UPI Completes 10 Years: From 90,000 Transactions to 24,162 Crore in FY 2025-26
UPI, the backbone of India's digital payments, has completed 10 years of its remarkable journey. Learn how this network, which started with just 44 banks, has grown to 741 banks today, and how it has made India proud on the global stage by achieving a 49% share of the world's total real-time payments. Read on for the full story.
Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which forms the bedrock of India's digital payments revolution, has reached the milestone of completing 10 years of its journey. UPI, which was introduced on August 25, 2016, by NPCI under the supervision of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), has created history in terms of digital financial inclusion all across India. As per the Ministry of Finance, UPI has become the largest real-time payment system in the world with its unprecedented growth in terms of both transaction volume and value.
UPI was introduced on August 25, 2016. In the initial phase of April 2016, UPI was operational only for 21 banks. In the initial months, in August 2016, only 90,000 transactions took place. The number of banks that were live for UPI was 44 in FY 2016-17, and it has gone up to 703 in FY 2025-26 and 741 in July 2026. Currently, it has reached even those remote corners of the country and connected all public, private, small finance, payments, and cooperative banks.
The transaction volume of UPI has grown by 13,000 times in the past ten years. The transaction volume in FY 2016-17 was 17.8 million, whereas, in FY 2025-26, it has touched 24,162 crore, resulting in a CAGR of 188%. Similarly, the transaction value is expected to grow almost 4,000 times from ₹0.07 lakh crore in FY 2016-17 to ₹314 lakh crore in FY 2025-26, growing at CAGR of 155%. An average of 66 crore transactions would take place daily in 2026, and 2,366 crore transactions worth ₹29.88 lakh crore have been recorded in July 2026.
