A rating action by which a credit rating agency stops maintaining a rating, ending its surveillance of the rated instrument or facility, so that no current opinion exists on it from that agency thereafter.
Withdrawal is itself a published action: the agency issues a press release stating that the rating is withdrawn and, ordinarily, the basis on which it withdrew.
Common triggers
- The rated obligation ceases to exist. The instrument is redeemed, the facility is repaid or closed, and there is nothing left to rate. This is the clean case.
- No outstanding rated debt. The borrower no longer has obligations under the rated facilities — repaid, refinanced elsewhere, or taken over by another lender.
- Issuer request. A rated entity may seek withdrawal, and SEBI’s framework sets conditions under which an agency may act on that request rather than leaving withdrawal at either party’s convenience. The agency’s press release ordinarily states the basis — for example, a no-objection from the lenders concerned, or redemption of the instrument.
Withdrawal at request is the case to read carefully. An issuer’s reasons for wanting a rating gone vary from the mundane (the facility was refinanced and the new lender uses a different agency) to the informative (the rating was heading somewhere the issuer preferred not to publish).
The INC-then-withdrawal path
A common sequence in Indian rating histories: the issuer stops cooperating, the rating migrates to the issuer-not-cooperating category, is maintained there on best-available information for a period, and is then withdrawn. On this path the last informative review may sit well before the INC migration, let alone the withdrawal — so the final published rating level tells you less than the trajectory that led to it.
What a withdrawn rating does and does not tell you
It tells you that an opinion existed, what it was at each prior action, and when surveillance ended. The press releases behind those actions remain published and archived; withdrawal does not unpublish anything.
It does not tell you the borrower’s current condition. A withdrawn rating is not a downgrade, not a default signal, and not a clean bill — it is the absence of a current opinion. Nor does withdrawal at one agency say anything about ratings the borrower holds elsewhere: a borrower may be freshly rated by a second agency the day after the first withdraws.
How withdrawn actions appear in rating history
The withdrawal appears as an action in its own right, dated, with “Withdrawn” as the action type, and the rating history block in later documents (where the borrower is still rated by that agency on other instruments) carries it like any other action. Anything the withdrawal release itself contains — including a lender-wise annexure, where one appears — is as at that action date and goes stale from that day, because no further review will refresh it.
Related
- Issuer not cooperating — the category a rating often passes through on the way out
- Rating rationale — the document a withdrawal is announced in
- Provisional rating — a different way a rating can end without a downgrade
- How to read a rating press release — the action type, in context
- Glossary index