What written off on your CIBIL report actually means.

The meaning

What the words actually say.

Written off (bank booked it as a loss) means your lender gave up waiting. After dues stayed unpaid long enough, usually well past the 90-day NPA mark, the lender booked the loan as a loss in its own accounts and stopped treating it as a performing asset. Two things follow that most people miss. First, the debt does not disappear: the lender, or a recovery company it sells the account to, can still legally pursue the money. Second, the words on your report are an accounting statement by the lender, not a punishment by the bureau, which is why only the lender can change them. For the one-line version, and the other words printed beside it on the same page, see written off in the glossary. Before you pay a lender to close a written-off account, check which of its two numbers you are being quoted — the foreclosure amount or the Total Loan Value — because closing the account and clearing the label are not the same step, and the bank may ask for the larger one before the label goes.

To every future lender, written off reads as the strongest routine red flag a report carries: this borrower's last lender lost money. Loan and card applications are commonly rejected on this mark alone, whatever the score number says.

Written off vs settled

Worse, better, or just different?

Both say the lender lost money, and both suppress approvals, but they say it differently. Settled means you and the lender agreed on a payoff smaller than the dues, and you paid it. Written off means the lender booked the loss without any such resolution, which most lenders read as one step worse. The combinations exist too: post write-off settled (a partial settlement after write-off) and, the one you actually want, post write-off closed, full repayment after write-off, code 13, the repair destination. The full code table is in our status codes guide.

The two honest paths

Wrong write-off, or real one.

If the write-off is wrong, you repaid but the lender never updated, the last instalment went unreported, the account was closed with an NOC (the bank's letter confirming closure) in your hand, that is a correction case: documents to the lender first, then the bureaus, escalated if ignored, exactly as the dispute guide lays out. We publish cases of both kinds: fully repaid gold loans still showing written off, corrected with the NOCs as evidence, 737 to 790, and a closed HDB loan reported written off years later, corrected after the client's own CIBIL dispute had failed.

If the write-off is real, the dues genuinely stand, the honest path is narrower: pay the full outstanding, collect the closure letter, and have the lender re-report the account as Post Write-Off Closed (written off once, later paid). A discounted settlement does not clean the mark, it converts one negative into another. The service-side detail, including what we can and cannot do for you, is on the written-off correction page.

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