Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: India’s digital payment system Unified Payments Interface (UPI) marked its 10th anniversary on April 11, after growing 12,000- fold in volume and over 4,000 times in terms of value.
The payment system scaled from 17.86 million transactions worth Rs 6,952 crore in FY17 to 218.98 billion transactions amounting to nearly Rs 285 lakh crore in FY26, data from analytics firm Tracxn showed. Transactions rose gradually in the initial years — to 915 million in FY18 and 5.39 billion in FY19 — before UPI entered the mainstream in FY20 facilitating 12.52 billion transactions worth over Rs 21 lakh crore.
The pandemic years accelerated adoption as volumes jumped to 22.33 billion in FY21 and 45.97 billion in FY22, and again it doubled to 83.75 billion transactions in FY23. The payment app recorded 130.13 billion transactions in FY24 and 185.87 billion in FY25.
In 2025, UPI processed 228.5 billion transactions, marking a 33 per cent year‑on‑year increase, while total transaction value touched Rs. 299.74 trillion, another report said. Merchant acceptance infrastructure expanded in 2025, with UPI QR codes increasing 15 per cent YoY to 731.38 million.
Point‑of‑sale terminals grew 15 per cent to 11.48 million. Bharat QR deployments eased slightly as the ecosystem consolidated around UPI-led acceptance models, the report said. One‑month UPI transaction value stood at about Rs 28 lakh crore, roughly 70 per cent of the economy’s total currency stock, underscoring that digital payments volumes remain large relative to cash.
Meanwhile, India’s digital payments ecosystem saw a strong comeback in March 2026, with the UPI registering its highest-ever monthly transaction volume since its launch in 2016, according to data released by the National Payments Corporation of India. UPI processed 22.64 billion transactions in March, marking a sharp rise from 20.39 billion transactions recorded in February. The March figure also surpassed the previous high of 21.70 billion transactions seen in January. On a year-on-year basis, transaction volumes grew by 24 per cent.
Notably, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has described UPI as the world’s largest real-time payment system by volume, noting that it has been built and scaled within a decade
