An emergency fund target tells you what to build. A runway tells you what you have: how many months your savings would cover if income stopped today.
The formula is simple. Monthly burn is essential expenses plus EMIs, and runway is liquid savings divided by that burn. EMIs belong in the burn because loan payments do not pause when a job does. Many people leave them out and overestimate their runway.
Example: ₹4,00,000 in liquid savings, ₹45,000 of essential expenses and ₹22,000 of EMIs. The burn is ₹67,000, so the runway is 6.0 months. If you could cut 20% of the expenses under pressure, the burn drops to ₹58,000 and the runway stretches to 6.9 months.
Count only money you can reach quickly: bank balances, liquid funds and deposits you can break. Equity can be down in exactly the month you need it.
The emergency fund runway calculator does this with your own numbers.