How to find your IFSC code, with or without a cheque book

In rough order of reliability:

1. Your passbook or account statement

This is the one most people forget, and it is backed by an RBI instruction. Circular RBI/2011-12/516 of 20 April 2012, titled Printing of MICR Code and IFSC Code on Passbook / Statement of Account, tells banks to put both codes where customers can find them:

Banks are accordingly advised to take necessary steps to provide this information as indicated above in all passbook / statement of account to their account holders.

RBI/2011-12/516, DPSS (CO) RTGS No. 1934/04.04.002/2011-12

On most passbooks it is on the front sheet with your account number. On statements it is usually in the header block. This is your own bank telling you your own code, which makes it the best source there is.

2. Net banking or your bank's app

Look under account details or account summary. Same reasoning as the passbook: it comes from your bank's core system, so it is current by definition. If your branch has been renumbered after a merger, this is the first place the new code will appear.

3. A cheque leaf — with one caveat about what the RBI actually said

On a standard Indian cheque, the IFSC is printed in the top-left block, under the bank name and branch address. The MICR code is the nine-digit number in the band along the bottom.

Here is the caveat, and we think it is worth knowing. Many pages state that the RBI mandates the IFSC in the top-left of a cheque under the CTS-2010 standard, which the RBI published as an annexure to circular DPSS.CO.CHD.No.1832/04.07.05/2009-2010 of 22 February 2010. We read it. The word "IFSC" does not appear in its text at all — not in the mandatory features, not in the desirable features, not in the implementation section. It appears only as a label inside the sample layout drawing.

What the standard does say, in its mandatory section, is that "placement of significant fields on the cheque forms shall be mandated" — so placement is mandated in general terms, and the sample layout shows where. What it does not do is name the IFSC in words. Practically this changes nothing: look at the top-left of your cheque and you will find it. It is worth knowing only because a page that tells you the RBI mandates the IFSC by name is describing a document it has not opened.

4. The RBI's own IFSC search

The RBI runs a lookup at rbi.org.in/Scripts/IFSCMICRDetails.aspx, with separate tabs for IFSC and MICR. We checked it on 4 September 2026 and it works. It is bank-name plus branch-name search rather than a free-text box, so you need to know roughly what your branch is called.

One practical warning: a great many pages link to a different RBI URL for this, of the form website.rbi.org.in/web/rbi/ifscdetails. That address now redirects to the RBI homepage. If a site sends you there and you end up on the RBI's front page wondering what happened, the site's link is stale, not you.

5. The RBI's full branch list, as a spreadsheet

Fewer people know this exists. The RBI publishes the entire branch list itself, from its NEFT page, as a single file: List of NEFT enabled bank branches (Consolidated Indian Financial System Code). It is the master file. Every IFSC lookup site in India, this one included, is downstream of it.

There is a second one too, on the RTGS side — a list of RTGS-enabled branches. The two do not contain exactly the same number of branches, which is a small curiosity worth knowing if you ever compare them.

If you are comfortable with a spreadsheet, this is the most authoritative answer available to a member of the public. If you are not, use the search box on this site: we are built from the same file and we say which release we are showing.

6. Calling the branch

Fine as a last resort, with one warning. Do not get the number from a search result. We do not publish branch phone numbers on this site precisely because the numbers in the official file are frequently stale or belong to a shared call centre, and the RBI's own fraud-awareness material warns about customer-care numbers found through search. Use the number printed on your passbook, or your bank's official branch locator.

Why so many bank links are broken right now

If you have been clicking bank links and hitting 404 pages, there is a reason. In April 2025 the RBI ordered every bank to move its website to the exclusive .bank.in domain:

All banks are advised to commence the migration of their existing domains to the '.bank.in' domain and complete the process at the earliest and in any case, not later than October 31, 2025.

RBI/2025-26/28, CO.DIT.DCD.No.S81/01-71-110/2025-26, 22 April 2025

The migration was a security measure and a good one, but a lot of older pages did not survive it. We checked several merger-era IFSC notices on 4 September 2026: Canara Bank's page about former Syndicate Bank codes now returns 404, and Union Bank's amalgamation microsite returns a server error. Where a bank's own notice has gone, an Internet Archive copy is often the only remaining record.

If the code you find does not work

Two possibilities worth checking in this order:

1. The code is from a bank that has merged. If your cheque book predates 2021 and your bank was one of those amalgamated, the code has almost certainly been withdrawn. The dates for every merged bank are here, and you can check a specific code against 135 releases of the branch list going back to February 2016.
2. It is a transcription error. The two characters people get wrong are the letter O versus the digit 0, and the letter I versus the digit 1. Remember that the fifth character is always a zero — that one, at least, is never a letter.