The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has issued a new circular in which banks and payment service providers (PSPs) have been asked to set a limit of 10 most used APIs (application programming interfaces) on the UPI network by July 31, 2025 and ensure their correct use.
These APIs include – balance inquiry, fulfilling autopay mandate, checking transaction status, etc. NPCI says that repeated such requests increase the pressure on the UPI network and there is a risk of the system going down.
This means that from August 1, 2025, there will be a lot of changes in the UPI ecosystem.
These new guidelines assume significance since there have been multiple UPI outages reported since March this year.
The guidelines state that UPI apps shall have the capability to limit or stop balance enquiry requests, if needed to reduce the load in peak hours. The NPCI has set a limit of 50 per app per customer per day in a 24-hour period. These balance enquiry requests shall only be initiated by the customer.
As part of the API usage guidelines, the NPCI has also directed issuer banks to communicate about the available balance in the user’s account after every financial transaction.
As regards autopay mandate execution, the NPCI has directed initiator PSPs to ensure UPI autopay executions are initiated at moderated transaction per second (TPS) and must be started during non-peak hours. The NPCI has allowed maximum of 1 attempt and 3 retries per autopay mandate.
Also read: Insurance premium payments become easier with THIS unique UPI facility – Here’s how it works
This step of NPCI has been taken with the aim of making the UPI system more reliable and stable. In the recent past, it has been observed that due to heavy traffic and excessive requests, there are problems in the network.
“PSP banks and/or acquiring banks shall ensure all the API requests (in terms of velocity and TPS — transactions per second limitations) sent to UPI are monitored and moderated in terms of appropriate usage (customer-initiated and PSP system-initiated),” the circular said.
In case of failure to comply with directions, there could be API restrictions, penalties, suspension of new customer onboarding, or other measures 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, mentioning that all system-initiated APIs must be ‘queued and rate-limited’.
The circular said that all non-customer-initiated APIs need to be restricted during peak hours. So peak hours here are defined as 10 AM to 1 PM and 5 PM to 9:30 PM during the day.
