The Unified Payments Interface processed 24.07 billion transactions worth Rs 29.37 lakh crore in September 2026, according to National Payments Corporation of India data reported by MediaNama. Volume was 1.8% lower than the record 24.51 billion in August, and value was 1.5% lower than the Rs 29.82 lakh crore of the previous month. Even so, the figures are well above those of a year earlier: volume rose 22.5% and value 17.8% from the 19.63 billion transactions worth Rs 24.89 lakh crore of September 2025.
A monthly dip does not tell the whole story, because September has 30 days and August has 31. Measured per day, UPI handled 802.28 million transactions in September, an all-time high that is above 790.6 million in August. The average daily value also reached a record of Rs 97,913 crore, up from Rs 96,205 crore. So the fall in the monthly total is a calendar effect more than a sign of weaker use, which is IndiaX24’s reading of the published numbers.
The average size of a transaction has fallen. The report says that it was Rs 1,012 in September, compared with Rs 1,217 in August and Rs 1,268 in September 2025. A smaller average means that people are using UPI for more small, everyday payments, and the report quotes this conclusion: the lower transaction size indicates growing usage of UPI for smaller, everyday payments. It also means that the value of payments is growing more slowly than their number, as the 17.8% rise in value against 22.5% in volume shows.
The split between types of payment is clear. Person-to-person transfers numbered 8.83 billion, while person-to-merchant payments were 15.22 billion, which is about 63% of all transactions on IndiaX24’s arithmetic. Merchant payments are therefore the larger part of the system, and they matter for the fee that the payments body has planned for some of them.
Only a small slice of merchant payments is large. The report says that just 4% of person-to-merchant transactions exceeded Rs 2,000, which is about 609 million transactions. The proposed merchant fee, which the NPCI has deferred until after Diwali, would apply to transactions above that amount, so it would touch a small share of the volume, though not a small share of the value. A separate IndiaX24 article explains the fee and the deferral.
The growth rate shows how large UPI has become. A rise of more than 22% on a base of nearly 20 billion transactions a month means an addition of about 4.4 billion monthly transactions in a year. Search results also report that UPI handled about 145 billion transactions worth Rs 177 lakh crore in April to September 2026, which is 27% more than in the same period a year earlier, but this was seen only in a social media summary and is not confirmed.
What lies behind the numbers? The sources point to wider use among small merchants and for small purchases. The strong growth in volume compared with value suggests that the system is moving into smaller payments, in places where cash was once the norm. The report does not break the numbers down by app or bank, so it cannot say which providers gained.
There are limits to what the data show. They count transactions and not users, and they include payments of all sizes. They also do not show the share of payments that fail or are reversed, which the regulator and the NPCI publish separately. The figures are monthly totals published by the NPCI and may later be revised.
The September numbers show a system that is still growing at a fast pace, with a daily record in a month that officially recorded a decline.
Featured image: A hand holding a smartphone (file photo; a stand-in image, not a photo of UPI data). Photo by Santeri Viinamäki, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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