New milestone: UPI daily transactions cross 800-million mark on March 2; February volumes up 27%

UPI hits 800 million a day in March

• UPI saw 20 percent value and 27 percent volume growth in February
• UPI transactions surpassed 800 million daily in March
• UPI growth rate slows with more users and reduced subsidies

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The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) sustained robust momentum in February, clocking a 20 percent year-on-year surge in transaction value and 27 percent jump in volume.

The growth accelerated in March, with daily transaction volumes crossing the 800 million mark for the first time on March 2, also recording highest-single-day value of Rs 1.31 lakh crore, data available with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which runs UPI, shows.

In February, the daily average transaction volume stood at 728 million, compared with 575 million in the year-ago period.

On February 2, UPI recorded 772 million transactions worth Rs 1.25 lakh crore and the number zoomed to new highs in March.

The second and third days of the month are usually the busiest for UPI due to salary disbursements and spending spurred by salary payments and bill payments.

In fact, February saw more than 700 million transactions every day, barring four. The country’s most popular payment system crossed 700 million for the first time in August. The platform has been seeing daily transaction value of more than Rs 1 lakh for 12-15 days a month.

In terms of value, the daily average stood at Rs 96,000 crore, possibly setting the course for Rs 1 lakh crore worth of daily transactions in March.

Limits to growth

While the growth of 27 percent remains high for a platform with 21 billion monthly transactions, the year-on-year growth last year stood at 38 percent, indicating a slowdown.

In 2025, the platform saw a 5-7 percent month-on-month growth and around 35 percent annual growth. Over the last few months, the growth has slowed to 4 percent MoM and around 26 percent annually growth.

“As UPI reaches more people, the disposable income and consumption patterns are going to be on a much lower scale than we saw during the platform’s early growth curve driven by high-earning urban consumers. The expansion to more users faster could achieve better growth but the cashbacks and other incentives are lower to spur that kind of growth,” said a senior banker, who works in the digital division, on condition of anonymity.

Lower subsidies

The Centre has set a target of one billion (100 crore or 1,000 million) transactions a day for UPI, which the platform is on course to achieve it later this year at the rate.

On February 1, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman allocated Rs 2,000 crore as incentive expenditure for UPI and RuPay debit cards. The industry expectation was around Rs 4,500 crore, based on the previous highest subsidy the government had allocated for digital payments.

Digital transactions carry what is called a merchant discount rate (MDR), a fee that banks collect from merchants at the point of sale for facilitating digital payments. UPI MDR was 30 basis points before the government waived it in 2020. One basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point.