NPCI Rolls Out New Limits On UPI Balance Checks, Among Other Guidelines

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has issued revised rules for how banks and payment apps should use UPI APIs.

The move follows four major UPI outages between March and May 2025. NPCI found that these were caused by excessive and rapid use of the “check transaction status” API by payment service provider (PSP) banks.

The “check transaction status” API lets banks or apps confirm if a UPI payment went through, especially when the user doesn’t get a clear confirmation due to delays or errors.

NPCI has mandated issuer banks to display the available balance within a user’s account while communicating every successful transaction.

The NPCI circular also defines UPI peak hours as 10 am to 1 pm and 5 pm to 9:30 pm, when transactions are at their highest.

During these times, banks are told to restrict non-customer-initiated API calls and set up a queue system to manage automated requests. PSPs must report their API management plans to NPCI by August 31, 2025.

Starting July 31, the balance enquiry API—which allows UPI users to check their account balance—will be limited to 50 requests per app per customer per day.

This means if you use both Paytm and PhonePe, you can check your balance up to 50 times on each app within a 24-hour period.