Borrowing Rs 1 lakh for Dashain 2083: what a festive loan, a credit card and a dhukuti each actually cost

A colleague did the Dashain sum on the back of a tea receipt last week. Rs 22,000 to send home to Jhapa, two return bus tickets, a khasi share, new clothes for the kids, tika money for twenty-odd foreheads. He got to Rs 95,000 before the sweets. His festival expense payment, one month's basic, is Rs 31,000.

The gap is Rs 64,000, and it will get filled from somewhere. Every year the same four somewheres come up in the office: the bank, the card, the dhukuti, the boss. This post prices each one for Rs 1 lakh borrowed at the end of Asoj and repaid by the end of Poush, using the rate sheets banks published on 1 Asoj 2083 (17 September 2026) and the NRB report that came out the day after.

Why the gap exists in 2083

The festival expense is statutory and it is small. Section 37 of the Labour Act 2074 entitles every worker to one month's basic remuneration for the festival they celebrate, pro-rated for less than a year's service. Basic, not gross. On a package where allowances are a large share of gross, the payment is a fraction of what the household spends, and the tax on it trims it further.

Against that, a lean Dashain for a family of four came to about Rs 40,000 when it was priced in early Bhadra, and the comfortable version near Rs 1.2 lakh. Prices have moved since. NRB's one-month report for FY 2083/84, published 18 September 2026, puts year-on-year inflation at 5.96% in mid-August, against 1.68% a year earlier. The Dashain lines are worse than the headline:

Last Dashain, in Asoj 2082, headline inflation was under 1.5%. This one is running at four times that on a khasi and a bus ticket. The country borrows for it collectively: NRB's spokesperson once put the cash that leaves the banking system for Dashain at Rs 76 billion, most of it back by Chhath, and the Dashain month of 2082 was the first in which remittances crossed Rs 200 billion. Households that receive that money have a different set of decisions. Households that do not are the audience here.

The right answer, obviously, is the sinking fund started last Kartik. This post is for the year that did not happen.

The Dashain offer that is not there

Banks advertise festive offers every Asoj, so it is worth saying what they are for. As of 28 September 2026, a search of bank sites and the business press found no commercial bank offering a festive discount on personal loans or overdrafts. What is on offer is for larger purchases:

• Muktinath Bikas Bank is lending for house purchase or construction at base rate plus 0.25%, which is 5.78% on its 5.53% base, until the end of Kartik 2083, with auto and SME schemes alongside.
• Samsung Nepal's Dashain-Tihar campaign runs 20 September to 16 November with cashback of up to 26% on televisions and 24-month EMI through a hire-purchase company. The announcement does not say the EMI is interest-free.
• Midea's scheme advertises cashback up to Rs 37,700 and "0% interest EMI" without naming the partner bank, the tenure or the processing fee.

Last year's pattern was the same. Daraz's 2082 Dashain sale came with 15% off on partner-bank credit cards and 10% on debit cards, capped at a couple of thousand rupees; the broader roundup of bank offers was POS cashback, remittance bonuses and free account opening. Nothing on the borrowing rate.

So the festive offer is a discount on a fridge or a house, paired with a loan at the ordinary rate. For the Rs 1 lakh that Dashain itself costs, the ordinary rate sheet is the whole story. Here it is.

The menu, priced for Rs 1 lakh over three months

All figures are my arithmetic: simple interest on Rs 1 lakh for three months, plus the fees the tariff sheets list. Rates are the ones effective 1 Asoj 2083 unless dated otherwise. Where a bank quotes a range I have used the middle for the cost column and shown the range beside it.

Sources for the rows follow. Siddhartha, Nepal SBI, Laxmi Sunrise and Prabhu publish the loan-against-FD formula, the personal loan premiums of base plus 1 to 3.25 points and the gold premiums of base plus 1.5 to 4. Base rates for Bhadra 2083 ran from 3.83% at Rastriya Banijya to 5.57% at NIC Asia, with Nabil at 4.45% and Siddhartha at 4.92%; the NRB average was 4.72%. The Asoj personal-loan comparison has Everest lowest at 5.18 to 7.18% floating and Siddhartha at 8.18%. Card figures are from NIC Asia's September 2026 tariff of charges and Prabhu's rate sheet. The gold price is the 28 September fine-gold rate of Rs 2,94,300 a tola, and the 60% loan-to-value is ADBL's published rule.

Four rows deserve more than a line.

The employer advance, and the law behind the deduction

This is the cheapest money in the country and the least used, because asking feels like a confession. It is a routine transaction. Section 38(1)(i) of the Labour Act explicitly permits an employer to recover its own loans and advances from remuneration, after tax and SSF have come out first, up to a ceiling the Rules set. Rs 1 lakh recovered over three salaries is Rs 33,333 a month off net pay from Kartik to Poush; check with HR what ceiling they apply per pay period, because the Rules cap it and the cap is what decides whether the recovery runs three months or five.

Government has done this at scale for decades. Civil servants receive the festival expense of one month's salary with the Asoj pay, which the treasury has historically released in the days before the festival, and from this fiscal year federal offices pay salaries every fifteen days under an FCGO circular, which makes the cash-flow problem smaller for that group than for anyone in the private sector still paid once a month after the festival.

The loan against your FD is the only bank product with a net cost near 1%

The formula is the same at every bank that publishes one: your FD's coupon plus up to 2 points, or the base rate plus 2, whichever is higher. With one-year FDs paying 2.75% at Siddhartha, 2.85% at Nabil and 3.10% at Prabhu, the FD-plus-2 leg gives about 5%; the base-plus-2 leg gives 6.45% at Nabil and 7.10% at Nepal SBI, and that is the one that binds. Call it 6.5 to 7.1%.

Rs 1 lakh at 7% for three months is Rs 1,750 of interest. NMB lends up to 90% of the deposit, so a Rs 1.11 lakh FD backs the loan and keeps earning its 3%, which is about Rs 780 over the same three months after the 6% TDS. Net cost: a little under Rs 1,000. NIC Asia's tariff lists the administrative fee on a loan against your own FD as nil. The FD-or-shares loan post has the mechanics; the point for Dashain is that this beats breaking the FD, which costs the rate step-down and the penalty, and it beats every unsecured option by a wide margin.

The card is either free or the most expensive thing on the list

Both are true, and the statement date decides which. NIC Asia's product page gives up to 45 days interest-free on purchases. Buy the clothes and the tickets just after the statement closes, and the Kartik salary lands before the due date; the Dashain spending then costs nothing and the Daraz-type card discounts are pure gain. Pay the minimum instead, which NIC Asia sets at Rs 1,000 or 10% of the balance, and the remaining 90% revolves at 2.25% a month, 27% a year. Prabhu charges 2.5% a month, 30% a year. Three months of compounding on Rs 1 lakh is Rs 6,900 to 7,700, and a missed minimum adds 1% a month on top. When a card makes sense is a longer post; the Dashain rule is one sentence. Use it for purchases you can clear in full from the next salary, and for nothing else.

Cash from the card is the worst row on the table. NRB restricted card cash withdrawals to 10% of the approved limit, and only in emergencies, in May 2022, and banned cashing out wallet balances loaded from a card. NIC Asia charges Rs 300 or 2.5% on its own ATMs, Rs 500 plus 2.5% on other banks' machines, with interest from the day of withdrawal. Rs 1 lakh in cash needs a Rs 10 lakh limit and costs about Rs 9,400 over three months.

The card EMI sits between the two. NIC Asia's tariff replaces interest with a flat processing fee: 2.5% for three months, 5% for six, 7.5% for nine, 10% for twelve, 18% for eighteen and 24% for twenty-four, with Rs 500 to cancel. A flat 2.5% on a balance that falls to zero over three months is an effective rate near 15% a year; the 10% twelve-month fee works out near 18.5%. That is the same arithmetic as the BNPL post's 17 to 19%, and it is what "0% EMI" means in practice: cheaper than revolving, two to three times a personal loan.

The dhukuti pot in round one is a 19% loan with no paperwork

How a dhukuti works has its own post. The Dashain-specific fact is that the person who needs the pot in Asoj is the person who pays for everyone else's return. In a bidding circle the pot goes, in Seibel's 1988 field description, to the member willing to accept the least, and "members forgo sizeable portions of the sum" to jump the queue.

Take ten members at Rs 10,000 a month. Suppose the winning bid for the first pot is Rs 8,000, so the early taker walks away with Rs 92,000 and still pays Rs 10,000 for ten months. The Rs 8,000 is interest on a loan whose balance falls from Rs 92,000 to zero across the year; on that reducing balance it is roughly 19% a year. The bid is assumed, and a hotter circle bids higher. Whatever the number, it is paid to people who can wait, by the person who cannot, and it is paid inside an arrangement that Section 14A of the Banking Offence and Punishment Act prohibits outright. Police broke up circles in Kathmandu in 2015 and estimated five thousand groups running at the time. If the organiser leaves with the Asoj pot, the member who bid for it has nothing to take to a court.

Two rules that make any of these cheaper

Penal interest is capped at 2 percentage points. NRB's August 2024 amendment to the Unified Directives requires every loan contract to state a penal rate of no more than 2% and forbids interest on the penal charge itself. NIC Asia's tariff implements it as an additional 2% a year on overdue principal or interest, including gold loans and expired overdraft limits. A late Poush instalment on a 7% personal loan therefore costs 9%, not the 24% a late card payment does.

Prepayment on a small loan is free. The same tariff lists the prepayment fee as nil for loans below Rs 50 lakh, which is every loan in this post. Take the personal loan for six months to keep the instalment small, then clear it in Poush when the Magh bonus or the tax refund arrives; the prepay-or-not post covers the NRB rule behind that. And the personal overdraft cap, which NRB doubled to Rs 1 crore in its first quarterly review of FY 2082/83, is not something Rs 1 lakh will ever touch.

One practical note on cash. NRB's Baisakh 2083 directive cut the daily ATM limit to Rs 50,000, Rs 20,000 a transaction and Rs 3 lakh a month, and has told banks to load Rs 100 notes for the festival. Whatever route the Rs 1 lakh takes, moving it to tika envelopes takes two ATM days or a counter visit before Phulpati on 17 October, when branches start closing.

Three colleagues, three answers

The office tea-receipt sums, with the route each person took and what it will cost by Poush-end.

The third row is the one that matters. The dhukuti was the path of least resistance, the aunt was family, and the bid would have been the same Rs 8,000 the table above assumes. The bank loan took a week, a CIB check and a 0.75% fee, and it will cost a third of what the circle would have, with a contract that a court recognises. The personal-loan-versus-gold-versus-overdraft post ranks the three bank options for the same person if the bank says no; the gold route would have needed a little over half a tola of fine gold at the 28 September price and a 60% loan-to-value, and it would have cost slightly more.

None of the three used an instant loan app, which is the fourth somewhere that comes up in the office and the one with no licence behind it. Foneloan, the bank-embedded product, is a different thing; it is legitimate and disburses Rs 500 to Rs 1 lakh for up to 30 days inside partner-bank apps, but it does not publish its rate, and money you cannot price you should not borrow for a festival.

What you actually need to know

1. The festive loan offer is for the house and the fridge, not the festival. As of 28 September 2026, no commercial bank had discounted personal loans or overdrafts for Dashain 2083; Muktinath's 5.78% home loan and the appliance cashbacks are what the season actually brings. Rs 1 lakh of Dashain spending borrows at the ordinary rate sheet.
2. The order is advance, FD loan, personal loan, card in the window. Rs 0, about Rs 1,000, Rs 2,000 to 2,800, and Rs 0 again if the Kartik salary clears the statement. Revolving the card costs Rs 6,900 to 7,700 for the same three months and a cash advance near Rs 9,400.
3. The early dhukuti pot is a 19% loan from people you cannot sue. The bid you offer to take the pot in Asoj is interest paid to the members who can wait, inside an arrangement Section 14A bans. If the circle is the only option left, it is the signal to take a smaller Dashain, and the Rs 40,000 version is a real one.

Have a different basic, a different FD and a different bank? Email parjanya57@gmail.com with the three numbers and I'll send back the table priced for your case.

This post is part of the Nepal Money Basics guide — the save-the-gap section.