Credit rating agencies in India

Seven credit rating agencies account for essentially all of the published rating output an Indian credit team has to read. This page is written for someone who has to work across it — read several rationales in a week, reconcile ratings from different agencies on the same borrower, or explain to a committee why two agencies rate the same company differently.

It is not a beginner’s explainer of what a credit rating is. It assumes you know that and want to know what actually varies between the seven.

The seven with an established published book

A note on the list itself — and why it is seven and not nine. SEBI’s register of credit rating agencies lists nine registered CRAs as at 22 August 2026. The seven above are the established houses whose published archives make up the rating output in circulation. The other two are recent registrants — ACER Credit Rating Private Limited (registration IN/CRA/009/2025) and CredStone Ratings Private Limited (IN/CRA/010/2026) — and this page does not describe them. (SEBI register of credit rating agencies)

Registrations, corporate names and group ownership all change, and individual agencies have from time to time been the subject of regulatory proceedings. Check the register rather than any third-party list, this one included.

Three of the seven sit inside global rating groups and two others carry lineage worth knowing:

• CRISIL is majority-owned by S&P Global. It is the oldest of the seven, established in 1987, and has the largest published book.
• ICRA is a Moody’s group affiliate, established in 1991.
• India Ratings and Research is a wholly-owned Fitch Group subsidiary and generally applies Fitch’s methodological framework in an Indian context.
• CARE Ratings is domestically owned and listed on Indian exchanges, trading under the CareEdge brand.
• Acuité was formerly SMERA, the SME Rating Agency of India, and that origin still shapes the shape of its book.

What this ownership actually means for you: it explains methodological family resemblance and it explains house style in a rationale. It does not mean an Indian AAA from a globally-affiliated agency maps to a global AAA. Indian scales are national scales. They rank credit within India and are not directly comparable to an international scale.

The notation, and where the differences actually are

SEBI standardises the symbols and their definitions. In principle every agency’s AAA carries the same meaning — the highest degree of safety regarding timely servicing of financial obligations — down through D, which denotes default or expected default.

So the notation itself is not where the differences live. The differences live in four places.

1. The prefix is mandatory and identifies the agency

Every rating symbol must carry its agency’s identifier. That is why you see CRISIL AA- and [ICRA]AA- rather than a bare AA-. When you are aggregating ratings across agencies, the prefix is the field that tells you which agency’s opinion you are holding, and stripping it is how comparison quietly becomes conflation.

ICRA’s square-bracket convention is the one that most often breaks a naive parser. Plan for it.

2. Long-term and short-term are separate scales

The long-term scale runs AAA, AA, A, BBB, BB, B, C, D, with + and − modifiers applied from AA through C. Long-term ratings carry an outlook — Positive, Stable or Negative.

The short-term scale is entirely separate: A1, A2, A3, A4, then D, with a + modifier available on each of A1 through A4. Short-term ratings do not carry an outlook.

A company will routinely hold both at once — a long-term rating on its term loans and a short-term rating on its commercial paper or working capital facilities. There is no such thing as “the company’s rating” in the singular. There is a rating on each rated instrument or facility.

The two scales are also not two views of one ranking. They are separate ordinal axes with different lengths, and A1+ has no notch-for-notch equivalent on the long-term scale — which is why the drawing below deliberately does not line them up.

3. The suffixes change what is being rated

Three suffixes carry substantive meaning and are frequently misread:

• (CE) — credit enhancement. The rating reflects an explicit external support structure, not the obligor’s own standalone credit. SEBI’s framework requires the CE suffix where a rating is supported by such a feature, and requires the agency to also disclose the unsupported rating.
• (SO) — structured obligation. The rating is on a structure — the cash flows and the transaction, not the originator’s general credit.
• Issuer Not Cooperating, usually written as an explicit ISSUER NOT COOPERATING tag rather than a symbol suffix. See INC. It means the rating is being maintained on the basis of limited and possibly dated information.

A AA (CE) and a AA are not the same opinion about the same thing, and a portfolio view that treats them as the same symbol is wrong before it starts.

4. Provisional ratings are conditional

A provisional rating — prefixed Provisional — is contingent on documentation or a structure that is not yet in place. SEBI has tightened the conditions under which provisional ratings may be assigned and how long they may remain provisional. Treat a provisional rating as an opinion about a document set, not about a live obligation.

Bank loan ratings versus instrument ratings

This is the distinction that matters most in practice and the one most often flattened.

An instrument rating is on a market instrument — a non-convertible debenture, commercial paper, a bond. Its audience is investors. Its purpose is to price and permit investment. It exists because someone is buying the paper.

A bank loan rating is on a borrower’s bank facilities — cash credit, working capital demand loans, term loans, letters of credit, bank guarantees. Its audience is the lending bank and, behind the bank, the bank’s regulator. Under the Basel standardised approach a bank assigns a risk weight to a corporate exposure by reference to a rating from an External Credit Assessment Institution accredited by the RBI. Note that RBI accreditation is a separate list from SEBI registration and it has changed: in January 2023 the RBI’s eligible-ECAI notification named six agencies, and the position of one agency has been varied since. The RBI’s own notifications are the authority on who is currently eligible; do not assume every SEBI-registered agency is on that list. (RBI, Basel III Capital Regulations – Eligible Credit Rating Agencies, 9 January 2023)

Four consequences follow, and they are the whole reason this dataset exists:

The bank loan rating names the facilities. Because the rating has to be attributable to a specific facility of a specific lender for capital purposes, a bank loan rating release carries a facilities table and, frequently, a lender-wise annexure naming the bank behind each line. Instrument ratings have no equivalent — there is no counterparty to name.

A bank loan rating exists whether or not anyone reads it. Many rated Indian borrowers have never issued a market instrument. They are rated because a bank required it. That means the rated universe is far broader than the bond-issuing universe, and skews heavily towards mid-corporates and SMEs.

Amounts on the facilities table are sanctioned limits, not drawings. Proposed and unallocated limits routinely appear as their own line. Totalling the table without excluding them overstates the position.

Lender disclosure depends on borrower consent. In October 2022 the RBI noted that lender details were missing from a large number of press releases issued by external credit assessment institutions, attributing this to the absence of the requisite borrower consent, and ruled that a bank loan rating without that disclosure shall not be eligible for being reckoned for capital computation by banks, with effect from 31 March 2023. (RBI/2022-23/125, 10 October 2022)

What each agency is known for

Treat this section as reputational positioning drawn from what the agencies themselves publish about their capabilities, not as a measured share of any market. Agencies compete across the board and none of these is exclusive.

• CRISIL — the largest and oldest book, with a research and analytics business alongside the ratings arm and long-standing coverage of SMEs as well as large corporates.
• ICRA — long-established in structured finance and the financial sector, with a substantial presence in securitisation transactions and a separate analytics property.
• CARE Ratings — a large bank loan rating book and long-standing infrastructure and manufacturing coverage.
• India Ratings — banks and financial institutions and structured finance, applying Fitch group methodology.
• Acuité — mid-corporate and SME coverage, reflecting its SMERA origins, and a separate sustainability ratings arm.
• Brickwork — bank loan ratings, SMEs, and municipal and sub-sovereign issuance.
• Infomerics — mid-corporate, SME and NBFC coverage.

The practical point for cross-agency work: where a borrower sits in the size distribution is a decent predictor of which agencies it will have been rated by, and a mid-sized borrower rated by one of the smaller agencies is a normal occurrence, not a signal.

What varies operationally, and how to plan for it

If you are reading across the seven, these are the frictions you will actually hit.

Document naming. Some agencies title the document a press release, some a rating rationale, some publish both. The annexure appears variously as “Annexure II”, “Details of instruments/facilities”, “Lender-wise details”, or as an unlabelled trailing table.

Archive structure. Each agency publishes only its own book, on its own site, with its own search and its own URL scheme. There is no cross-agency index. Direct links to the seven archives are on Sources, and how to check a company’s credit rating walks through each one.

Entity naming. The same borrower appears under different legal-name renderings at different agencies, and after a merger or a name change the older releases keep the older name. The same is true of the lenders inside an annexure: bank names carry branch suffixes, initialisms and legacy names of merged institutions.

Review timing. A cooperating issuer’s rating is reviewed periodically rather than continuously, broadly once a year. Two agencies rating the same borrower will have last looked at it on different dates, sometimes many months apart, and a rating difference between them is often a difference in vintage rather than in opinion.

Annexure availability differs enormously by agency. This one is measurable, and we have measured it.

Annexure publication, measured across the seven

The lender-wise annexure is the part of a bank loan rating release that names the banks. Whether it appears at all depends on borrower consent — and the resulting share varies far more between agencies than most people expect.

Across the corpus, 46.2% of rating actions carry at least one lender row — 32,498 of 70,337 actions. By agency:

Two of those bars carry a footnote in the drawing, and both are worth stating in full.

Brickwork’s share rests on a very small base — 76 rating actions in the corpus, against 22,046 for CRISIL. Read it as a note, not as a rate.

India Ratings at zero is not a parsing failure. It is genuine non-publication of the lender dimension: India Ratings publishes an instrument-wise annexure with no lender column. That was verified across all 9,490 of their rating actions in this corpus, each backed by its own source document. If you need lender names and you are reading an Ind-Ra release, they are not there to find.

The rest of the spread is a consent-and-house-practice effect, not a data quality effect. What it means operationally is that a lender-side view of Indian rated credit is structurally weighted towards the agencies at the top of that chart, and a borrower rated only by ICRA or India Ratings is far less likely to have a published banking relationship than one rated by Acuité.

That is a coverage bias, it is stated in full on Data limits, and it is why every count derived from annexures is a floor rather than a total.

Reading across the seven at once

One release is readable in five minutes. Seven agencies, seven archives, seven layouts and tens of thousands of actions is a different problem.

TatvaRatings parses publicly published rating press releases from seven SEBI-registered agencies into one schema — borrowers, rating actions, rated facilities, key financials, rating drivers, and the lender-wise annexure — with borrower and lender identities resolved across the whole corpus, and indexes the annexure from the lender’s side. As at 30 August 2026 that is 70,337 rating actions, 45,528 borrowers, 194,471 rated facilities and 179,857 lender-exposure rows naming 1,501 distinct lenders, with the earliest action held from May 2019.

The limits above carry through unchanged: rated borrowers only, 46.2% annexure availability with the agency spread shown, sanctioned positions rather than outstanding balances, and every record as at its own action date.

Common questions

Related

• How to check a company’s credit rating — where each of the seven publishes
• How to read a rating press release — the document, section by section
• Glossary — the terminology, defined
• Coverage — the corpus, with an as-at date
• Data limits — what it is bounded by
• Sources — the seven public archives