The phone pays, but the cash stays
UPI payments grew 19.4x between November 2019 and July 2026. What happened to cash?
UPI payments grew 19.4x; currency in circulation grew 2.5x
- 10.5%cash with the public as a share of GDP, 2024-25
- 4.0xUPI users, March 2020 to June 2026
- −75.7%debit-card payments a month, November 2019 to July 2026
- 2.7% → 0.7%extra cash drawn before Diwali, 2012–15 to 2022–25
- ₹5,412the average ATM withdrawal, July 2026, up 20.1%
- 85.5%of the value of banknotes in ₹500 notes, March 2026
RBI research finds the demand for currency “influenced by the precautionary and store-of-value motives”, while “the use of cash as a payment medium continues to fall” (RBI Occasional Papers).
SOURCES
Reserve Bank of India, payment system indicators (new format), November 2019 to July 2026: UPI, debit cards, ATM and micro-ATM withdrawals, and the number of ATMs and micro-ATMs. Reserve Bank of India, reserve money components, monthly and weekly (currency in circulation), and average monetary aggregates (currency with the public). Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, nominal GDP on the 2011-12 base, as macro-economic aggregates. All as published on DBIE.
Not on DBIE: banknotes in circulation by denomination, RBI Annual Reports, Table VIII.1; UPI users, NPCI’s counts as reported by PIB, the RBI and the Lok Sabha at eight dates; the dates of Diwali, DoPT holiday lists for Central Government offices; and the events marked on the charts, from RBI and Government of India documents, each linked where it is shown.
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Payments and withdrawals by month (CSV)
Currency in circulation by month (CSV)
Currency with the public and GDP by year (CSV)
Banknotes by denomination, end-March (CSV)
UPI users, official counts (CSV)
METHOD
Payments. The series begin in November 2019, when the RBI changed how they are counted, and are not joined to earlier data. UPI includes transfers between people. Multiples (“19.4x”) compare the first month with the last.
Cash. Currency in circulation is all notes and coins issued, including the cash banks hold; currency with the public leaves that out, and is used for the share of GDP. The shares use the 2011-12 GDP base that DBIE carries; MoSPI moved GDP to a 2022-23 base on 27 February 2026, and they will be recomputed when its back series is published. A month of UPI payments is a flow and the cash in circulation a stock: the two are shown side by side, never one as a share of the other.
UPI users. Unique users onboarded, not monthly active users. The header compares official counts only, March 2020 (14 crore) and June 2026 (55.49 crore); the wall joins the counts with straight lines and holds the latest after it.
The blink. 2,366 crore UPI payments in July 2026 over 31 days is about 8,833 a second, or 2,944 in a blink, taken as a third of a second; the wall rounds it to the thousand above.
Diwali. Currency in circulation each Friday; the three weeks up to the week of Diwali against that year’s usual weekly growth, the mean over the 52 weeks ending ten weeks before. 2016, 2017 and 2020 are left out (demonetisation, the refill and the pandemic). Dussehra usually falls two or three weeks before Diwali and cannot be told apart from it.
Machines and notes. Each icon stands for a fixed amount, given under the grids. The notes in the cash grids are coloured in the mix of ₹100 and larger banknotes in circulation that March, by number; the RBI does not publish which notes machines pay out. The RBI prints one ₹500 row: the old series to March 2016, the new from March 2017.