The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has issued new guidelines for the United Payments Interface (UPI) Identity (ID). This comes with the objective of improving the popular digital platform’s security ensuring its compliance with the technical specifications. It will standardize the UPI transaction ID format making smoother and secure transactions without any errors caused due to inconsistency in ID generation.

Under this, users won’t be able to use special characters in their UPI IDs. All the information in the UPI ID has to be ‘alphanumeric’.

According to a UPI circular dated 9^th January, “We have been working with the ecosystem to improve compliance, though the issue has been largely resolved, it is observed that a few of the participants continue to be non-compliant. Considering to the criticality of compliance to the specifications, it has been decided not to allow any special characters in UPI transaction ID. Any transaction with ID containing special characters shall be declined by the central system. This shall be effective 1^st February 2025.”

As per this, the UPI users who try making transactions using the non-compliant apps after 1^st February will face the issue of transaction failure if their app generates transaction ID with any special characters.

An example of a valid transaction ID is: upi1234567890abc12345

Where the ID consists only of the valid characters of letters and numbers. The NPCI also aims to bring a uniformity across all the UPI based transactions through an enforcement of a 35-character limit for the transaction IDs, that will only contain alphanumeric characters.

While an invalid transaction ID somewhat looks like: upi@12345!67#abc

Here, there is a use of special characters like #, !, @ which are considered to be invalid. In consequence of this, if a user tries to make payment with the app that generates such special characters, the transaction will be considered invalid and NPCI will reject it.

To ensure that your UPI transactions do not get affected by this rule and isn’t rejected make sure that,

Your UPI app is updated to the latest version. Updates more often meet up with the compliance features and security enhancements. Further, keep checking the app settings or the announcements about the compliance with the new rules of NPCI.

If you are unsure about your app’s compliance with the new rules laid down by the NPCI, then you can verify it with the customer support who will confirm you up whether the app will process transactions without special characters or not.

Make sure that you are only using the trusted app sources for making UPI transactions. Only download the official apps from official app stores, avoid using any third party apps that do not comply with NPCI guidelines.

So, you got to check your app’s transaction ID format, or update your app, and if needed then switch to the compliant apps.

As of December 2024, the UPI transactions have hit a record high at 16.73 billion. 8% of which increased in November alone, marking a significant rise in the use of UPI for daily transactions.