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India’s go-to-payments platform, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), is getting a major technical overhaul from August 1. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which operates UPI, has announced new Application Programming Interfaces (API) usage rules aimed at preventing the system from buckling under its own weight. These changes, while mostly invisible to users, will directly impact how often and when certain UPI functions like balance checks and autopay mandates can be used.
India’s UPI system, which processes over 16 billion transactions monthly as per NPCI’s UPI ecosystem statistics, has become a digital backbone. As of May 2025, it registered over 18 billion transactions and the value exceeded Rs 25.14 lakh crore. But as the system scales, the challenges of load balancing, system abuse and technical fragility are also scaling.
Recent outages have been a turning point, the most notable being a five-hour disruption on April 12, the longest in over three years. This resulted in a circular from NPC: “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).”
Why now
UPI is the country’s most preferred digital payment method, and it processes about 7,000 transactions in a second. So when UPI is down even for a minute, it can roughly impact four lakh people and for ten minutes, the impact could be 40 lakh transactions.
Between March 26 and April 12, UPI experienced four outages in just 18 days, an unprecedented disruption for India’s real-time payment system used by over 40 crore users. The outages were largely attributed to overburdened banking systems and unchecked API requests, especially during the financial year-end. With UPI accounting for 83% of all digital transactions, the repeated failures have sparked urgent calls from experts for system-level throttling and stricter API regulation by NPCI.
NPCI’s investigation into the outage found that the issue was caused by the flooding of ‘check transaction’ API. “Further, it was observed that a few PSP banks were also sending requests for ‘check transactions’ even for older transactions multiple times,” stated the NPCI report. The NPCI’s operating guidelines limit banks to checking a transaction’s status only three times, with each request requiring a 90-second interval. However, this restriction was meant to be implemented by the banks themselves and many reportedly didn’t.
What’s changing from August 1?
In the circular, NPCI directed all banks and payment service providers (PSPs) to “moderate and regulate the use of 10 significant, most-used APIs by July 31.” These APIs are the back-end request tools that drive everything from checking your bank balance, autopay mandate execution, and confirming a UPI transaction, among others.
Key changes
Balance enquiry limited: You can now check your bank balance a maximum of 50 times per UPI app per day.
List of linked accounts: The number of times you can check which accounts are linked to your mobile number will be restricted to 25 times per day per app.
Autopay execution: Autopay mandates (using for things like SIPs or Netflix or any other subscriptions at a certain frequency, such as monthly) will now be executed only during non-peak hours, defined as before 10 am, between 1 pm and 5 pm and after 9.30 pm.
Staggered transaction status checks: Banks and PSPs must now stagger “check transaction status” API calls. Only three checks are allowed within a two-hour window, with a minimum 90-second interval after authentication.
Mandatory balance with notifications: Banks are now required to include updates account balances in every transaction notification to reduce redundant balance checks. NPCI has also mandated that non-customer-initiated APIs must be restricted during peak hours to prevent system congestion.
Impact on you
While most UPI users won’t immediately notice the change, until they do. If you are in the habit of checking your balance after every transaction or querying account details frequently, you may now run into system-imposed limits. The cap of 50 balance enquiries per app per day may sound generous but in apps that send automatic balance requests for internal checks, this limit could be reached faster than expected. However, to offset this, banks are required to send real-time balance updates with every successful transaction notification. This should reduce the need for separate balance checks and improve user experience. Autopay functionality also changes slightly. You can still create mandates at any time, but execution will only happen during non-peak hours.
For users paying EMIs, SIPs or subscription bills, this means minor delays or time shifts. There will be one attempt and up to three retries per autopay mandate, all at moderate speeds. The check translation status API, a tool banks use to confirm whether a payment went through, was central to the outage. Going forward, the staggered checks (every 90 seconds, max three in two hours) should drastically reduce load and stabilise the system.
To enforce compliance, NPCI has warned that violations could lead to penalties, suspension of onboarding new users, or even restrictions on API access. PSPs are required to submit an undertaking by August 31 confirming that all system-initiated APIs are queued and rate-limited.
