SRINAGAR: The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) completes a decade on August 25, with its annual transaction volume surging nearly 13,000-fold to more than 24,162 crore transactions in 2025-26 from 1.78 crore in its first year, cementing its position as the backbone of India’s digital payments ecosystem and the world’s largest real-time payment system by transaction volume, PIB sad in a statement.
Launched on August 25, 2016 by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) under the regulatory oversight of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), UPI has transformed how individuals, businesses and merchants make and receive payments, while emerging as a major pillar of India’s digital public infrastructure.
The scale of the expansion is reflected not only in transaction volumes but also in value. Annual transaction value rose from Rs 0.07 lakh crore in 2016-17 to around Rs 314 lakh crore in 2025-26, an increase of more than 4,000 times.
UPI recorded a 30 per cent year-on-year increase in transaction volume in 2025-26, while transaction value grew 21 per cent. The platform now accounts for 84 per cent of India’s digital payment transactions.
The growth has accelerated sharply in 2026. Monthly UPI transactions crossed 2,300 crore for the first time in May, reaching 2,320 crore. The momentum continued in July, when the platform processed a record 2,366 crore transactions, with a total value of Rs 29.88 lakh crore.
UPI is now processing an average of about 66 crore transactions every day.
The International Monetary Fund has recognised UPI as the world’s largest real-time payment system by transaction volume. In 2025, UPI accounted for nearly 49 per cent of global real-time payment transaction volume, highlighting the scale at which India’s digital payments infrastructure has expanded.
UPI’s institutional ecosystem has expanded dramatically since its launch. Only 21 banks were associated with the platform at its launch in April 2016. By 2025-26, the number had risen to 703, and 741 banks were live on UPI as of July 2026.
The participating institutions include public sector and private banks, small finance banks, payment banks and cooperative banks. Banks operate as remitter payment service providers, beneficiary payment service providers, or both, while NPCI monitors performance across the participating ecosystem.
The expansion of participating banks has helped UPI achieve extensive geographic coverage and made real-time digital payments accessible to a much wider section of the population.
The platform’s first month, August 2016, saw only about 90,000 transactions. A decade later, monthly transactions are measured in thousands of crores.
The data also underline the extent to which UPI has become embedded in everyday commerce.
Person-to-merchant (P2M) payments account for 63 per cent of total UPI transaction volume, reflecting the widespread use of the platform for frequent, relatively small retail payments. Person-to-person (P2P) payments, meanwhile, account for 71 per cent of transaction value, indicating their greater role in larger-value transfers between individuals.
The ticket-size distribution further illustrates UPI’s role in routine transactions. About 86 per cent of P2M transactions in 2025-26 were below Rs 500, showing how extensively UPI is being used for everyday purchases and micro-payments.
P2P payments also remain heavily concentrated in the lower-value segment, with 59 per cent of transactions below Rs 500. However, 41 per cent were above Rs 500, demonstrating the platform’s growing versatility beyond small-value retail payments.
The divergence between transaction volume and value reflects UPI’s dual role: a mass-market mechanism for high-frequency retail payments and an increasingly important channel for personal fund transfers.
What began as a domestic payment innovation has increasingly become an instrument of India’s digital diplomacy and cross-border payments strategy.
UPI is currently operational in 11 countries: the United Arab Emirates, France, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Singapore, Mauritius, Qatar, Cambodia, Greece and the Maldives.
Its international expansion has positioned UPI as a potential model for interoperable, real-time payment infrastructure and has extended India’s digital public infrastructure beyond its domestic market.
The system’s core strength lies in its interoperability. It allows users to make real-time peer-to-peer and peer-to-merchant payments through participating applications, removing the need for separate payment arrangements between individual banks and merchants.
Over its first decade, UPI has evolved from a new payment mechanism into critical infrastructure underpinning India’s rapidly expanding digital economy.
Its growth has coincided with greater access to smartphones, bank accounts and digital financial services, allowing payments to move increasingly from cash-based transactions to instant electronic transfers.
The platform has also helped bring small merchants and consumers into the formal digital economy, while its interoperability has allowed users to transact across participating banks and applications.
The government has described UPI as a key component of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure and has emphasised continued policy and technological support to bring more users and merchants into the ecosystem.
With transaction volumes already exceeding 2,300 crore a month and the system operating across 11 countries, the next phase of UPI’s development is expected to focus on further innovation, internationalisation, financial inclusion and expansion of digital payment capabilities.
Ten years after its launch, UPI has moved far beyond its original role as a new payment interface. It has become one of the central pieces of India’s digital economy—and one of the country’s most prominent technology platforms on the global payments stage.
