The kisan credit card is the main route by which Indian banks give farmers short-term credit: a revolving limit that pays for a crop season, or the working capital of a dairy or fishing business, and is repaid when the produce is sold. There were 7,28,27,884 operative KCC accounts with INR 10,08,256 crore outstanding in 2025-26, according to figures the Finance Ministry gave the Lok Sabha on 3 August 2026.
Three things changed in 2025 and 2026. The collateral-free limit rose to INR 2 lakh, the Budget for 2025-26 promised a higher ceiling for subsidised interest that was still awaiting appraisal on 1 February 2026, and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) rewrote the scheme for loans sanctioned from 1 January 2027. This explainer sets out the rules, the money, the numbers and the open questions.
What a kisan credit card is and who issues it
The KCC scheme was introduced in 1998 to make it simpler and faster for farmers to get short-term institutional credit for crop production, according to a PIB backgrounder on the scheme published on 11 March 2026. Its current version, the Revised Kisan Credit Card (2020) scheme, also covers post-harvest and marketing expenses, household consumption and allied activities, through a RuPay-enabled card with one-time documentation, the backgrounder says.
Eligible borrowers include individual and joint owner-cultivators, tenant farmers, oral lessees and sharecroppers, as well as self-help groups and joint liability groups, including groups of tenant farmers. The application is a one-page form with basic details pre-filled from banks’ records of PM-KISAN beneficiaries, and Common Service Centres are authorised to send completed applications to bank branches digitally.
Government designs the subsidy, but banks issue the card and make the loans. The same backgrounder counts 457 banks onboarded on the KCC platform: 37 commercial banks, 46 regional rural banks (RRBs) and 374 cooperative banks. It reports 1,998.7 lakh applications processed, of which 631.5 lakh came through commercial banks, 337.2 lakh through RRBs and 1,030.0 lakh through cooperative banks. The backgrounder does not give a date for these totals.
The lending rules are the RBI’s. On 19 June 2026 it issued final KCC directions in four sets, one each for commercial banks, small finance banks, RRBs and rural cooperative banks. Non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) are not among the four, a point that shapes how fintech lenders can take part.
How banks set a KCC limit
A KCC is a credit limit, not a single loan. For crops, the starting point is the scale of finance: the cost of cultivating a unit area of each crop, notified by a State Level Technical Committee or a District Level Technical Committee. Under the RBI directions for commercial banks dated 19 June 2026, the drawing limit for each crop season is the sum of four parts:
- the scale of finance for each crop multiplied by the area cultivated;
- 10% of that amount for post-harvest expenses and household consumption;
- 20% of that amount for repairs and maintenance of farm assets and other working capital, a component that now names soil testing, weather advisory, software and digital advisory platform fees, drone-based crop health surveys and spraying, satellite crop monitoring and organic or good agricultural practices certification;
- premiums for crop, accident, health and asset insurance, if any.
From the second crop season, the bank sets a maximum permissible limit by adding 10% to the previous season’s limit. If the technical committee has not notified a scale of finance for a season, the bank is to consider a 10% notional increase on the previous one; if it was notified but not revised, the existing figure stands. The limit is rounded to the nearest INR 1,000, and the composite facility, including any investment credit, has a tenure of six years.
Marginal farmers can instead get a flexible limit of INR 10,000 to INR 50,000, known as Flexi KCC, set without reference to land value. Banks must waive collateral and margin for agricultural loans, including allied activities, up to INR 2 lakh per borrower, and may waive collateral up to INR 3 lakh where the loan is against hypothecation of crops or stock with a recovery tie-up. The INR 2 lakh limit took effect on 1 January 2025, up from INR 1.6 lakh, according to the Finance Ministry reply to the Lok Sabha of 3 August 2026.
The interest subvention scheme behind the 4% rate
The low headline rate comes from a central subsidy, the Modified Interest Subvention Scheme (MISS), launched as a Central Sector Scheme in 2006-07. Under the terms the Union Cabinet approved on 28 May 2025 for 2025-26, farmers get short-term loans of up to INR 3 lakh through a KCC at 7% a year, and the lending institution receives an interest subvention of 1.5%.
Farmers who repay on time get a prompt repayment incentive of up to 3%, which brings the effective rate to 4%. For loans taken only for animal husbandry or fisheries, the interest benefit applies up to INR 2 lakh. The Cabinet said no change was proposed in the structure or other components of the scheme, and it justified keeping the 1.5% subvention by pointing to lending costs and movements in the median MCLR and the repo rate.
The Finance Ministry’s status report on the 2025-26 Budget announcements, dated 1 February 2026, says the Cabinet approved expenditure of INR 15,642 crore on the subvention component for 2025-26. PRS Legislative Research analysis of the 2026-27 agriculture demand for grants puts MISS at INR 22,600 crore in 2024-25 actuals, the 2025-26 revised estimate and the 2026-27 budget estimate, or 16% of the agriculture ministry’s budget.
Banks claim the subvention and incentive through the Kisan Rin Portal, launched in September 2023, which automates the submission and processing of those claims, according to the PIB backgrounder. The RBI’s 2026 directions do not set subvention terms themselves: they tell banks to adhere to the instructions on interest subvention and the prompt repayment incentive as applicable from time to time.
A third-party assessment by the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bengaluru, found that every INR 1 invested under KCC-MISS contributes INR 2.30 to net value addition in agriculture and allied sectors, with an estimated subsidy outlay of INR 1.87 lakh crore from inception to 2024-25, the Finance Ministry told the Lok Sabha on 3 August 2026.
The INR 5 lakh kisan credit card limit: announced, not settled
The Budget for 2025-26, presented on 1 February 2025, said the loan limit under MISS would be enhanced from INR 3 lakh to INR 5 lakh for loans taken through the KCC. The Cabinet decision of 28 May 2025 kept the INR 3 lakh ceiling for 2025-26, and an agriculture ministry release of the same day said the INR 5 lakh proposal was under active consideration.
The Finance Ministry’s status report of 1 February 2026 explains the delay. An Expenditure Finance Committee (EFC) met in April 2025, an add-on field study was done in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, and the ISEC evaluation was carried out. Because the scheme was due for review for the next Finance Commission cycle, the report says, implementing the Budget announcement had been clubbed with a new EFC. The Department of Financial Services said an EFC meeting in April 2025 had approved a memorandum that included raising the limit to INR 5 lakh, and that further steps would follow once scheme guidelines were finalised.
Official messages differ. The PIB backgrounder of 11 March 2026 states that in 2025-26 the crop loan limit under MISS was raised from INR 3 lakh to INR 5 lakh, and the limit for fisheries and allied activities from INR 2 lakh to INR 5 lakh. The same document says short-term loans up to INR 3 lakh are available at 7%. TAD could not find a Cabinet decision or scheme guideline, published by 31 October 2026, that extends subvention to loans between INR 3 lakh and INR 5 lakh.
Our analysis: until a Cabinet decision or scheme guideline is published, lenders have no official basis for claiming subvention on the slice of a KCC between INR 3 lakh and INR 5 lakh. This is general information, not advice. The natural place for the change is the appraisal of MISS for the next Finance Commission cycle that the status report describes.
Kisan credit card numbers: accounts, money and bad loans
The latest official count TAD found is the state-wise table annexed to Lok Sabha unstarred question 2423, released by PIB on 3 August 2026. It shows operative KCC accounts rising from 7,14,90,107 in 2021-22 to 7,34,70,282 in 2022-23 and 7,75,04,234 in 2023-24, then falling to 7,72,10,538 in 2024-25 and 7,28,27,884 in 2025-26.
Outstanding balances held up better than account numbers. They went from INR 8,15,314 crore in 2021-22 to INR 9,81,761 crore in 2023-24 and INR 10,20,072 crore in 2024-25, before easing to INR 10,08,256 crore in 2025-26. Uttar Pradesh had the largest balance in 2025-26, with 98,60,137 accounts and INR 1,39,986 crore outstanding, followed by Rajasthan with 71,53,741 accounts and INR 1,15,769 crore.
Asset quality is the weak spot. The same reply lists non-performing KCC loans at scheduled commercial banks, excluding RRBs, of 64,63,562 accounts and INR 95,269 crore in 2025-26, against 66,62,078 accounts and INR 84,637 crore in 2021-22. The agriculture ministry’s release of 28 May 2025 put KCC non-performing assets at 12.66% in 2021-22 and 11.5% in 2023-24.
TAD’s calculation from the table: operative accounts fell by 43,82,654 between 2024-25 and 2025-26, while the average balance rose from about INR 1.32 lakh to about INR 1.38 lakh per account. The reply does not explain the fall in accounts, and TAD has not seen an official explanation. The bad-loan figures cover only scheduled commercial banks, so they cannot be set against the totals in the first table to give a ratio.
KCC for animal husbandry and fisheries
The KCC was extended to fishers and fish farmers in 2018-19 to meet their working capital needs, according to the PIB backgrounder. The RBI directions for regional rural banks list rearing of dairy animals, poultry birds and small ruminants, fisheries and aquaculture, including pearl, seaweed, bio-floc and brackish water culture, and sericulture, lac culture and beekeeping among the allied activities a KCC can fund.
Allied lending has grown quickly from a small base. Operative animal husbandry KCC accounts rose from 15,08,450, with INR 15,216 crore outstanding, in 2021-22 to 51,25,553, with INR 60,997 crore, in 2025-26. Fisheries accounts went from 60,095, with INR 1,531 crore, to 1,37,776, with INR 5,355 crore, over the same period, according to the Lok Sabha annexure.
Conversion from application to sanction is lower than the acceptance numbers suggest. The PIB backgrounder reports 55.9 lakh animal husbandry applications, of which 55.08 lakh were accepted and 39.22 lakh sanctioned, and 6.83 lakh fisheries applications, of which 6.77 lakh were accepted and 4.82 lakh sanctioned. It gives no period for these figures.
Under the Cabinet’s 2025-26 terms, subvention on loans taken only for animal husbandry or fisheries is capped at INR 2 lakh. The backgrounder’s statement that this limit has risen to INR 5 lakh carries the same caveat as the crop loan limit above. Where a borrower takes credit for both crops and allied activities, the 2026 directions say the 10% consumption component is counted only once.
The RBI’s revised kisan credit card directions from 1 January 2027
The RBI said in its Statement on Developmental and Regulatory Policies of 6 February 2026 that it would revise the KCC guidelines, and it published draft directions on 12 February 2026, with comments due by 6 March 2026. The stated aims were to widen coverage, simplify operations and bring existing instructions on agriculture and allied lending into one place.
The final directions, issued on 19 June 2026, apply to loans sanctioned under the scheme from 1 January 2027. Loans sanctioned earlier stay under the existing guidelines until they mature or are next renewed. According to Business Standard, the RBI had planned to apply the rules from 1 July 2026 and moved the date after stakeholders raised operational and technology-related challenges.
The main changes for lenders are these:
- Crop seasons are standardised at 12 months for short-duration crops and 18 months for long-duration crops, measured from sowing to marketing.
- The KCC is a composite facility with a six-year tenure; a term loan for an investment needing longer may be treated as a separate facility outside the KCC.
- Drawing limits follow the notified scale of finance, with technology services named inside the 20% working capital component.
- Sub-limits for crop and allied working capital and for long-term loans are kept as separate loan accounts under the composite facility.
- Insurance premiums can be paid from the KCC account only with the borrower’s explicit consent, taken at the application stage.
Business Standard reported that the RBI declined suggestions to raise the Flexi KCC limit, lend beyond the notified scale of finance, raise the collateral-free limit, renew a KCC on the basis of interest servicing, or merge the sub-limits into one. The paper said the RBI treated interest subvention, reporting by cooperatives to credit information companies and portability of a KCC between banks as outside the scope of the directions.
Kisan Rin Portal and digital KCC lending
Three digital layers sit around the card. The first is the Kisan Rin Portal, which brings together farmer profiles, disbursement data, subvention claims and scheme performance. A PIB release of 18 September 2023 announced its launch with a door-to-door KCC campaign aimed at PM-KISAN beneficiaries without a card, put operative KCC accounts at 7.35 crore as of March 2023 with a sanctioned limit of INR 8.85 lakh crore, and named NABARD as the campaign’s primary executing organisation.
The second is the loan journey itself. On 2 September 2022 the RBI announced a pilot of end-to-end digital KCC lending, developed by the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH), to start that month in Madhya Pradesh with Union Bank of India and Tamil Nadu with Federal Bank. The RBI said then that rural loans took two to four weeks from application to disbursement and needed branch visits and proof of land ownership.
The third is shared data. In April 2024 NABARD agreed to integrate its e-KCC loan origination portal for cooperative banks and RRBs with RBIH’s Public Tech Platform for Frictionless Credit, which supplies digital land records, satellite data, KYC and credit history, a Press Trust of India report in Business Standard said. About 351 district and state cooperative banks and 43 RRBs were to get access, with a goal of about 5 crore KCC loans.
The Finance Ministry’s reply of 3 August 2026 lists the Kisan Rin Portal, the Jan Samarth portal, e-KCC and KRISHIKA among the digital tools used to speed up agricultural credit. The RBI’s 2026 directions for commercial banks do not refer to the Farmer ID being built under AgriStack, which TAD explains in a separate guide.
What the kisan credit card means for banks, NBFCs and agri-fintech firms
In TAD’s view, the 2027 directions are an operations project for banks as much as a credit one. Loan systems need the new season definitions, six-year composite limits, rounding rules and separate accounts for working capital and investment credit, and branch staff need the revised scale-of-finance workflow. Stressed accounts remain a cost: INR 95,269 crore of KCC loans at scheduled commercial banks were non-performing in 2025-26.
The four sets of RBI directions cover banks only. Our analysis: for NBFCs and fintech lenders, the KCC is therefore mainly a sourcing, data and service opportunity rather than a product they issue, and naming technology costs inside the 20% component, from soil testing and weather advisory to drone spraying and digital advisory fees, gives agritech providers a clearer basis for farmers to pay for their services from a KCC limit.
For input companies and machinery dealers, the KCC book of INR 10,08,256 crore in 2025-26 is, in TAD’s view, a measure of the working capital farmers can draw for seed, fertiliser, crop protection and hire services. Our analysis: uncertainty over the INR 5 lakh subvention limit matters most to larger growers and to dairy and fisheries borrowers whose needs sit above INR 3 lakh.
For investors, NABARD’s venture arm is raising money for rural fintech and agritech, including the INR 450 crore first close of NABVENTURES Fund II. Farm credit and insurance deals are tracked on the TAD deals ledger and the Deals and capital desk, and lenders active in the segment are listed in the agri-finance and insurance suppliers guide.
Kisan credit card: frequently asked questions
Who issues a kisan credit card?
Banks issue the card, not the government. A PIB backgrounder of 11 March 2026 counts 457 banks on the KCC platform: 37 commercial banks, 46 regional rural banks and 374 cooperative banks. The RBI’s revised directions of 19 June 2026 cover commercial banks, small finance banks, regional rural banks and rural cooperative banks. NBFCs are not among the four categories the directions address.
What interest rate does a KCC loan carry?
Under the Modified Interest Subvention Scheme terms approved by the Cabinet on 28 May 2025 for 2025-26, short-term loans up to INR 3 lakh carry 7% a year. Lenders receive a 1.5% subvention, and farmers who repay promptly get an incentive of up to 3%, making the effective rate 4%. For loans only for animal husbandry or fisheries, the benefit applies up to INR 2 lakh.
Has the INR 5 lakh subvention limit taken effect?
The Budget for 2025-26 announced it, and a PIB backgrounder of 11 March 2026 describes the limit as raised. But the Finance Ministry’s status report of 1 February 2026 said implementation had been clubbed with a new Expenditure Finance Committee appraisal, and TAD found no Cabinet decision or guideline applying subvention between INR 3 lakh and INR 5 lakh by 31 October 2026.
How many kisan credit card accounts are there?
Figures given to the Lok Sabha on 3 August 2026 show 7,28,27,884 operative KCC accounts with INR 10,08,256 crore outstanding in 2025-26, down from 7,72,10,538 accounts and INR 10,20,072 crore in 2024-25. Animal husbandry made up 51,25,553 accounts and fisheries 1,37,776 accounts in 2025-26.
When do the new RBI rules apply?
The RBI’s Kisan Credit Card Scheme Directions, 2026, issued on 19 June 2026, apply to loans sanctioned from 1 January 2027. Earlier loans stay under the existing guidelines until maturity or next renewal. The rules standardise crop seasons at 12 and 18 months, set a six-year composite tenure and name technology costs within the 20% working capital component.
Is a KCC loan collateral-free?
Banks must waive collateral and margin for agricultural loans, including allied activities, up to INR 2 lakh per borrower, a limit that took effect on 1 January 2025. Where the loan is against hypothecation of crops or stock with a recovery tie-up, banks may waive collateral up to INR 3 lakh. Above those limits, collateral follows each bank’s credit policy.
