UPI Transaction Rules: Decoding Recent Changes For UPI Users

UPI Rules Update: The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is now among the top choices for payments in the country. Since it began, many more digital transactions have been happening in India. To make UPI payments even better, some rules and changes were announced from time to time.

Here’s a summary of the most important ones:

Deactivation of Inactive UPIs:

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has asked payment apps like Paytm, Google Pay, PhonePe, and banks to disable UPI IDs and numbers that have been inactive for over a year.

UPI IDs and linked mobile numbers that haven’t been used for transactions for over 12 months will be deactivated. This aims to curb dormant accounts and potential misuse.

Increased Transaction Limits:

NPCI has set a new maximum daily payment limit of Rs 1 lakh for UPI transactions.

However, the RBI on December 8 increased the UPI transaction limit for education and healthcare facilities to Rs 5 lakh. Earlier, the transaction limit was Rs 1 lakh.

Interchange Fee:

This change was announced in early 2023. For specific merchant UPI transactions exceeding Rs 2,000 and conducted through prepaid payment instruments (PPI) such as online wallets, an interchange fee of 1.1 percent will apply. Customers need to know that they will not incur any additional costs while making transactions.

Four-hour Time Limit:

As per reports, to reduce the growing cases of online payment fraud, it is expected that there will be a four-hour time limit for the first payment exceeding Rs 2,000 between users who haven’t transacted before. Reportedly, soon UPI users will be able to activate the ‘Tap and Pay’ feature. However, an official announcement is yet to be made.

UPI ATM:

RBI is set to introduce UPI ATMs nationwide. With these ATMs, you can scan a QR code to withdraw cash directly from your bank account.

UPI transactions in November 2023 clocked a fresh peak in value hitting Rs 17.4 trillion, up 1.4 percent compared to Rs 17.16 trillion in October 2023. At the same time, the number of transactions reduced by 1.5 percent to 11.24 billion versus a record high of 11.41 billion a month earlier.