Computing your delay interest claim: MCLR plus 2, in actual rupees

Delay interest is the rare legal remedy that reduces to arithmetic: a published rate, your payment trail, a calendar. Yet most Maharashtra buyers negotiating with a late builder have never computed their own number, which means they are negotiating a lakh-scale claim without knowing its size. Ten minutes with this article ends that.

The formula, unpacked#

Section 18 gives a delayed buyer two remedies, and Maharashtra's rules price both off one benchmark: SBI's highest MCLR plus 2 percent.

Remedy one, stay and claim. You keep the flat coming; the promoter pays interest on everything you have paid, for every month past the promised date, until actual possession. The full remedy structure is covered separately; here we do the money.

Remedy two, exit. Full refund of amounts paid, with interest at the same rate computed from your payment dates.

The moving part is MCLR, SBI's published lending benchmark. Note which MCLR the rule means: the HIGHEST tenor SBI publishes, not the one-year rate quoted in most news coverage and not an average across banks. Through 2025's repo cuts the benchmark drifted down across the system, with scheduled banks' one-year median at 8.50 percent in June 2026 (RBI data), but the figure your claim runs on is SBI's own top of schedule, 8.90 percent as of June 2026, giving a prescribed rate of 10.90 percent. Check SBI's current table the week you file, because your claim floats with it.

The worked example#

Priya and Arjun (illustrative, as ever) paid Rs 60 lakh toward an Rs 80 lakh flat promised for 30 June 2025. It is now July 2026: thirteen months late.

• Rate: 8.90 percent MCLR plus 2 = 10.90 percent per annum.
• Annual interest: 10.90 percent of Rs 60,00,000 = Rs 6,54,000.
• Monthly: Rs 54,500.
• Thirteen months: Rs 7,08,500, and running at Rs 54,500 every further month.

An analogy: the meter, not the argument#

An auto fare dispute changes character the moment someone points at the meter. Delay negotiations are the same: before you compute, the conversation is the builder's story against your frustration; after, it is a meter reading. Rs 54,500 per month reframes everything, including the builder's incentives, because every month of further delay now has a price tag they can read too.

Building the claim that survives scrutiny#

1. Reconstruct the payment trail. Every receipt, bank entry and loan disbursement, dated. The claim is computed instalment-wise; a missing Rs 8 lakh receipt is roughly Rs 70,000 a year of unclaimed interest at current rates.
2. Fix the promised date. The agreement's possession clause plus stated grace period. The registration page's date history corroborates; a quietly extended registration does not move your contractual date.
3. Check the force majeure window. Regulator-declared periods, like the COVID orders, pause the meter for their own duration and no longer; the anatomy is in the force majeure guide.
4. Compute and demand in writing. A dated letter with the table above, before filing. Some claims end here.
5. File with the computation attached. The complaint that pleads "interest of Rs 7,08,500 as of filing, accruing at Rs 54,500 monthly" gets an order in those terms; the filing process takes Rs 5,000 and your PDFs.

The tax and the timing footnotes#

Interest received is generally taxable as other income, so the post-tax claim is the true comparison figure against any settlement. And interest for the exit remedy runs from payment dates, which usually makes exit claims larger than stay claims on the same facts, one honest input into the keep-or-leave decision that the project's own trajectory should settle: a project visibly finishing rewards staying; a flatlining one does not.

The evidence half of this arithmetic, the promised date, each extension with the promoter's own stated reason, and how regularly the project has filed, is what the Rs 499 ReraGenie buyer report assembles for any covered Maharashtra project, before and during a dispute. The project watch, Rs 299 for 90 days and included free with the buyer report, emails every change in that one project's filing, so the record builds itself while the meter runs. Sign up on ReraGenie; the meter runs better with a witness.

The one-line summary#

MCLR plus 2, on what you paid, per month late: compute it, demand it in writing, plead it in numbers, and negotiate with a meter instead of a mood. The meter does not stop at the occupancy certificate either, which is the point of OC received, keys withheld.

This article is educational and not legal advice. For a dispute, consult a lawyer who practices before MahaRERA.