India’s Unified Payments Interface will start charging merchants a 0.4% fee on some payments above ₹2,000 (about $21) on October 15, ending the free processing merchants have had since 2020. The fee tops out at ₹300 (about $3) per payment, merchants taking in no more than ₹100,000 a month through UPI are exempt, and railways, telecom, insurance, and fuel pay a flat ₹5 instead. Payments of ₹2,000 or less account for over 95% of merchant payments on UPI and stay free, and consumers won’t pay anything since merchants can’t add the fee to prices. The National Payments Corporation of India, which runs UPI, cites industry estimates that the network costs about ₹200 billion ($2.1 billion) a year to operate and says the fees will fund infrastructure, security, and fraud prevention.
