If you have read anything about the RBI Ombudsman, there is a good chance it told you that you have one year to complain. That was true. It stopped being true on 1 July 2026. The scheme was replaced. The Reserve Bank — Integrated Ombudsman Scheme, 2026, notified on 16 January 2026, came into force that day and took the place of the 2021 Scheme. And the filing window was cut. You must still complain to the bank, lender or payment entity first, and you may still come here if it does not reply within thirty days or if you are dissatisfied with what it says. But the complaint to the Ombudsman must now be filed within ninety days of the later of two dates: when that timeline expired, or the last communication you received. Ninety days is not a long time to notice that a bank has stopped replying, find your papers, and write something. It is a great deal shorter than the year most of the internet still promises you. The compensation went the other way. There is no ceiling on the disputed amount. Consequential loss may be compensated up to ₹30 lakh, raised from twenty; and up to ₹3 lakh for your time, your expenses and the harassment and mental anguish, raised from one. So the trade is plain: more money available, far less time to ask for it. And one more thing the Scheme says in terms — an advocate cannot act as your authorised representative here unless the advocate is the aggrieved person. This forum is built for you to use yourself, and it costs nothing to use.
What is on this page
A new scheme took effect and the previous one stopped applying to fresh complaints. The Reserve Bank — Integrated Ombudsman Scheme, 2026 was notified on 16 January 2026 and came into force on 1 July 2026, replacing the 2021 Scheme of the same name.
Schemes of this kind are not amended quietly in a corner. This one was consulted on through a draft in 2025, notified in January, and given nearly six months before it began, which tells you the Reserve Bank expected people to need the notice.
Most people did not get it, because this is not the sort of thing anybody writes to you about. You find out when you need the forum, which is the worst moment to discover that a period has shortened.
The one sentence to take from this page. If what you know about the RBI Ombudsman came from anything published before July 2026, the time limit you are carrying in your head is wrong, and the error runs the expensive way, towards losing the remedy rather than towards keeping it.
The 2021 Scheme was itself a consolidation, and a good one. It merged three separate ombudsman arrangements into a single jurisdiction-neutral forum, so that a complainant no longer had to work out which of three schemes and which regional office their grievance belonged to.
That structure survives. What the 2026 Scheme did was not to undo the integration but to rework the machinery inside it: the timelines, the ceilings, the response obligations on the entity, and the handling at intake.
So if you used this forum a few years ago, the shape will be familiar. The dates will not be.
It is worth knowing the 2021 Scheme existed because of how often you will still meet it. Bank websites, printed leaflets at branches and a great deal of published guidance still name it as the governing framework. None of that is dishonest; it is simply material that was correct when it was written and has not been revisited.
Where you meet a reference to it, the question to ask is whether the document is describing your complaint or somebody else earlier one. For anything you are filing now, it is the earlier one.
This is the change that matters more than all the others together, and it deserves to be stated without hedging.
Under the 2021 Scheme a complainant had one year to bring the matter to the Ombudsman. Under the 2026 Scheme the complaint must be filed within ninety days.
Three months instead of twelve. For a person who has been going back and forth with a bank, waiting for a reply that keeps being promised, that is the difference between a remedy and a closed door.
Why this one bites hardest. Nothing about a banking grievance feels urgent in the first few weeks. The entity is still responding, or still promising to. By the time it is obvious that nothing is going to happen, a year felt like plenty of room. Ninety days does not leave room for that realisation to arrive slowly.
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Because nobody takes a page down when a scheme is replaced. The article that explained the one year window in 2023 is still indexed, still well written, and still being found by people searching this week.
There is a simple test you can apply to anything you read on this subject, including something that looks current. Does it mention the 2026 Scheme or the date 1 July 2026, and does it say ninety days. A page that says one year, or that names the 2021 Scheme as the governing framework, is describing a scheme that no longer applies to your complaint.
Date-checking is not enough on its own, because pages get re-dated without being rewritten. Check the content for the number, not the page for its timestamp.
There is one category of stale page that deserves particular caution, which is the bank own customer information. An institution that has not updated its grievance leaflet is not thereby giving you an extra nine months, and a complainant who relies on it will not be excused on that basis.
The transition is handled sensibly and it is worth knowing which side of the line you are on.
Complaints that were received before 1 July 2026 continue to be dealt with under the 2021 Scheme. So do appeals arising from decisions made under that Scheme, and the execution of awards made under it. Everything filed from that date onwards is on the 2026 Scheme.
Note what the saving does not do. It protects complaints already made, not grievances that existed. If your problem arose in 2025 but you did not file until after July 2026, you are on the new Scheme and the new window.
The distinction people get wrong. The date that decides which scheme governs you is the date your complaint reached the Ombudsman, not the date the bank wronged you. An old grievance filed late is a new complaint under the new rules.
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It would be unfair to describe the 2026 Scheme as a tightening and leave it there, because the compensation available moved substantially in the complainant favour.
There is no ceiling at all on the disputed amount. On top of that, compensation for consequential loss may be awarded up to thirty lakh rupees, where the 2021 ceiling was twenty. And compensation for loss of your time, the expenses you were put to, and the harassment and mental anguish you suffered may go up to three lakh rupees, where it was one.
Tripling the second of those is a real signal. It says the forum is expected to take seriously the cost of being ignored, not merely the money that went missing.
One caution about reading too much into the ceilings. They are upper limits on what may be awarded, not an indication of what is usually awarded, and the great majority of complaints concern sums far below either figure. A ceiling of thirty lakh does not make a wrongly levied charge of eleven thousand rupees into a large claim.
What the raise is actually useful for. It removes a cap that occasionally bit in genuinely serious matters, and it signals that the non-financial consequences of being ignored are to be taken seriously. Neither of those is a reason to inflate a modest claim.
Wider than most people assume, and the last category on the list surprises almost everybody.
| Category | Covered | The qualification to check |
|---|---|---|
| Banks | Commercial, regional rural, state and central co-operative, urban co-operative | Urban co-operative banks are in on a deposit threshold |
| NBFCs | Those taking deposits, or with customer interface above a size threshold | Several categories are excluded altogether |
| Payment entities | Non-bank issuers of prepaid payment instruments | The issuer, not every app in the chain |
| Credit information companies | Yes | Whether your grievance is with them or with the lender that reported |
The first question on any enquiry is therefore not what went wrong. It is who it went wrong with, and whether that institution is inside the Scheme at all.
The qualifications in that last column are not formalities. An urban co-operative bank below the deposit threshold, or an NBFC in one of the excluded categories, is outside the Scheme however legitimate the grievance, and the complainant has to look elsewhere entirely.
That is why the first question on any enquiry is about the institution rather than the incident. It takes a minute to answer and it determines whether anything else on this page applies to you at all.
If you complained to a bank some weeks ago and have been waiting patiently for a reply, stop reading the rest of this page in order and do one thing first.
Find the date the entity received your complaint. Add thirty days. If that date has passed and nothing has come, your ninety days is already running, and it has been running since that expiry rather than since you gave up hope.
Patience is the single most expensive habit on this subject. The forum does not reward a complainant for having given the bank every chance; it simply closes.
There is a version of this that is worse than simple waiting, which is active patience. The complainant who keeps telephoning, keeps being promised a call back, and feels that the matter is therefore progressing. From the point of view of the period, that is identical to doing nothing, and it feels entirely different.
Activity is not the same as a filed complaint. Phone calls, branch visits and follow-up emails do not preserve anything. If the timeline has expired, the only thing that stops the window closing is a complaint lodged with the Ombudsman.
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The Ombudsman is not where a grievance starts. It is where a grievance goes when the institution has had a proper opportunity to deal with it and has not.
That sequencing is a condition rather than a courtesy. A complaint brought here without the entity having been given its chance is not entertained, and the attempt will have consumed time you did not have to spare.
The whole of the first stage — how to write to a bank, which channel to use, how to escalate inside the institution and what to keep — is set out on our banking complaint page, and if you have not yet written to anybody at all, start there rather than here.
There is a sound reason for the sequencing beyond procedural tidiness. A very large share of grievances are resolved once they reach somebody inside the institution with authority to look at them, and a forum that let everybody skip that stage would spend its time on matters that a nodal officer would have fixed in a week.
The regulated entity itself, through its own grievance mechanism, in writing, with something that proves it arrived.
What counts is a complaint the entity has received, not an exchange with a branch official, not a conversation at a counter, and not a social media post. You need a date and a reference, because every period on this page is computed from that receipt.
Keep the acknowledgement in the form the entity gives it. A ticket number in an email, a stamped copy of a letter, a screenshot of a portal submission with its date visible. Any of those will do; none of them can be reconstructed afterwards.
One point on channels. Where the entity publishes a designated grievance route, use it rather than a general enquiry address, because the thirty days runs from receipt by the entity in the manner it has specified. A message sent to a sales inbox is easy for the institution to say it never received as a complaint.
Once the entity has received your complaint, it has thirty days to reply. That is the general period and it runs from receipt.
If thirty days pass and no reply has come, the gate to the Ombudsman opens. You do not have to send a reminder, you do not have to warn them, and you do not have to wait for a final answer that is never going to arrive.
Write both dates down the day you complain. The date it was received, and the date thirty days later. Those two dates are the foundation of everything that follows, and they are the two that people reconstruct wrongly months afterwards.
Note what the period is not. It is not thirty working days, it is not thirty days from when the matter was escalated internally, and it does not restart each time somebody at the entity picks the file up again. It runs once, from receipt.
Thirty days is the default, not the only possibility. Where the Reserve Bank, the National Payments Corporation of India or the card network guidelines specify a longer timeline for the type of grievance in question, that longer period applies instead.
This matters because certain categories of dispute, particularly in payments and cards, have their own resolution timetables. Computing ninety days from the wrong starting point is as fatal as not computing it at all.
So the question to settle early is which timeline governs your category, and that is one of the first things we establish rather than assume.
How do you find out which applies? Ask the entity, in writing, as part of the original complaint: under what timeline it is dealing with your grievance. A question of that kind costs nothing, is perfectly ordinary, and produces a written answer you can compute from instead of guessing.
A line worth adding to every complaint you send a bank. Ask them to confirm the timeline within which they will respond. Whatever comes back is useful: an answer gives you the date, and silence is itself the default thirty days running.
There are two doors into this forum, not one, and people regularly miss the second.
The first is silence: no reply within the applicable timeline. The second is a reply you are dissatisfied with. You do not have to establish that the reply was unreasonable before you may come here; dissatisfaction with it is the stated condition.
That matters because a great many entities close complaints with a polite, prompt reply that does not address the point. Receiving that reply is not the end of the road, and it is also the event that may start your ninety days.
It follows that you do not need to argue with the entity after an unsatisfactory reply in order to earn the right to come here. People frequently spend six weeks in further correspondence trying to make the institution see sense, in the belief that they must exhaust something. The reply was the exhaustion.
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Every regulated entity is required to have a senior officer at head office responsible for this Scheme, at the rank of General Manager or equivalent, and the Scheme requires the Scheme information to be displayed and made available, in English, Hindi and the regional language.
Two practical uses for that. It gives you a senior addressee inside the institution when a branch is going in circles. And it means the information about this forum should be on display at the branch and on the website, so a bank that tells you it does not apply is contradicting what it is obliged to publish.
Addressing a stalled grievance to that officer, in writing, is often the step that unblocks it without anybody going anywhere.
Use it sparingly and in writing. A short, dated letter to that officer setting out the grievance, the reference and what has happened since tends to be read, because it arrives at a level where somebody is answerable for the Scheme rather than for the transaction.
There is a second time condition and it sits one step further back. Your complaint to the regulated entity itself must have been made before the period of limitation under the Limitation Act, 1963 expired for the underlying cause.
So an old grievance cannot be revived simply by complaining to the bank about it today and then coming here on fresh ninety days. The chain has to be sound at both ends: a complaint to the entity made in time, and a complaint here made within ninety days.
Where this catches people. A charge from four years ago, noticed last month. Complaining to the bank now does not reset anything, because the first condition looks at when the complaint to the entity was made against the underlying limitation period. Old grievances need advice before effort.
Four items, and if you have them the rest of this is administration.
One. Your complaint to the entity, as sent, with the date.
Two. Proof it was received: the ticket, the reference, the stamped copy, the portal screenshot.
Three. The reply, in full, with its date. Or a note recording that none came and when the thirty days expired.
Four. The underlying evidence: the statement line, the charge, the transaction, the letter, whatever shows the thing you are complaining about actually happened.
People arrive with the fourth and none of the first three. The fourth proves the grievance; the first three prove you are entitled to be here at all, and without them the grievance never gets looked at.
Assemble these as you go rather than at the end. The complaint and the acknowledgement exist on the day you complain; the reply exists on the day it arrives. A folder built in real time takes minutes. The same folder reconstructed in month three takes an afternoon and is usually missing the one thing that mattered.
Not when the problem happened. Not when you noticed it. Not when you gave up on the bank. The ninety days runs from a specific event and the whole of this section group exists because people compute it from the wrong one.
It runs from the expiry of the entity timeline, or from the date of the last communication you received from the entity, whichever of those is later.
Get this one point right and most of the risk on this page disappears. Get it wrong and everything else you do is careful work aimed at a date that has already passed.
The reason the misunderstanding is so common is that every other deadline in ordinary life runs from the thing that went wrong. Here it runs from the institution response, or its failure to respond, which is an event most people do not think of as an event at all.
The Scheme uses the later of the two deliberately, and once you see why, the rule stops feeling arbitrary.
If it ran only from the expiry of the thirty days, an entity could reply on day forty-five and eat a fortnight of your window by being late. If it ran only from the last communication, an entity that never replied would leave the window open forever.
Taking the later of the two closes both problems. A late reply gives you a fresh ninety days from that reply; total silence gives you ninety days from the expiry.
So a reply is not bad news for your dates. If the entity writes to you on day sixty with something unsatisfactory, your ninety days runs from that letter rather than from day thirty. The communication that annoys you is also the one that extends your window.
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On paper three months sounds generous. In the life of an actual grievance it is not, and it is worth understanding where it goes.
A fortnight passes before anybody accepts that the bank is not going to deal with it. Another two or three weeks go in one more attempt at the branch, or a call to a helpline, or waiting for a manager to come back from leave. Papers then have to be found, which on a two year old account problem can take a week on its own. Suddenly it is day sixty and nothing has been drafted.
The people who miss this window are almost never careless. They are patient, and the Scheme does not reward patience.
There is also a quieter reason it runs out. A banking grievance is rarely the most important thing happening in somebody life, and it gets attended to in the gaps. Three months of gaps is not three months of work, and the period does not distinguish between the two.
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Because dates are easier to see than to describe.
| Event | Date | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Complaint reaches the bank | 3 March | Starts the thirty days |
| Thirty days expire | 2 April | The gate opens; a candidate start date |
| Bank replies, unsatisfactorily | 22 April | Later than the expiry, so this is the start date |
| Ninety days from 22 April | About 21 July | The outer date to file with the Ombudsman |
Had the bank never replied, the outer date would have run from 2 April instead and fallen about three weeks earlier. That is the whole of the arithmetic, and it is worth doing on paper rather than in your head.
Run your own dates through the same four rows before you do anything else. It takes two minutes with a calendar and it answers the only question that determines whether the rest of the work is worth doing.
The row that does the work is the third one. A reply from the entity, however unhelpful, is later than the expiry of its own timeline, so it becomes the start date and pushes your outer date back. People treat an unsatisfactory reply as a setback; for the arithmetic it is the opposite.
A list of things people believe pause the period, none of which do.
Continuing to correspond with the bank. Being told the matter is under review. A promise that somebody will call back. Escalating internally to a higher officer. Posting about it publicly. Waiting for a statement or a document the bank has not sent. Being unwell, travelling, or otherwise unable to attend to it.
Only one thing genuinely resets the start date, and that is a further communication from the entity, which makes the later of the two dates later. Everything else runs in the background while the period expires.
The hardest of those to accept is internal escalation, because it feels like the responsible thing to do and because the entity frequently encourages it. Escalating is worth doing; it is simply not a substitute for watching the date, and the two should run in parallel rather than one after the other.
Do it once, in writing, the day the thirty days expires. Four lines.
Date the complaint was received by the entity. Date thirty days later, or the longer timeline where one applies. Date of the most recent communication from the entity, updated if another arrives. Outer date, being ninety days from whichever of the second and third is later.
Keep it with the papers rather than in a diary app, because the papers are what somebody will open when the question is asked. The same habit is what keeps any long-running matter usable, and on a file that has run for years that becomes legal file management in its own right.
Recompute it whenever anything arrives from the entity, and keep the superseded version rather than overwriting it. If a question ever arises about which communication you treated as the last one, a sheet showing the computation changing as letters came in is a far better answer than a single figure with no working.
Do not conclude that from your own arithmetic before somebody checks it, because the commonest error runs in your favour and people talk themselves out of a live remedy.
The two mistakes we see are computing from the date of the problem rather than from the entity timeline, and forgetting a later communication that moved the start date forward. A bank email in month four, even a dismissive one, can mean the window is open when you thought it had closed.
Where it truly has gone, say so and move on to what is left. Depending on the grievance that may be a consumer forum, which has its own and generally longer periods, and is consumer complaint or consumer forum case territory. Or it may be a fresh and genuinely different grievance, which starts its own cycle.
A judgment worth stating, because the instinct runs the other way.
A complaint filed in week six with the essential documents beats a beautifully assembled one filed in week thirteen, and it beats by a wide margin one that was still being perfected in week fourteen. The forum can ask you for more. It cannot extend your window.
So the discipline is to get the four core items together, draft plainly, and file. Refinement is available afterwards; the date is not.
There is a second reason for filing early that has nothing to do with the deadline. A complaint lodged while the matter is still live tends to be met with better records on the entity side, because the people who handled it are still there and the file is still open. At month three the institution is reconstructing too.
The trade, stated plainly. A good complaint filed on day forty beats a perfect one filed on day ninety-one, because the second does not exist. Completeness can be added later; the filing date cannot.
Everything in this section group reduces to one page of paper, prepared on the day you complain rather than on the day you worry.
Line one. What I complained about, in one sentence.
Line two. Date the entity received it, and the reference it gave.
Line three. Date its timeline expires.
Line four. Date of the last thing it sent me, updated each time something arrives.
Line five. Outer date to file, recomputed whenever line four changes.
Five lines. It is the cheapest thing on this page and it is the only one that reliably prevents the failure this page is about.
Keep it at the front of the folder, not at the back. The point of it is to be the first thing anybody sees, including you in two months when you have stopped thinking about this daily and need to know in ten seconds whether you are still in time.
Maintainability is decided before anybody looks at the merits, and a complaint that fails here is not a complaint that was considered and rejected. It is one that was never examined.
Four things have to hold. The institution must be one the Scheme covers. You must have complained to it and be able to show it. The timeline must have expired or the reply must have arrived and left you dissatisfied. And the grievance must not be one the Scheme excludes.
The next several sections go through the exclusions, because they are where otherwise sound complaints die and because almost none of them are intuitive.
Work through them in that order too, because they get progressively harder to answer. Whether the institution is covered takes a minute. Whether you can evidence your complaint takes a look in the folder. Whether the grievance is excluded can take a proper conversation, and it is the one worth spending time on.
A grievance that is pending before, or has already been decided by, the Ombudsman, a court, a tribunal or an arbitrator is not entertained here.
Both halves of that catch people. Pending means you cannot run two forums at once hoping one of them moves faster. Decided means you cannot bring the same matter here because you were unhappy with the result somewhere else.
The practical consequence is that forum choice is a decision to be made once, deliberately, at the start. Filing somewhere to see what happens and keeping this in reserve is not a strategy the Scheme permits.
Think before you issue anything. A notice is one thing; a proceeding is another. If you are weighing a legal notice and this forum, understand which steps start a proceeding elsewhere and which do not, because one of them closes this door.
The single largest category of refused complaints, and the hardest for an aggrieved customer to accept.
A decision about whether to lend, how much, at what rate, to whom, whether to continue a relationship, or how to price a product is the entity commercial judgment. The Scheme expressly excludes it. The Ombudsman is not there to tell a bank that it should have given you the loan.
What remains complainable is everything around that decision. Whether you were told. Whether the entity followed the process it publishes. Whether charges were correctly applied. Whether your documents were handled properly. Whether somebody gave you an assurance the entity then ignored.
The reframing that turns a dead complaint into a live one. Stop complaining about the decision and start complaining about the handling. The same facts, aimed at process rather than outcome, frequently fall inside the Scheme when the original formulation did not.
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Several categories are outside it regardless of merit, and they are easy to state.
Disputes between two regulated entities. Disputes between a vendor and a regulated entity, which is a commercial contract matter. Employer and employee disputes, including by staff of the entity. Grievances directed against the management or executives personally rather than against the institution. And anything done by the entity in compliance with an order of a court or of another statutory authority, because the entity complying with an order has not exercised a judgment you can complain about.
If your grievance is in one of those boxes, no amount of drafting moves it out.
The last of those deserves a note, because it is the one people argue with. Where an entity has frozen an account or remitted money under a direction from a court or an authority, the complaint is really with the direction, not with the institution that obeyed it. Complaining here about compliance with a lawful order does not succeed, and the real remedy lies against the order.
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The Scheme also excludes complaints that are abusive, frivolous or vexatious, and this one is within your control in a way the others are not.
Abusive is self-explanatory and it costs people their complaints. A file that calls the manager a thief invites a decision about the tone rather than the charge. Say what happened and what it cost; let the facts carry the indignation.
Vexatious usually means the same grievance recycled repeatedly in different forms. If you have complained four times about substantially the same thing, a fifth version is at risk, and the better course is to take the strongest formulation once.
There is a tone that works and it is not the one most people reach for at month three. Dates, figures, documents, and one sentence saying what you want. A complaint written in that register is read as serious precisely because it is not shouting, and it leaves the facts to do the work.
What we will not draft. Allegations of dishonesty or criminality against named staff on a charge dispute. They convert a complaint about money into an argument about character, and the complainant loses that argument even when the charge was wrong.
The 2026 Scheme provides for rejection at intake on specified non-maintainability grounds, which is an efficiency for the forum and a warning for a complainant.
It means a complaint that plainly fails one of the conditions can be turned away at the front rather than travelling some distance first. You will know sooner, which is genuinely better, but you will also have spent the time and, more importantly, some of the ninety days.
That is the whole argument for checking maintainability before drafting rather than discovering it afterwards. It is half an hour at the start against a lost window at the end.
Rejection at intake is also a reason to be precise in the complaint itself about why it is maintainable. State the entity, state the date of your complaint to it, state what happened to it, and state the date from which you say your window runs. A reader who can see those four at the top has no reason to reject at the front.
If the same grievance is before a court, this forum is closed to it. If a different matter between you and the entity is in court, that does not by itself close the door on an unrelated grievance.
The test is whether it is the same grievance, not whether the same two parties are in dispute somewhere. A customer litigating a property matter with a bank can still complain here about a wrongly levied charge on a savings account.
Where the position is genuinely unclear, that is a question to resolve before filing. Getting it wrong means a rejection, and a rejection consumes time you cannot recover.
One practical consequence for anybody considering litigation. If you are weighing a court route and this one, remember that starting the first closes the second for that grievance. The sequence is not reversible, and the free forum is the one that disappears.
Common and legitimate, and it needs the authority settled before the portal asks for it rather than during the filing.
Adult children complaining for elderly parents, a family member acting for somebody unwell, a partner acting for a firm. In each case somebody other than the account holder is putting their name to a document about another person money, and the forum will want to know on what footing.
Where an authority has to be drawn rather than simply asserted, that is power of attorney drafting, and it should cover this specific purpose rather than being a general document pressed into service.
Settle it early for a second reason as well. Where the account holder is unwell or elderly, the person helping them is often doing so under time pressure already, and discovering at the filing stage that an authority is needed can cost a fortnight out of ninety days.
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The Scheme says it expressly, and it is unusual enough to be worth stating carefully. An advocate cannot act as the authorised representative of a complainant here, unless the advocate is themselves the aggrieved person.
That is a deliberate design choice rather than an oversight. A cost-free, document-based, conciliation-first forum stops being any of those things if it becomes a place where represented parties argue against unrepresented ones.
Two consequences follow for you. You do not need to engage anybody to use this forum, and you should be sceptical of anybody suggesting that engaging them improves your standing in it. And the work that genuinely helps is preparation rather than representation, which is the distinction this whole page rests on.
Why we are telling you something against our own interest. Because the alternative is letting you believe you have bought an advantage you have not. What we sell on this page is a correctly computed date, a clean file and a complaint that reads properly. That is worth money. Access is not, because access is free.
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Three routes, and the first is the one almost everybody should use.
The Reserve Bank complaint management portal at cms.rbi.org.in takes the complaint online and gives you a record of the submission. There is an email route to the Centralised Receipt and Processing Centre. And a physical complaint may be sent or delivered to that centre at Chandigarh.
There is also a contact centre on 14448 for guidance and for checking status. What it cannot do is take your complaint, so a telephone call is not a filing however helpful the conversation is.
Whichever route you use, the filing is the act that stops the clock. Preparing the complaint, printing it, or deciding to file tomorrow does none of that, and an outer date reached with a finished complaint sitting on a desk is the most frustrating way to lose a remedy.
Three routes, one requirement. Online at the Reserve Bank complaint portal, by email to the processing centre, or physically to the centre at Chandigarh. Each of them works. What none of them tolerates is being done after the outer date.
The portal is preferable for a reason that has nothing to do with technology. It produces a dated acknowledgement automatically, which is the thing you will want if any question later arises about when you filed.
Where somebody is not comfortable online, the physical route is real and it works. If you use it, choose a method that leaves you a despatch record, and file that record with everything else. A complaint posted without a record is a complaint whose filing date you cannot establish.
Whatever route you use, save the acknowledgement immediately. Not the confirmation screen you intend to screenshot later. The file, saved, named, in the folder with everything else, on the day. The number of matters that become difficult because nobody kept the submission receipt is remarkable.
If you file online, note the complaint registration number the moment it is generated and put it on the computation sheet. Every subsequent conversation, status check and piece of correspondence will be indexed by that number, and hunting for it later in an email account is a small, avoidable irritation.
Facts, in order, with dates, and one clear request at the end. That is the entire specification and it is harder to follow than it sounds, because a person who has been ignored for two months wants to explain how that felt.
Open with what the entity did or failed to do, and when. Then the complaint you made and its date and reference. Then what came back, or that nothing did. Then what it cost you, in figures where there are figures. Then the single remedy you want.
Leave out the adjectives, the history of your relationship with the bank, and the comparison with how another customer was treated. None of them help and all of them lengthen a document that is read by somebody with a great many to read.
A useful discipline for the last line. Write the remedy as something that can actually be done: reverse the charge of a stated amount, correct the entry, release the document, pay the sum. Avoid asking for the institution to be dealt with, or for an apology, or for a general direction. A remedy somebody can implement is a remedy somebody can award.
Resist the temptation to put everything in. A complaint that runs three separate problems together is harder to decide than three complaints, and the weakest of the three sets the tone for all of them.
Where the matters genuinely are connected — a wrong charge, then a failure to reverse it, then a failure to reply — that is one grievance with three stages and it belongs together. Where they are separate incidents that happen to involve the same bank, they are separate.
If you are unsure which you have, ask whether a single remedy would fix all of it. If yes, one complaint. If you would be asking for two different things, it is two.
Where you genuinely do have two separate matters, file them separately and say in each that the other exists. That is not splitting a case; it is keeping two decisions clean. What you should not do is hold the second back as a reserve, because its own clock is running independently of the first.
Once a complaint is before the Ombudsman, the regulated entity is required to put in its written response within fifteen days.
That is a shorter leash than the entity is used to and it is one of the quieter improvements in the 2026 Scheme. It also changes the character of the process: by the time anybody is considering your grievance, the entity has had to commit itself in writing to a position.
For you that is useful. Their written response is frequently the first time the institution says anything specific, and its specifics are what the rest of the matter is argued against.
It also changes what you should be reading for. When the entity response arrives, the useful question is not whether it is fair but what it commits them to: which facts they accept, which they dispute, and what they say their own records show. Those three are the frame for everything that follows.
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Ahead of any decision, the Ombudsman may work to get you and the entity to an agreed resolution. Participation can be online, which removes the travel objection that used to keep complainants away.
A good proportion of sensible outcomes happen here rather than in an award, and there is no shame in it. A settlement now, on terms you accept, is usually better than a decision later on terms somebody else chose.
Decide your floor before the meeting, not during it. Write down the lowest outcome you would genuinely accept and why. People who go in without that number agree to things in the room that they regret by evening, because the pressure to be reasonable is considerable and entirely one-directional.
Go in having re-read your own complaint, not having prepared arguments. The forum is not adversarial and a conciliation meeting is not a hearing; the person conducting it is trying to find an outcome both sides can live with, and the complainant who is clear, calm and specific about what would resolve it is the one who tends to get it.
The Scheme anticipates an entity that does not engage, and deals with it in two ways that both favour the complainant.
The matter can proceed without the entity where it fails to respond. And an entity has no right of appeal against an award that resulted from its own failure to furnish the information required of it.
So silence, which is a serviceable tactic against an individual customer, is a poor one here. That shift in incentive is part of what makes the forum work at all.
It also means a complainant should not read institutional silence as a sign that the complaint is going nowhere. In this forum, unlike in correspondence with a branch, the other side has an obligation to answer and a real cost attached to ignoring it.
That said, do not count on it. An entity failing to respond is a possibility the Scheme handles, not a strategy you should hope for. What you filed still has to carry the matter by itself, because a decision taken in their absence rests entirely on your side of the paper.
Where the matter is not settled, the Ombudsman decides it. The decision is made on the documents and on whatever the conciliation revealed, and it is reasoned.
Read it properly when it comes, including the parts that went against you, because those are what any appeal would have to address. A decision that grants part of what you asked is a common outcome and is not a loss.
If it goes your way, the practical question becomes implementation and timing, and those are set out in the award itself. Keep it with the file; it is the document that proves what you are owed.
Note the date it reaches you and keep the envelope or the email header. Every remaining period in the Scheme runs from receipt, and receipt is a fact about a day rather than about when you got round to opening it.
Read the reasoning, not just the result. Where part of a claim failed, the award will usually say why, and the reason is almost always evidential rather than legal. That tells you something useful whether or not you appeal.
A distinction that matters mainly when you are wondering whether the entity can appeal.
The Scheme separates awards into categories, and the right of a regulated entity to appeal attaches to one of them and not the other. The practical effect is that certain kinds of direction are, from the entity point of view, final.
This is worth asking about when an award arrives, because it tells you whether you are likely to be facing an appeal or whether the matter is effectively over.
If the distinction is not obvious from the document, ask. It changes what you should expect over the following month and whether it is sensible to treat the matter as concluded, and it is the kind of question the forum exists to answer plainly.
In practical terms, the distinction exists so that directions the forum regards as straightforward implementation are not held up for months by an appeal, while genuinely contestable determinations remain reviewable. For a complainant that mostly means knowing which kind of document is in your hand before you make plans around it.
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This surprises people who remember the old banking ombudsman arrangements, where the amount in dispute was itself limited.
Under this Scheme there is no ceiling on the disputed amount. If a bank wrongly debited eighty lakh rupees, that is not outside the forum by reason of its size.
What is capped is compensation beyond the disputed sum, and that is a different thing from the sum itself. Keeping the two separate in your own mind makes the next two sections much easier to apply.
It is a meaningful change in who the forum is for. A free, document-based route with no limit on the sum in dispute is available to a business with a large payment failure on exactly the same terms as to an individual disputing a charge, and a good many eligible complainants assume, wrongly, that they are too big for it.
Consequential loss is what the failure caused beyond the money directly involved, and compensation for it may be awarded up to thirty lakh rupees, raised from twenty under the 2021 Scheme.
Examples of the kind of thing that falls here: a payment that failed and caused a contract to be lost, a cheque wrongly dishonoured with consequences that followed, a facility stopped without notice at a moment that cost money.
Consequential loss has to be shown rather than asserted, and shown as flowing from what the entity did. That is a higher bar than annoyance, and it is where most large claims under this head are reduced.
Be realistic in what you claim under this head. An inflated consequential loss figure, unsupported by documents, tends to reduce the credibility of the parts of the complaint that were well evidenced. Claim what you can show and say plainly that you are doing so.
Separately, compensation up to three lakh rupees may be awarded for loss of your time, the expenses you incurred, and the harassment and mental anguish you suffered. That ceiling was one lakh under the previous Scheme.
Tripling it is a signal worth reading. It says that being made to chase an institution for months is itself a harm the forum will price, rather than an unfortunate background to the real complaint.
It also means this head is worth taking seriously in the drafting. Record the trips, the calls, the days taken off, the courier costs, the time spent. Not as a grievance, as a schedule.
Keep the record contemporaneously if you can. A schedule compiled from memory at the end reads as an estimate; one built from dated entries as things happened reads as evidence, and the difference in how it is received is considerable.
The difference between a complaint that recovers something and one that is merely upheld usually lies here.
For the disputed amount: the transaction or charge itself, from the statement or record, with the date and figure.
For consequential loss: the chain. What you lost, what it was worth, and why it followed from what the entity did. Each link evidenced, because a missing link collapses the whole head.
For time and harassment: a schedule rather than an adjective. Dates of visits, calls, letters, hours taken, costs paid.
A complainant who hands over those three in order is in a quite different position from one who describes a bad experience at length. Where the underlying documents are scattered about or sit in another language, pulling them together is document verification and legal translation work before it is a complaint.
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An award is not imposed on you silently. There is a step at which you accept it, and that acceptance has consequences, including for the entity right to appeal.
Decide it with a clear head and with the arithmetic done. An award of part of what you claimed, received now and implemented, is frequently worth more than the prospect of a larger figure after an appeal that may take a year and may fail.
If you are inclined to reject it, work out what you would be appealing for and whether the papers support it, before the thirty days starts to run down.
If you need time to think, note the date you received it and work out the deadline before you start thinking. Deciding under a deadline you have not calculated is how people end up either accepting something too quickly or discovering the appeal window has gone while they deliberated.
An appeal lies to the Appellate Authority, who is the Executive Director in charge of the Consumer Education and Protection Department of the Reserve Bank. An appeal lies only against an Award.
Note the limitation in that second sentence. Not every outcome is an award, and where a complaint is closed or rejected on other grounds, the appeal route may not be available for it at all.
This is another place where the exact form of what you received matters more than how it felt. Read the document to see what it is before deciding what to do about it.
It is also worth being clear-eyed about what an appeal is for. It is not a fresh run at the same grievance dressed up more neatly. Where the Ombudsman decided against you because the evidence did not establish something, the appeal has to confront that, and an appeal that simply restates the original grievance tends to go the same way.
A complainant must appeal within thirty days of receiving the Award. The Appellate Authority may allow a further period of up to thirty days where there is sufficient reason.
Treat the extension as a safety net for genuine difficulty, not as part of your planning. It requires a reason, the reason is assessed, and an appeal prepared on the assumption of sixty days that then has no reason to offer is in a poor position.
The habit that makes this easy. The day the award arrives, write the date on it and write the date thirty days later. Two seconds, and it is the same discipline that this entire page has been arguing for. Every period in this Scheme runs from a document that arrived on a day somebody should have written down.
One further point about the extension. Sufficient reason means a reason, stated and capable of being assessed. Illness, absence from the country, or a genuine delay in receiving the award are the kinds of thing that are explicable. Having needed longer to decide is not.
Not freely, which is a deliberate feature. A regulated entity may appeal only with the prior sanction of an officer of the rank of Executive Director or equivalent, within thirty days of receiving your letter of acceptance, with the same extension available for sufficient cause.
It may appeal only against one category of award, and it may not appeal at all where the award resulted from its own failure to furnish the information required of it.
The requirement of senior sanction matters in practice. It means an appeal is a decision taken at a level where somebody weighs whether the institution should be contesting this at all, rather than a reflex at the desk that lost.
Where an entity does appeal and writes to you about it, do not reply in the heat of it. That is correspondence with consequences, and if a formal response is needed it belongs in a considered reply rather than an email sent the same evening. If the underlying matter touches your credit record or a bank clearance, those have their own routes as credit dispute assistance and NOC from bank.
A complaint that reads as a sequence of dated facts rather than as a grievance. The narrative in order, the reference number the bank gave you, what was asked and what came back, and the single thing you want done.
With it, an indexed bundle: your written complaint to the entity, its reply or the proof that none came, the statements or screenshots that show what happened, and anything that fixes a date. Each item numbered and referred to from the narrative, so a reader never has to hunt.
And before any of that, the computation: the date your complaint reached the entity, the date its timeline expired, the date of its last communication, and the outer date for filing. Four dates on one page, because they decide whether the rest is worth preparing.
The standard we hold a draft to. Somebody who has never heard of your matter should be able to read it once and state, without re-reading, what went wrong, when you raised it, what the entity said, and what you want. If any of the four needs a second pass, it goes back.
We work out whether the complaint can be entertained at all, because a file that fails at intake has cost you the preparation and, far more expensively, some of the ninety days.
That means three checks. Whether the entity is one the Scheme covers. Whether you have actually been through its own process and can show it. And whether the window is still open on the computation above.
Where any of the three fails, we say so plainly and tell you what is left instead. On a fair number of enquiries that is the whole of our usefulness, and it is delivered in a day rather than a fortnight.
We would rather lose the instruction at that stage than take it. A complaint we knew would fail at intake, prepared and filed anyway because the client wanted to try, costs them money and the remainder of their window, and it is not a service.
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Four things to begin. A copy of the complaint you made to the bank or the entity, with the date it went. Its reply, or a note saying none came. The reference or ticket number. And a short account, in your own words, of what the underlying problem is.
Add the statements, screenshots or letters that evidence the transaction or the charge in question. Send them as they are rather than sorting them first; sorting is our job and we would rather see the pile than a curated version of it.
Where the papers or the correspondence sit in a different language from the one the file will run in, that is handled as legal translation and is priced separately. Where what the papers actually say has to be tested against what the complaint will assert, that is document verification.
The one thing to send even if it looks bad. The dates. Including the ones that suggest you may be late. A file built on the assumption that time is in hand, and then reworked, costs more than an honest start and reads worse at the other end.
This forum is designed to be used by the person who was wronged, without representation, and the Scheme says so in a way that is unusually direct. An advocate cannot act as your authorised representative here unless the advocate is themselves the aggrieved person.
So the complaint is yours. It goes in your name, the declaration is yours, and if there is a conciliation meeting it is you who attends or authorises somebody permitted to. Nobody argues it for you, because the design of the forum does not contemplate argument.
What that leaves for us is preparation: the computation, the drafting, the bundle, the index. Work that makes your own complaint land properly rather than work that substitutes for you.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it
Named because on complaint work the unhelpful requests are predictable.
Describe a complaint to the entity as having been made on a date it was not. The whole computation runs off these dates and they are provable from the entity own records. We will not adjust one.
Write the complaint in somebody else name. It belongs to the person whose account or transaction it was, and the Scheme is explicit about who may represent whom.
Inflate the loss. A claim for mental anguish bolted onto a dispute about a charge weakens the part that was going to succeed.
Promise an outcome, a figure, or a date. Nobody can, and anybody who does is selling something other than this.
Lodge a complaint we have told you is outside the Scheme, because you would like to try anyway. We will explain why and leave the decision with you, but we will not prepare it.
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Ours is ₹2,500, and the window we hold ourselves to is 2 – 7 days from the day the four starting items reach us. That is the eligibility check, the date computation, the complaint, the bundle and the filing.
The forum itself charges you nothing. There is no filing fee, no stamp, no appearance fee and nothing payable at any stage. That is a deliberate feature of the Scheme rather than a concession, and it is the reason we say the next paragraph out loud.
You can do this yourself. The portal is open to any complainant, the Scheme is written to be used without a representative, and a person with an organised folder and a clear head will often manage perfectly well. What we sell is the organising and the dates, not access. If your matter is straightforward and your papers are in order, keep your money.
Said plainly, because it is the honest thing to say on a free forum. Our fee buys preparation, not entry. Anybody suggesting that a paid intermediary gets a better hearing at a cost-free statutory forum is describing something that does not exist.
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Worth knowing before you build expectations on it, because the disappointments are consistent.
It cannot reverse a commercial decision. A refusal to lend, a limit, a pricing decision or a decision to close a relationship on notice is the entity to make.
It cannot hear a matter that is already somewhere else. If the same grievance is before a court or has been decided, the door is shut here.
It is not a debt forum. A dispute about whether you owe the money, as opposed to how you were treated, generally belongs elsewhere, and restructuring or closing a facility is loan settlement or loan closure work.
It is not the police. Where money has gone in a fraud, the urgent steps are reporting and recovery, which are online financial fraud complaint and UPI and bank fraud recovery, and harassment by a lending app is its own complaint.
It is not an insurance forum. A dispute with an insurer goes to a different ombudsman under a different scheme, and that is ombudsman complaint for insurance.
You will have noticed that this page gives figures where most of our pages refuse them. That is not a change of policy; it is a difference in the source.
Thirty days, ninety days, thirty lakh, three lakh and the appeal periods are in the Scheme itself, published by the Reserve Bank, applying identically to every complainant in the country. There is no State variation and no schedule that differs by office, so a figure printed here is right for everybody reading it.
What we still will not print is anything about your own matter: whether you are in time, what your complaint is worth, or what it will be awarded. Those depend on your dates and your documents, and a confident number against any of them would be invented.
The same logic explains why the fee is here too. The forum charges nothing, that is true for every complainant in the country, and it is a fact worth printing precisely because a reader who does not know it may pay somebody under the impression that they are buying entry.
Send us four lines and we can tell you where you stand. Which bank, lender or payment entity. What went wrong, in one sentence. The date you complained to them. And whether they replied, with the date if they did.
We come back with the outer date for filing, whether the matter looks like one the Scheme covers, and whether this is work worth paying for or something you should simply go and do on the portal this week. More enquiries than you might expect end with that second answer, and saying it on day one is the point of asking.
If you are not sure whether your entity is even covered, send the name anyway. That question takes us a minute and it is the one most likely to make everything else irrelevant, so it is worth asking before you spend an evening gathering papers.
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Send the date you complained and what they said. You will get the outer filing date and a straight answer on whether the Scheme covers it, before anything is charged.
The framework is the Reserve Bank — Integrated Ombudsman Scheme, 2026, notified on 16 January 2026 and in force from 1 July 2026, which replaced the Reserve Bank — Integrated Ombudsman Scheme, 2021. It is made under section 35A of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949, section 45L of the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934, section 18 of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007 and section 11 of the Credit Information Companies (Regulation) Act, 2005. On transition, complaints received before 1 July 2026, appeals arising from decisions under the 2021 Scheme, and the execution of awards made under it continue to be governed by the 2021 Scheme.
On who is covered, the Scheme applies to commercial banks, regional rural banks, state and central co-operative banks, scheduled urban co-operative banks and non-scheduled urban co-operative banks with deposits of fifty crore rupees or more; to non-banking financial companies which accept deposits or which have customer interface with assets of one hundred crore rupees or more, excluding the categories the Scheme lists; to non-bank issuers of prepaid payment instruments; and to credit information companies.
On when a complaint may be brought, the complainant must first have made a complaint to the regulated entity. The Ombudsman may then be approached where no reply has been received within thirty days of the entity receiving the complaint, or within any longer period specified by the Reserve Bank, the National Payments Corporation of India or the card network guidelines where such a longer timeline applies, or where the complainant is dissatisfied with the reply. ★ The complaint to the Ombudsman must be filed within ninety days from the date on which that timeline expires or from the date of the last communication from the regulated entity, whichever is later. The complaint to the regulated entity must itself have been made before the expiry of the period of limitation under the Limitation Act, 1963.
On what is not entertained, the Scheme excludes, among other things, a grievance which is pending before or has been decided by the Ombudsman, a court, tribunal or arbitrator; matters involving the commercial judgment or commercial decision of the regulated entity; disputes between regulated entities, and between a vendor and a regulated entity; employer and employee disputes; grievances against the management or executives of a regulated entity; action taken in compliance with an order of a court or other statutory authority; and complaints that are abusive, frivolous or vexatious. An advocate cannot act as an authorised representative of the complainant unless the advocate is the aggrieved person.
On what may be awarded, there is no ceiling on the disputed amount. The Ombudsman may award compensation for consequential loss up to thirty lakh rupees, and compensation up to three lakh rupees for loss of the complainant time, expenses incurred, and harassment and mental anguish suffered. The corresponding ceilings under the 2021 Scheme were twenty lakh rupees and one lakh rupees.
On appeal, an appeal lies to the Appellate Authority, the Executive Director in charge of the Consumer Education and Protection Department of the Reserve Bank, and only against an Award. A complainant must appeal within thirty days of receipt of the Award, and the Appellate Authority may allow a further period not exceeding thirty days for sufficient reason. A regulated entity may appeal only with the prior sanction of an officer of the rank of Executive Director or equivalent, within thirty days of receipt of the complainant letter of acceptance, with the same extension available.
On filing, a complaint may be made on the portal at cms.rbi.org.in, by email, or in physical form to the Centralised Receipt and Processing Centre, Reserve Bank of India, Central Vista, Sector 17, Chandigarh 160017. The Reserve Bank Contact Centre on 14448 provides guidance and status information; a complaint cannot be lodged over the telephone. There is no fee at any stage.
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