UPI Transactions Hit Record High in May to 1868 Crore

Mumbai: Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions surged 33 per cent to a record high of 1868 crore in May 2025 compared to 1403 crore in the year ago period. The transaction value hit Rs 25.14 lakh crore, a rise of 23 per cent year on year in the reporting month compared to Rs 20.44 lakh crore in May 2024 according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). NPCI is an umbrella body for operating retail payments and settlements in India.

On a quarter-on-quarter basis, the volume rose 4 per cent from April’s 1789 crore while the value rose 5 per cent from Rs 23.95 lakh crore. The average daily transaction volume increased to 60.2 crore in May 2025 from 59.6 crore in April 2025 and the average daily transaction amount was up at 81,106 crore from 79,831 crore in April.

Meanwhile with the UPI ecosystem suffering from four outages from March to May 2025, in a recent circular, the NPCI has directed all banks and PSPs (Payment Service Providers) to moderate and regulate the use of 10 significant, most-used APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), or requests initiated by customers and other stakeholders on the UPI network, by July 31, 2025. These include raising requests for balance inquiry, autopay mandate execution, checking transaction status, and more. This means that UPI users will only be able to undertake these transactions a specific number of times during the day. According to the circular, all non-customer-initiated APIs must be restricted during peak hours, that is 10 AM to 1 PM and 5 PM to 9:30 PM during the day. Out of the 10 APIs on which restrictions have been placed, 9 are non-financial in nature, while only 1 (autopay mandate) is financial. The balance enquiry API, through which UPI users can initiate a request for checking their account balance, has been restricted to 50 per app per customer per day from July 31. However, UPI apps can limit or stop the balance enquiry requests to reduce load during peak hours.

Failure to meet these directions could result in API restrictions, penalties, suspension of new customer onboarding, or other measures deemed appropriate by NPCI for PSPs and banks, the circular further added. Additionally, all PSPs will have to submit an undertaking to NPCI by August 31, 2025, stating that all system-initiated APIs must be “queued and rate-limited.”

In value terms, total digital payments surged 17.97 per cent to Rs 2,862 lakh crore. The RBI also said it remains committed to extending UPI to 20 countries by 2028–29.