NSE Tuesday BSE Thursday: How India Split the F&O Expiry Calendar

If you traded futures or options yesterday, you were trading an NSE monthly expiry — 25 August 2026 was the last Tuesday of the month, and the whole index-derivatives complex on the National Stock Exchange settled that day. Five years ago that same expiry would have landed on a Thursday, shoulder to shoulder with the BSE. That collision is exactly what regulators pulled apart. This guide is the plain-English NSE BSE expiry day calendar: what changed, why SEBI split the two exchanges onto different days, which index expires when, and the small rules — holidays, weeklies, monthlies — that quietly decide your settlement date.

Get the calendar wrong and you can be short an option you thought had two more days to run. Get it right and expiry becomes something you plan around instead of something that surprises you.

What actually changed on India’s expiry calendar

For most of the derivatives era, Thursday was expiry day in India. Both the NSE and the BSE settled their weekly and monthly index contracts on Thursday, which meant the two biggest venues in the country hit their most volatile hour at the same time, on the same afternoon, every week.

That is what SEBI changed. Under a circular dated 26 May 2025, each exchange was assigned a single, fixed expiry day — and the two exchanges were deliberately given different days. From 1 September 2025, NSE derivatives expire on Tuesday and BSE derivatives expire on Thursday. Contracts that were already set to expire on or before 31 August 2025 were left untouched; the new cycle began cleanly with the first Nifty weekly on Tuesday, 2 September 2025, and the first Sensex weekly on Thursday, 4 September 2025.

The change is structural, not cosmetic. It affects when your position settles, when premium decays fastest, when margins are checked, and when the market’s attention concentrates. If you learned the market before September 2025, the mental model of "Thursday equals expiry" is now half-wrong — it is true for the BSE and false for the NSE. Building this foundation properly matters, which is exactly the gap a structured stock market training program is designed to close before you put real capital behind an options position.

Why SEBI split NSE and BSE expiry days

The logic behind the split is congestion. When both exchanges expired on the same Thursday, expiry-day volatility, volume spikes and settlement risk all piled onto one day of the week. A single bad Thursday could stress the clearing system across the entire market at once.

By giving each exchange its own day, SEBI spread that load. Expiry pressure now arrives twice a week in smaller doses — NSE on Tuesday, BSE on Thursday — instead of once in a single concentrated burst. The stated aims, described in the SEBI circular and echoed by exchanges and brokers, were to reduce systemic risk, avoid two venues’ expiry volatility overlapping, and stop the entire derivatives ecosystem from crowding onto one afternoon.

There is a second, older piece of the same reform that traders still confuse with this one. From 20 November 2024, SEBI restricted each exchange to weekly options on just one benchmark index. That is why the market feels quieter than the 2023 "expiry every day" era — several weekly contracts simply no longer exist.

It helps to see the two measures as one project with two moving parts. The November 2024 rule reduced how many weekly expiries exist; the September 2025 rule fixed when the survivors land. Both grew out of the same concern that a large, fast-growing base of retail options traders was crowding into a handful of high-adrenaline expiry sessions, and that the risk of that concentration was better managed by thinning and spreading it than by leaving every index expiring on the same Thursday. Whatever your view on the policy, the practical takeaway is the same: the expiry map you may have learned in 2022 or 2023 no longer describes the market you are trading in 2026.

The full NSE BSE expiry day calendar

Here is the part worth bookmarking. There are two things to track for any contract: the exchange it trades on (which fixes the day of the week) and whether it is a weekly or monthly contract (which fixes which week).

Weekly options exist on only two indices now — Nifty 50 on the NSE (Tuesday) and Sensex on the BSE (Thursday). Everything else is monthly only, expiring on the last Tuesday or last Thursday of the month depending on its exchange.

Read the table by exchange first. If it is an NSE product, its day is Tuesday. If it is a BSE product, its day is Thursday. The only remaining question is weekly versus monthly — and only Nifty and Sensex still carry weeklies.

Weekly versus monthly: the last-Tuesday and last-Thursday rules

Weekly and monthly contracts share a day of the week but differ in which week they land. A weekly contract expires every week on its exchange’s day. A monthly contract expires only once a month — on the last occurrence of that day in the calendar month.

So a Nifty monthly settles on the last Tuesday of the month; a Sensex monthly settles on the last Thursday. In the final week of the month, a Nifty weekly and a Nifty monthly can expire on the very same Tuesday, because that Tuesday is both "this week’s" and "the last of the month." That overlap is normal and often the busiest expiry of the month.

A quick worked example makes it concrete. Take August 2026. The Tuesdays are the 4th, 11th, 18th and 25th. Each of those was a Nifty weekly expiry on the NSE, and because the 25th was the last Tuesday of the month, it doubled as the Nifty, Bank Nifty and FinNifty monthly expiry — the single heaviest NSE settlement of the month. On the BSE side, the Thursdays were the 6th, 13th, 20th and 27th; each was a Sensex weekly, and the 27th, being the last Thursday, carried the Sensex and Bankex monthly. So a single week at the end of August held an NSE monthly on Tuesday the 25th and a BSE monthly on Thursday the 27th, just two days apart. Map any month this way and the calendar stops feeling abstract.

This is also why premium decay now has two rhythms in a week. A Nifty option bleeds hardest into Tuesday; a Sensex option bleeds into Thursday. If you sell options for theta, the day of the week you are short changes the shape of your risk. We break down what actually happens in those final hours in our guide to options expiry day in India.

Holidays, rollovers and the mistakes traders still make

Three edge cases catch people out even after they have the day-of-week rule memorised.

• Holiday shift. If the scheduled expiry day is a trading holiday, the contract expires on the previous trading day. A Tuesday holiday pulls the NSE expiry back to Monday; a Thursday holiday pulls the BSE expiry back to Wednesday. Never assume the day is fixed in a holiday-heavy month.
• Rollover timing. Positional traders roll futures from the near-month to the next-month contract around expiry. With NSE now on Tuesday, that rollover window has moved two days earlier than the old Thursday habit. Reading the rollover data around those days tells you how much of the position is being carried forward — we cover this in our note on futures rollover data and expiry sentiment.
• Wrong-exchange assumption. The single most common error since the change is treating every expiry as Thursday. If you trade both Nifty and Sensex options, you are juggling two calendars, not one. Confusing them can leave you holding an option through a settlement you did not expect.

None of this is difficult once the framework is clear. It is only dangerous when you carry a pre-2025 habit into a post-2025 market. Traders who also watch price action across both venues should understand the wider differences between the two exchanges, which we lay out in BSE vs NSE: key differences every investor should know.

What the NSE BSE expiry day calendar means for you next

The reform did something useful: it turned expiry from a single weekly cliff into a predictable, spread-out rhythm. Your job is to internalise the map. Know that NSE means Tuesday and BSE means Thursday, that only Nifty and Sensex still have weeklies, that monthlies land on the last such day of the month, and that a holiday drags the date one trading day earlier.

A simple weekly routine keeps you on the right side of it. At the start of each week, note which products you hold and tag each one Tuesday or Thursday by its exchange. Flag the last Tuesday and last Thursday of the month as your monthly-settlement dates. Cross-check the exchange holiday calendar so a mid-week holiday does not quietly pull an expiry a day earlier. Decide in advance whether you intend to close, roll, or let each position settle — and do that thinking before expiry week, not during it.

Once the NSE BSE expiry day calendar is second nature, expiry stops being a source of nasty surprises and becomes a set of dates you can plan trades, rollovers and risk around. That is the difference between reacting to the market and operating inside it — and it is a skill that compounds across everything else you trade. NIFM has spent 14 years teaching exactly these market mechanics to learners across India, and the expiry calendar is one of the first things a serious derivatives student is expected to know cold.

Frequently Asked Questions

What day does NSE F&O expire now?

Since 1 September 2025, all NSE equity-derivative contracts expire on Tuesday. Nifty 50 weekly options expire every Tuesday, and monthly contracts (Nifty, Bank Nifty, FinNifty) expire on the last Tuesday of the month. If that Tuesday is a trading holiday, expiry moves to the previous trading day.

What day does BSE Sensex expire?

BSE equity derivatives expire on Thursday. Sensex weekly options expire every Thursday, and Sensex and Bankex monthly contracts expire on the last Thursday of the month. Before September 2025 both exchanges expired on Thursday; SEBI separated them to reduce single-day congestion.

Why did SEBI change the expiry days for NSE and BSE?

Both exchanges previously expired on Thursday, concentrating volatility, volume and settlement risk on one day. Through a circular dated 26 May 2025, SEBI fixed a different single expiry day for each exchange — Tuesday for NSE, Thursday for BSE — to spread the load across the week and lower systemic risk.

Do Bank Nifty and FinNifty still have weekly expiry?

No. From 20 November 2024, SEBI limited each exchange to weekly options on a single benchmark index. NSE kept weekly options only on Nifty 50, discontinuing weekly contracts on Bank Nifty, FinNifty and Nifty Midcap Select. Those indices now trade only monthly contracts, expiring on the last Tuesday.

What happens if the expiry day falls on a holiday?

The contract expires on the previous trading day. If a Tuesday is an NSE holiday, that week’s expiry shifts to Monday; if a Thursday is a BSE holiday, expiry shifts to Wednesday. Always check the exchange holiday calendar in months with public holidays near month-end.

Can a weekly and a monthly contract expire on the same day?

Yes. In the last week of the month, the weekly and monthly Nifty contracts both expire on the last Tuesday, and the weekly and monthly Sensex contracts both expire on the last Thursday. That overlap usually produces the highest-volume expiry of the month.

Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Markets carry risk — please do your own research or consult a qualified financial professional before investing. NIFM provides training and exam preparation; certification exams conducted by regulatory or professional bodies are administered by those bodies independently.