On Friday, the day before Dashain began, Nepal Rastra Bank raised the number of times an individual can load a digital wallet in a single day from 10 to 50. The higher ceiling applies during Dashain, from 17 to 25 October, and again during Tihar and Chhath, from 7 to 15 November, according to ShareSansar and ICT Frame, which both reported the central bank's move on 16 October. This is the third festival season in a row the cap has gone up: it was 30 a day in 2024 and 40 a day in 2025.
The mechanics are simple. Under the regular provisions of Nepal Rastra Bank's payment-system directives, a natural person's wallet can receive deposits through a maximum of 10 transactions per day. For the festival windows that ceiling becomes 50. The central bank has also directed payment service providers to report the number of transactions and the total transaction amount conducted under the temporary provision to its Payment Systems Department, which means the festival experiment will be measured, not just announced. NRB's own Payment Oversight Report for 2023/24 already lists the temporary festival relaxation of wallet transaction limits as routine policy facilitation. What began as an exception has become a tradition.
The reason is the calendar. Dashain and Tihar are the largest cash-spending events in the Nepali year: new clothes, meat, travel home, tika dakshina, festival bonuses paid out as a month's extra salary. NRB spokesperson Guru Prasad Paudel told Corporate Samachar that currency in circulation stood at Rs 794 billion as of mid-September and is expected to rise 8 to 10 percent during Dashain, roughly Rs 64 to 79 billion in additional cash pulled out of the banking system. The central bank is fighting that tide on two fronts. On the digital side it keeps widening the wallet pipe. On the cash side it is quietly stepping back from the new-note ritual: this year there is no fixed exchange campaign, notes are available through regular bank operations and the NRB's Thapathali office, each person can take up to two sets of small-denomination notes, and new Rs 100 notes are being pushed through ATMs instead of counters. Anuj Dahal, head of NRB's Currency Management Department, has said demand for new notes has softened compared to previous years, a shift he links to the continued rise of digital payments. QR-based payments reached Rs 164.42 billion across 72.44 million transactions in the first month of the fiscal year, according to NRB data cited by Nepal Traveller, and platforms like eSewa, Khalti and mobile banking now let relatives send dakshina instantly, even from abroad.
The honest limits deserve equal space. A frequency ceiling was never the binding constraint for most wallet users. The amount still is: a legal briefing on Nepal's digital-wallet rules puts the end-of-day wallet balance cap at Rs 50,000, and 50 deposits a day is a ceiling almost nobody will touch. A permission is not a driver. Digital dakshina works where both the giver and the receiver have a smartphone, a wallet and the habit; outside the cities, the envelope at tika time is still cash, counted out by hand. And the central bank's own estimate tells the score: if currency in circulation still jumps a tenth during the festival, the wallet raise is a nudge at the margin of a tidal wave, not a reversal of it. None of this makes the policy wrong. It makes it small, and small policies should be described as small.
There is one genuinely interesting part, and it is the part NRB built into the order. By requiring payment service providers to report the transaction counts and amounts that flow through the raised ceiling, the central bank will know, after Tihar, exactly how much of the festival's money moved digitally because the cap was lifted. Three years of rising ceilings will have produced three years of data. If this Dashain is the one where the wallet finally beats the envelope, the numbers will show it. If not, the numbers will show that too, and the fourth raise, whenever it comes, will need a better argument than a bigger ceiling.
This article is published for research and education purposes only. It is not investment advice, and nothing here should be read as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. Figures cited reflect publicly reported information at the time of writing and may be revised.