PhonePe Founder and CEO Sameer Nigam said UPI payments will remain free for Indian consumers, asserting that users will not be charged for making payments through the digital payments platform.
“Consumers will NOT BE CHARGED anything for making UPI payments,” Nigam said in a post on X.
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‘Consumers will NOT BE CHARGED anything for making UPI payments.
— Sameer Nigam (@_sameernigam) August 8, 2026
Razorpay Co-founder and CEO Harshil Mathur also said UPI should remain free for consumers, while calling for continued protection for small businesses.
Mathur said the digital payments ecosystem needs a sustainable model to support continued investment in reliability, security and innovation. He said the focus should be on keeping UPI free for consumers, protecting small merchants and ensuring sustainability for the broader ecosystem.
“UPI transformed how India pays over the last decade. Now let’s build for the next one,” Mathur said.
UPI should remain free for consumers. And small businesses should continue to be protected.
But every great digital infrastructure needs a sustainable model behind it one that enables continuous investment in reliability, security and innovation. Else the system deteriorates…
— Harshil Mathur (@harshilmathur) August 8, 2026
The two industry leaders’ comments underscore the importance of keeping consumer-facing UPI payments free while ensuring that the payments ecosystem has a sustainable model to support its continued development.
In a separate development, Government of India has cleared that users will not face transaction charges for making payments through UPI, while any merchant discount rate (MDR), if introduced in the future, will apply only to a limited set of merchant transactions above a certain threshold.
Ministry of Finance said all person-to-person (P2P) transactions will continue to be free of charge. It added that the vast majority of UPI transactions will remain free for merchants as well.Also Read: Will you have to pay to use UPI? Here’s what the Payments Council of India said
