservative approximation, since your real income is usually higher than your committed spend, so the warning can trigger a little earlier than a true income-based test would. Treat it as an early signal, not an exact calculation.

The calculator still shows your target corpus, but the "months to goal" figure needs a savings rate to compute a timeline, so it shows "add a savings rate" instead of a number until you enter one.

Keep it somewhere safe and easy to access, not invested in equity. A high-interest savings account, a liquid mutual fund, or a sweep-in fixed deposit are common choices, since the goal is quick access without market risk, not growth.