UPI major rules change from August 1: Know how might effect you

UPI major rules change: Major changes are indeed coming to Unified Payments Interface (UPI) rules, effective August 1, 2025. UPI major rules change from August 1: Know how might effect you.

These new regulations, introduced by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), aim to enhance the stability, speed, and reliability of the UPI system, particularly by reducing the load from non-financial API calls that have contributed to outages in the past.

Key changes and how they might affect you:

Daily Limits on Balance Enquiries:

You will be limited to 50 balance checks per UPI app per day. For instance, if you use both PhonePe and Google Pay, you can check your balance 50 times on each app. This is intended to curb excessive and unnecessary requests that strain the UPI network.

To compensate, banks will be required to send your available balance with every successful transaction notification, reducing the need for separate balance checks.

AutoPay Mandates Limited to Non-Peak Hours:

Recurring payments set up through UPI AutoPay (for things like SIPs, Netflix subscriptions, loan EMIs, etc.) will only be processed during non-peak hours. Peak hours are defined as: 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM and 5:00 PM – 9:30 PM.

While you can still create AutoPay mandates during peak hours, their execution will occur when the system load is lower. Each mandate will have 1 attempt with up to 3 retries. This change aims to spread out the transaction load and prevent network congestion during busy periods.

Transaction Status Checks Get Rate-Limited:

If a transaction is stuck or delayed, banks and apps will now have to wait at least 90 seconds before checking its status. You will be allowed a maximum of 3 status checks within a two-hour window per transaction.

For certain failure codes, further checks will be blocked, and the transaction will be marked as failed to avoid overloading the system with redundant requests.

Account Linking Restrictions:

Queries to see which bank accounts are linked to your mobile number will be limited to 25 per app per day. Each attempt will also require explicit user consent after selecting the issuing bank.

Increased Compliance and Monitoring:

NPCI is requiring Payment Service Providers (PSPs) and banks to submit proof by August 31, 2025, that they are properly queuing and throttling API calls. Non-compliance could lead to penalties, onboarding bans, or other actions.

Acquiring banks must also undergo an annual audit by CERT-In empanelled auditors, with the first audit due by August 31, 2025.

Why these changes?

UPI has seen explosive growth, processing billions of transactions monthly. Recent outages, particularly in April and May 2025, highlighted the need for system-level improvements. NPCI has identified that a significant portion of the system load comes from non-financial API calls, such as frequent balance checks and repeated transaction status inquiries.

These new rules are a proactive step to manage this load, prevent future outages, and ensure a smoother and more reliable experience for all UPI users.

While these changes may require users to adjust some habits, the overall goal is to maintain UPI as a fast, secure, and stable digital payments ecosystem for India’s rapidly growing digital economy. It’s advisable for users to stay informed and update their apps accordingly before August 1.

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