Every year in India, millions of couples are told they need IVF. Most of them do not go ahead with it. The average cost of a treatment cycle sits at around Rs 1.2 lakh. The average monthly salary of an Indian sits at around Rs 50,000. The arithmetic is not complicated. For a large share of couples who leave a fertility clinic having understood their diagnosis and their options, the conversation ends not with a decision about treatment, but with a decision about money.

Sixty percent of patients in India delay medical treatment. Ninety-three percent of those delays happen because of a lack of liquidity, not a lack of intent. For IVF specifically, 57 percent of couples who walk out after an initial consultation without booking a cycle cite high cost and the absence of financing options as the primary reason. That is not a fringe statistic. It is the majority of patients the fertility sector is losing.

India currently performs around 3 lakh IVF cycles a year. The estimated need is closer to 20 lakh. That gap, 6.7 times the current volume, is not primarily a clinical failure. It is a financial one.

Three Barriers, Not One

The conversation around IVF access tends to collapse into a single variable: cost. That framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The data points to three distinct barriers operating simultaneously, and solving only one of them does not move the needle on the other two.

The first is awareness. A significant number of couples who could benefit from fertility treatment have limited understanding of what the treatment involves, how success rates work, what a cycle looks like in practice, and what the realistic range of outcomes is. Without that foundation, a financing offer lands on ground that is not ready to receive it.

The second is affordability. High upfront cost combined with limited awareness of financing options is what the data consistently identifies as the primary deterrent. This is where flexible payment infrastructure, particularly zero-cost EMI over three to twelve months, changes what is practically possible for middle-income couples. Fifty-two percent of fertility doctors surveyed said that no-cost EMI is the single most effective lever for unlocking patient access.

The third is fear. Thirteen percent of couples who do not proceed cite fear of treatment failure as their primary reason. This is not irrational. IVF is emotionally demanding, physically intensive, and the success rate for a single cycle, while improving, is not certain. When a couple is being asked to spend a significant share of their annual income on a procedure whose outcome is not guaranteed, the financial risk compounds the emotional one. A refund protection option, which covers the cost of a repeat cycle if the first one fails, directly addresses this third barrier. Twenty-seven percent of doctors in the same survey identified refund guarantees as a significant driver of patient uptake.

What Financing Alone Cannot Do

A couple who does not understand their diagnosis well enough to feel confident about proceeding will not be converted by an EMI offer, however attractive the terms. A couple paralysed by the fear of spending Rs 1.2 lakh and ending up without a successful outcome needs a different kind of reassurance than a lower monthly payment.

This is the argument for thinking about IVF support as a structured package rather than a financing product. The financial component matters enormously, and fixing the payment barrier is the single highest-leverage intervention for most patients. But the awareness barrier and the fear barrier need their own responses, and those responses are not financial.

Counselling support, clear communication about what the treatment process involves, honest context around success rates at different ages and diagnoses, and some form of financial protection against cycle failure are all part of what makes the journey navigable for a couple who would otherwise stop at the cost conversation.

The Clinic’s Perspective

The case study from a partner fertility clinic in Gurugram makes the operational logic concrete. Before structured financing was introduced, the clinic experienced high drop-offs at the payment stage. IVF decisions were being delayed specifically because of upfront cost. The clinic had strong clinical capability but constrained revenue. After introducing no-cost EMI at the counselling and payment stage, with no change to pricing or clinical protocols, the IVF conversion rate increased by 38 percent at the payment step and clinic revenue grew by 42 percent. Monthly treatment starts increased. Affordability-related drop-offs reduced noticeably.

The clinic did not acquire new patients to achieve those numbers. It converted the patients it was already seeing but losing at the payment counter.

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The Underlying Point

India’s fertility care gap is large enough to represent one of the most consequential unmet health needs in the country. The clinical infrastructure to serve it is growing. The diagnostic awareness is improving. What has not kept pace is the financial and emotional support infrastructure that allows a couple who wants to pursue IVF to actually go ahead with it.

Financing is the most important piece of that infrastructure. It is not the only one. The couples sitting across from a fertility doctor, having been told what they need, deserve a pathway that addresses all three of the barriers standing between them and treatment, not just the one that can be expressed in rupees.

Views expressed by: Gaurav Gupta, Co-Founder & CEO, CarePay

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of any organisation. The content is intended for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice.

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