UPI transactions are about to become quicker. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has introduced new response time rules to make the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) faster and more reliable.
In a circular dated April 26, NPCI asked all banks and payment apps to follow these new rules starting from June 16, 2025.
UPI currently handles digital transactions worth around ₹25 lakh crore every month. This move is expected to improve both the speed and reliability of UPI services.
New Response Time for UPI Transactions
With the new rules, the response time for several UPI-related services has been shortened. Here’s the updated timing:
Request Pay and Response Pay services: Reduced from 30 seconds to 15 seconds
Check transaction status and transaction reversal: Now must respond within 10 seconds
Validate address requests: Also limited to 10 seconds
NPCI has instructed all banks and UPI apps (like GPay, PhonePe, etc.) to make sure that these faster processing times do not cause any technical errors or service issues.
Why This Step Was Taken
This change comes after several recent disruptions in UPI services. A major outage happened on April 12, when many users were unable to complete transactions.
Similar technical failures were seen on March 26 and April 1 as well, creating problems for users relying on digital payments.
NPCI investigated the issue and found that the main cause of the outages was heavy load on the “check transaction” API.
Some banks were repeatedly sending requests for older transactions, which slowed down the entire UPI system and led to failures.
