Starting from January 1, 2023, the quarterly IRCC (Consumer Credit Reference Index) will increase strongly, and with it the rates of hundreds of thousands of Romanians who have bank loans whose rate is calculated according to the evolution of this index, according to RomaniaJournal.ro.
The quarterly IRCC will increase to 5.71% per annum, according to the NBR announcement of December 30, 2022. This is the calculated average value for the third quarter of 2022, which is to apply from January 1, 2023. It is increasing by 40% compared to the average value from the second quarter of last year (current), used to calculate rates until December 31. IRCC is currently 4.06% p.a.
According to Economica.net, approximately 450,000 Romanians have loans with the IRCC reference index.
The IRCC index is of two kinds, daily and quarterly. The daily IRCC is calculated by the NBR every day and represents the weighted average (with transaction volumes) of the interest rates of transactions on the interbank money market. On a day-to-day basis, IRCC has also seen gains in recent months.
Thus, in the fourth quarter of 2022, the daily IRCC had a minimum value of 5.32% (October 18) and a maximum value of 7.06% (October 24). The quarterly IRCC, the one used for consumer loans taken out after May 2019, is established as the arithmetic average of the daily IRCC values communicated for the previous quarter (all working days in the quarter are taken into account), to be applied by each credit institution for next quarter. The new value is published by the BNR on the last working day of the quarter.
