New rules of UPI will be implemented from August 1, NPCI issued circular
New UPI Rules: National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has asked banks and payment service providers (PSPs) to set limits on certain APIs on the UPI network to reduce the pressure on the system. There will be many changes in the UPI ecosystem from August 1, 2025. UPI apps will have to have the ability to limit balance inquiry requests during peak hours. NPCI has also issued new rules for autopay mandate.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) issued a fresh circular, requesting banks and payment system providers (PSPs) to put a cap on the 10 most popular APIs (application programming interfaces) used across the UPI network and ensure proper usage.
These APIs such as balance inquiry, auto-mandate completion, checking the transaction status etc. are maintained by the NPCI as such repeated requests put a lot of pressure on the UPI network and there are chances of the system crashing.
This implies that there will be numerous changes in the UPI ecosystem from August 1, 2025. The new rules are timely since there have been reports of multiple UPI outages since March this year.
The policy prescribes that the applications for UPI must be enabled with a feature to curtail or block balance inquiry requests in order to de-congest during peak usage periods. The limit for balance inquiries by a customer per app per 24 hours is 50 as prescribed by NPCI. The balance inquiry requests must be made by the customer only.
Under the API Usage Guidelines, NPCI has directed banks to provide information about the balance available in the user's account after every financial transaction.
With regard to AutoPay mandate execution, NPCI has directed the originating PSPs to initiate UPI AutoPay execution at moderated Transactions per Second (TPS), and it must be initiated during non-peak hours. NPCI has allowed a maximum of 1 attempt and 3 retries per AutoPay mandate.
This move by NPCI is aimed at making the UPI system more reliable and stable. Recently, network issues have been observed due to heavy traffic and high number of requests.
The circular states, “PSP banks and/or acquiring banks shall ensure that all API requests (in terms of velocity and TPS — Transactions per Second limits) sent to UPI are monitored and moderated in terms of appropriate usage (customer-initiated and PSP system-initiated).”
Non-compliance with the directions may result in API bans, penalties, suspension of new customer onboarding or other measures as deemed appropriate by NPCI for PSPs and banks, the circular added. Further, PSPs have been asked to submit an undertaking to NPCI by August 31, 2025, stating that all system-initiated APIs should be 'queued and rate-limited'.
All non-customer-initiated APIs will have to be restricted during peak hours, the circular said. Peak hours have been defined as 10 am to 1 pm and 5 pm to 9:30 pm during the day.
