UPI Carried 24.07 Billion Payments in September 2026, Roughly Three Times Brazil's Pix, and Merchants Start Paying a Fee on 15 October

UPI carried 24.07 billion payments in September 2026, worth 29.37 lakh crore rupees (29.37 trillion), according to National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) data that Business Today reported on 1 October. That is 23 per cent more payments and 18 per cent more value than a year earlier, and an average of 802 million payments a day, the first time the daily average has passed 800 million.

Most of the other fast payment systems in this piece are far smaller by count. The US Federal Reserve’s FedNow service settled 4,997,811 payments in the whole of April to June 2026. At September’s daily average, UPI processes that many in about nine minutes (our division). How UPI was built, and the identity system under it, are covered in tuput’s pieces on the payment rail and Aadhaar.

Which system is busiest depends on what you count

The finance ministry told the Lok Sabha on 8 December 2025 that, in a table from ACI Worldwide’s Prime Time for Real-Time report for 2024, UPI had 129.3 billion transactions, 49 per cent of the 266.2 billion counted worldwide. Brazil’s Pix came second with 37.4 billion (14 per cent), then Thailand with 20.4 billion, China with 17.2 billion and South Korea with 9.1 billion. The same reply said the International Monetary Fund’s June 2025 note called UPI the world’s largest retail fast payment system by volume.

Two limits apply to that table. It undercounts at least one operator: the Banco Central do Brasil’s own report says Pix grew 25.7 per cent in 2025 to nearly 80 billion transactions, which implies about 63 billion in 2024, well above the 37.4 billion in the ACI table. And it leaves out most of China. The People’s Bank of China (PBoC) reported that licensed non-bank payment institutions handled 338.02 billion network payments, worth 85.28 trillion yuan, in the third quarter of 2025 alone. That is about 3.7 billion a day (our division over the quarter’s 92 days). The figure includes wallet payments and transfers, and the PBoC publishes it as one pooled number, not by company. The BIS names Alipay and WeChat Pay as the Chinese examples of such wallets.

Counted per adult, the order changes again. The World Bank’s November 2025 report on fast payments in Latin America and the Caribbean gave 167 fast payments per adult in India in 2024 and 372 in Brazil. It said that, on the data available, only Thailand, at 399, was above Brazil.

Pix, five years in

The Banco Central do Brasil launched Pix in November 2020, and the BIS describes it as developed and operated by the central bank. The bank’s management report for 2023 to 2025 gives these 2025 figures:

• nearly 80 billion transactions, up 25.7 per cent on 2024
• more than R$35 trillion in value, up 33.8 per cent
• 7.8 billion transactions and R$3.7 trillion in December alone
• a daily record of 313,339,328 transactions on 5 December 2025
• 148 million individual users, about 86 per cent of Brazil’s adults

For August 2026, Agência Brasil, the state news agency, reported more than R$3.73 trillion and about 8.11 billion transactions. NPCI’s own FAQ of 15 September puts UPI at 2,451 crore (24.51 billion) transactions in the same month, which is 3.0 times Pix by count.

The euro area, the UK and the US

In the euro area, the European Central Bank (ECB) reported that instant credit transfers were 25 per cent of the number and 8 per cent of the value of credit transfers processed by euro area retail payment systems in the second half of 2025. Regulation (EU) 2024/886 required payment providers in euro countries to offer sending of instant euro payments by 9 October 2025. It also requires the money to reach the payee within 10 seconds and bars charges for instant transfers above those for corresponding ordinary ones. For scale, the ECB counted 83.5 billion non-cash payments of every kind, cards included, across the euro area in that half-year, about 13.9 billion a month (our division). UPI alone did 24.07 billion in September.

Pay.UK’s annual statistics show Faster Payments at 5.55 billion payments in 2025, up 9.0 per cent, worth 4.84 trillion pounds, up 14.0 per cent. One month of UPI is more than four times the UK’s whole year (our division).

In the United States, FedNow’s 4,997,811 payments in Q2 2026 were worth $274.66 billion, an average of $54,957 each. The service settled 2,130,889 in Q2 2025. The Clearing House said its RTP network, which it describes as processing over 98 per cent of US bank-to-bank instant payments, set a one-day record of 2.27 million transactions worth $8.62 billion on 1 May 2026. The record day averaged about $3,800 a payment (our division). UPI’s average September payment was about 1,220 rupees (our division of value by count).

UPI in eleven other countries

The finance ministry’s 24 August 2026 release says UPI operates in 11 countries: the United Arab Emirates, France, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Singapore, Mauritius, Qatar, Cambodia, Greece and the Maldives. NPCI’s 15 September FAQ also says 11. Pix is domestic only. The Banco Central do Brasil’s report says foreign providers in Chile, Argentina, the United States, Portugal and France can accept Pix QR codes through partners, with the money then sent abroad by ordinary channels.

The outage record

UPI had a run of disruptions in March, April and May 2025. Writing for the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) on 21 June 2025, Tanusha Tyagi called the outage of 12 April the longest in recent memory. NPCI attributed that one to a surge in transaction-status check requests, she wrote, and has not disclosed the causes of the others. She also noted that volume fell from 18.3 billion in March 2025 to 17.89 billion in April and attributed the dip to the outages. NPCI’s public uptime dashboard had not been updated past March 2025 when she wrote.

The sources used here include no comparable official outage count for Pix, SEPA Instant, FedNow, RTP or Faster Payments, so no ranking on reliability is offered.

What changes on 15 October

On 15 September 2026 the finance ministry and NPCI set a merchant discount rate (MDR, the fee a seller pays to accept a payment) on part of UPI. From 15 October, person-to-merchant payments above 2,000 rupees carry 0.4 per cent, capped at 300 rupees for payments of 75,000 rupees and above. Railways, telecom, insurance, fuel and farm inputs pay a flat 5 rupees above 2,000. Payments for mutual funds, securities and brokers pay 0.02 per cent, capped at 300 rupees. NPCI’s examples are 12 rupees on 3,000, 200 on 50,000 and 300 on 1,00,000.

Person-to-person payments of any size stay free, as do merchant payments up to 2,000 rupees and small merchants receiving up to 1 lakh rupees a month by QR code. The ministry says about 96 per cent of merchant payments are unaffected and that person-to-person payments, 70 per cent of UPI value, stay outside the fee. Its release calls the MDR “neither a tax nor a charge collected by the Government or NPCI”. The money goes to banks, payment providers and UPI apps, and 5 per cent of collections fund small-merchant adoption. NPCI’s FAQ sets the fee against credit card MDRs of typically 1.5 to 2.5 per cent and a debit card cap of 0.90 per cent.

Elsewhere, the World Bank report says Pix payments between people are free while merchant fees are set by contract between merchants and their providers. It also argues that processing cost barely rises with payment value, which is why it favours low flat fees over percentages. The EU rule above ties instant fees to ordinary transfer fees.

The argument over who pays

NPCI’s FAQ cites unnamed industry estimates of about 20,000 crore rupees a year to run UPI, and calls government subsidies a short-term bridge. MediaNama reported in March 2026 that Parliament’s Standing Committee on Finance said sustained expansion of UPI needs a viable revenue mechanism, that the finance ministry’s Department of Financial Services said incentive support covers 11 per cent of industry cost, and that RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra had said someone has to pay the costs. The ministry’s release says the framework is consistent with the committee’s 32nd report.

Traders objected, and two retailer bodies called a “No UPI Day” for 2 October. They withdrew it after meeting Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on 30 September, IANS reported. A delegation of about 20 traders, led by Praveen Khandelwal of the Confederation of All India Traders, told the minister the fee could burden small and medium businesses. BIS Bulletin 127 of 13 July 2026 notes that two providers, Google Pay and PhonePe, account for 80 per cent of UPI’s user-facing front end, citing a 2024 paper by Cornelli and co-authors.

Advocate Anjan Datta has challenged the framework in the Supreme Court. On 28 September a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana issued notice to the Union government, the Reserve Bank, NPCI and the UPI and Services Steering Committee, gave them four weeks to respond and declined an interim stay. The Additional Solicitor General told the court the charge is a settlement fee between payment aggregators and banks. The fee is scheduled to start on 15 October.