Options Expiry Days in India: NSE and BSE

Options expiry days in India follow a two-exchange, two-weekday pattern: Nifty 50 weekly options on the NSE expire every Tuesday, Sensex weekly options on the BSE expire every Thursday, and every other equity derivative, from Bank Nifty to single-stock futures and options, expires once a month on the last Tuesday (NSE) or the last Thursday (BSE). Expiry is the day a contract stops trading and is settled against the underlying's closing price. This page describes the schedule as it stands on 15 September 2026, pinned to the SEBI and exchange circulars that set it.

Which day do options expire in India?

The schedule in force for contracts expiring on or after 1 September 2025:

• NSE, Nifty 50: weekly options expire every Tuesday; monthly and longer-dated (quarterly, half-yearly) contracts expire on the last Tuesday of the month.
• NSE, Bank Nifty, FinNifty, Nifty Midcap Select and Nifty Next 50: monthly only, last Tuesday of the month.
• NSE, single-stock futures and options: monthly only, last Tuesday of the month.
• BSE, Sensex: weekly options expire every Thursday; monthly and longer-dated contracts expire on the last Thursday of the month.
• BSE, Bankex and Sensex 50: monthly only, last Thursday of the month.
• BSE, single-stock futures and options: monthly only, last Thursday of the month.

Two weekly index options a week, one per exchange, is the entire weekly menu. There is no daily expiry in India, and an exchange cannot move its day without SEBI's prior approval (SEBI circular SEBI/HO/MRD/TPD-1/P/CIR/2025/76, para 3.4).

Why do people still search for "daily expiry"?

Until 20 November 2024, India had an index options expiry every weekday. Between them the two exchanges covered the week: Nifty Midcap Select (NSE) and Bankex (BSE) on Monday, FinNifty on Tuesday, Bank Nifty on Wednesday, Nifty 50 on Thursday, Sensex on Friday. That rolling calendar is what the search term "daily expiry" still describes. SEBI ended it in two steps, each pinned to a circular.

Step one was circular SEBI/HO/MRD/TPD-1/P/CIR/2024/132 of 1 October 2024, "Measures to Strengthen Equity Index Derivatives Framework for Increased Investor Protection and Market Stability". Para 5.5 limited each exchange to weekly contracts on one benchmark index, effective 20 November 2024. NSE kept Nifty 50 (then still a Thursday expiry) and discontinued its other three weeklies (Bank Nifty, FinNifty, Nifty Midcap Select); BSE kept Sensex and dropped the Bankex weekly. BSE then moved Sensex from Friday to Tuesday from 1 January 2025, leaving Tuesday (BSE) and Thursday (NSE) as the two weekly expiry days.

Step two was circular SEBI/HO/MRD/MRD-TPD-1/P/CIR/2025/76 of 26 May 2025, "Final Settlement Day (Expiry Day) for Equity Derivatives Contracts". It set the rules that still apply: all equity derivatives on an exchange expire on either Tuesday or Thursday (para 3.1); each exchange keeps one weekly benchmark index options contract on its chosen day (3.2); every other contract (index futures, non-benchmark index options, single-stock futures, single-stock options) carries a minimum one-month tenor and expires in the last week of the month on that day (3.3). Exchanges had until 15 June 2025 to choose. BSE took Thursday (BSE notice 20250617-11, 17 June 2025) and NSE took Tuesday (NSE circular NSE/FAOP/68685 of 23 June 2025, modified by NSE/FAOP/68747 of 25 June 2025), both for contracts expiring on or after 1 September 2025. The first Tuesday Nifty expiry printed on 2 September 2025 and the first Thursday Sensex expiry on 4 September 2025.

India removed daily expiries while the US added them

The cross-market contrast is the part most Indian explainers skip. Over the same two years in which SEBI cut India from five weekly index expiries to two, US exchanges went the other way: SPX, SPY, QQQ and IWM options now list a contract expiring on every weekday, Monday through Friday. A US trader who wants a same-day contract can find one any day the market is open; our guide to which US stocks and indexes have daily options lists the current set, and what 0DTE options are covers the same-day mechanics. India's version of a 0DTE trade exists only on Tuesday (Nifty) and Thursday (Sensex).

The panel below checks the US side against traded contracts rather than listing rules. For each of the three ETFs it counts the distinct weekdays on which a contract with volume expired over the trailing five weeks, plus the number of distinct expiration dates traded, and spells out the weekdays in the last column.

SELECT
    underlying_symbol                                   AS symbol,
    uniqExact(toDayOfWeek(expiration_date))             AS weekdays_with_expiry,
    uniqExact(expiration_date)                          AS expiration_dates,
    trimBoth(concat(
        if(has(groupUniqArray(toDayOfWeek(expiration_date)), 1), 'Mon ', ''),
        if(has(groupUniqArray(toDayOfWeek(expiration_date)), 2), 'Tue ', ''),
        if(has(groupUniqArray(toDayOfWeek(expiration_date)), 3), 'Wed ', ''),
        if(has(groupUniqArray(toDayOfWeek(expiration_date)), 4), 'Thu ', ''),
        if(has(groupUniqArray(toDayOfWeek(expiration_date)), 5), 'Fri ', '')))  AS expiry_weekdays
FROM global_markets.options_greeks
WHERE date >= today() - 35
  AND date <  today()
  AND volume > 0
  AND underlying_symbol IN ('SPY', 'QQQ', 'IWM')
  AND toDayOfWeek(expiration_date) <= 5
GROUP BY underlying_symbol
ORDER BY expiration_dates DESC, symbol

SPY had a traded expiration on 5 of the five weekdays, spread across 54 distinct expiration dates in the window, and the expiry_weekdays column reads Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri on all 3 rows. Set that beside the Indian menu: Nifty 50 expires on one weekday, Sensex on one other, and no product on either exchange expires on more than one day of the week.

The vocabulary is a small tell about who is asking. Indian exchanges and brokers say "expiry" and "expiry day"; US exchanges and the OCC say "expiration" and "expiration date". A search for "options expiry day" is almost always an NSE or BSE question, while "options expiration" is a US one, and the US calendar itself (third-Friday monthlies plus weeklies and dailies on the largest products) is laid out in when do options expire. Japan sits at a third point: Nikkei 225 options settle to a Special Quotation computed from constituent opening prices on the second Friday, covered in what SQ day is in Japan. India settles to the close, Japan to the open.

How are Nifty and Sensex options settled on expiry day?

Indian index options are European-style (exercisable only at expiry) and cash-settled: the difference between the strike and the final settlement price is paid or received in rupees, and no index is delivered. The final settlement price is the closing value of the underlying index on expiry day, and that closing value is built from the closing prices of the index's constituent stocks.

How those constituent closes are found changed on 3 August 2026. Until then, a stock's closing price was the volume-weighted average price (VWAP) of its trades in the last 30 minutes of continuous trading, 3:00 pm to 3:30 pm IST, and the index settlement value was likewise derived from that last half hour. SEBI circular HO/47/11/11(3)2025-MRD-POD2/I/2765/2026 of 16 January 2026 replaced that, for stocks that have derivative contracts, with a Closing Auction Session (CAS): continuous trading in those stocks ends at 3:15 pm, a 20-minute auction runs to 3:35 pm, and the closing price is the single equilibrium price at which the most volume can be matched, within 3% of a reference price (the 3:00 to 3:15 pm VWAP). Para 4.9 of the circular restates the settlement rule for the new close: index contracts settle to the index close built from constituents' closing prices, and stock derivatives settle to the volume-weighted average of the stock's closing prices across exchanges. The derivatives segment itself now trades until 3:40 pm, and stocks without derivatives keep the last-30-minute VWAP close.

Single-stock options are physically settled: an in-the-money position at expiry becomes a delivery obligation in the underlying shares rather than a cash difference, which makes them a different instrument from the weekly index contracts most "expiry day" searches are about.

What happens when expiry day is a holiday?

If the scheduled expiry falls on a trading holiday, the contract expires on the previous trading day. A Tuesday holiday on the NSE moves that week's Nifty expiry to Monday; a last-Thursday holiday on the BSE moves the monthly Sensex expiry to Wednesday. The direction is always earlier, never later, and a monthly contract never spills into the following month. The exchanges publish the adjusted dates in their F&O calendars, and a holiday moves every contract that shares the day, weekly and monthly alike.

What extra margin applies on expiry day?

Para 5.6 of the October 2024 circular added an expiry-day charge. Extreme loss margin (ELM) is a buffer collected on top of the regular initial margin to cover losses beyond what the margin model scans for. On the day an options contract expires, an additional ELM of 2% applies to short positions in that contract: every short option open at the start of the day, and every short option initiated during the day, that is scheduled to expire that day. The measure took effect on 20 November 2024, the same day as the weekly rationalisation. For a seller of Tuesday Nifty options, the practical reading is that the margin requirement steps up on Tuesday morning and stays up until the position is closed or settled.

FAQ

Which day does Nifty expire?

Nifty 50 weekly options expire every Tuesday on the NSE, and Nifty monthly contracts expire on the last Tuesday of the month, for all contracts expiring on or after 1 September 2025. If that Tuesday is a trading holiday, expiry moves to the previous trading day.

Which day does Bank Nifty expire?

Bank Nifty has monthly contracts only, expiring on the last Tuesday of the month on the NSE. Its weekly contract was discontinued in November 2024 under SEBI's one-weekly-index-per-exchange rule.

Which day does Sensex expire?

Sensex weekly options expire every Thursday on the BSE, and Sensex monthly contracts on the last Thursday of the month, from 1 September 2025. Bankex and Sensex 50 are monthly only, also on the last Thursday.

Is there a daily expiry in India?

No. Since 20 November 2024 each exchange may list only one weekly index options contract, and since the September 2025 swap those two contracts expire on Tuesday (NSE, Nifty 50) and Thursday (BSE, Sensex). Every other equity derivative in India expires monthly.

At what time do Indian options expire?

Trading in the derivatives segment ends at 3:40 pm IST on expiry day, and the contract settles to the underlying's closing price. Since 3 August 2026 that close comes from the Closing Auction Session held from 3:15 pm to 3:35 pm for stocks with derivatives, and the index close is computed from those constituent closes.

The schedule above is current as of 15 September 2026; every date on this page traces to a SEBI or exchange circular, and only a new circular can move it. The US side of the comparison, which contracts list a same-day expiry on each weekday, is a live query on the Strasmore terminal.