How to Check How Many Demat Accounts You Hold (CDSL and NSDL)
If you have opened trading and demat accounts with more than one broker over the years, it is easy to lose track of how many are still open in your name. Every demat account remains active until you formally close it, and dormant accounts can still attract maintenance charges and clutter your financial records. This guide explains how to find out exactly how many demat accounts, and which ones, are held against your PAN across both depositories, CDSL and NSDL . The answer lives in a single document: your Consolidated Account Statement.
Conflict-of-interest disclosure. This guide is published by the WebNotes Editorial Team for informational purposes and is written independently. WebNotes operates a Zerodha account-opening referral programme, disclosed on the pages that carry the referral link; this guide does not carry it and earns no referral commission from the procedure described here.
Why the CAS is the answer
The Consolidated Account Statement is a periodic statement that shows all your transactions and holdings across demat accounts held with CDSL and NSDL, as well as mutual fund units held in Statement of Account (SOA) form. Because it is built around your PAN rather than around any one broker, it automatically pulls together every demat account linked to that PAN, whichever depository participant opened it.
This is what makes the CAS the right tool for the specific question of how many accounts you hold. Logging in to a single broker’s platform, such as Zerodha Console , only shows you the account with that broker. The CAS, by contrast, is issued by the depositories themselves and consolidates the full picture. If you want the deeper mechanics of how the statement is compiled and what each section contains, our detailed guide to the CAS from CDSL walks through the document line by line. For the purpose of counting accounts, you only need the list of demat accounts it prints at the top.
Two other approaches are worth ruling out before you start. Contacting each broker one by one works, but only if you already remember every broker you have ever signed up with, which defeats the purpose. Checking your email or SMS archive for account-opening confirmations is unreliable, because messages get deleted and old brokers may have merged or rebranded. The CAS sidesteps both problems by keying everything to your PAN, which does not change even when a broker does.
Demat accounts versus trading accounts
Before you count, it helps to be clear about what you are counting. A trading account is the account through which you place buy and sell orders with a broker. A demat account is the account that actually holds your shares, bonds, and other securities in electronic form with a depository. The two are usually opened together, but they are distinct, and it is the demat account that the depositories track and that the CAS reports.
This distinction matters for the count. You might have signed up with several brokers, each of which opened a trading account and a linked demat account for you. It is the demat side that shows up on the CAS. Mutual fund units held directly in Statement of Account form, without a demat account, appear in a separate part of the CAS, so a full read of the statement also tells you where your mutual fund holdings sit.
The CAS is generated monthly if you transacted in any demat account or mutual fund folio during that month, and half-yearly if there were no transactions in the period. Either version lists all the accounts registered against your PAN, so any reasonably recent statement will answer the question.
Method 1: Download the CAS from the CDSL portal
The most direct route is the CDSL CAS portal, which reports across both depositories. The seven steps in the procedure box above are expanded here.
Open the login page at cdslindia.com/cas/logincas.aspx in a web browser. You will be asked for three details: your PAN, one 16-digit demat account number, and your date of birth. Enter your PAN in uppercase, because the statement will not open if the PAN is typed in lowercase. For the 16-digit demat account number, you can use any one account that you already know is yours; it is used only to authenticate you, after which the statement reveals the complete list. If you do not have even one demat number handy, use the DigiLocker route described below instead.
After you submit these details, the portal sends a one-time password to the mobile number and email registered with the depository. Enter the OTP and submit it. Then click Download CAS, choose the statement period you want, and click Search. The generated statement opens with a summary that lists each demat account held with CDSL and NSDL, showing the depository, the participant, and the account number for each. Counting these entries tells you both how many accounts you hold and which depository and broker each one belongs to. Use the download or email icon to keep a copy for your records.
Method 2: Get the CAS through DigiLocker
If you prefer not to use the depository portal, or you do not have a demat number to hand, you can pull the same statement through DigiLocker , the Government of India document wallet. This route works well because it authenticates you through your existing DigiLocker login rather than through a demat number.
Log in at digilocker.gov.in and open Search Documents. Search for the issuer CDSL, and from the list of available documents select Consolidated Account Statement. You will be prompted to enter your 16-digit demat ID and your PAN, after which you click Get Document. DigiLocker fetches the statement and stores it in your Documents section, from where you can view or download it. The list of accounts inside is identical to the one you would see through the CDSL portal, since it is the same statement from the same source.
An NSDL-side alternative
CDSL and DigiLocker both surface the consolidated statement that spans both depositories, so for most people one of the two methods above is enough. If you specifically want to work from the NSDL side, NSDL offers its own investor login at eservices.nsdl.com. There you can register for IDeAS, create a user ID and password, and then log in to view and download statements for your NSDL holdings. Because the CAS already consolidates NSDL accounts into the CDSL-issued statement, the IDeAS route is useful mainly as a cross-check or when you want NSDL’s own interface. It does not report your CDSL accounts.
Reading the list: how many, and which ones
Once the statement is open, the header section is what answers your question. For each demat account, the CAS prints the depository name, the depository participant, and the account number. Tally the rows and you have the count. Just as importantly, you can see which broker holds each account, which turns a bare number into an actionable list.
A few things are worth checking as you read:
- Accounts you no longer use. Old accounts opened with brokers you have stopped trading with usually remain open. They will appear here even if you have not logged in for years.
- Zero-holding accounts. An account with no securities still counts as an open account and can still levy annual maintenance charges. The CAS shows it regardless of balance.
- The depository split. Seeing which accounts sit with CDSL and which with NSDL helps when you later want to consolidate or transfer holdings, because transfers within the same depository work differently from transfers across depositories.
If you want a second, account-level view of what a specific account holds and who its registered owner details are, the client master report and the statement of holdings give you the per-account detail that complements the consolidated count.
What to do once you know the number
Discovering that you hold three or four demat accounts when you actively use only one is common. You have a few options.
If the extra accounts are genuinely yours and simply unused, you can close them by submitting a closure request to the concerned broker, ideally after moving out any remaining holdings. If you would rather keep the securities but tidy up, you can transfer holdings into your main account and then close the rest; our guide on how to merge or consolidate demat accounts with Zerodha covers the transfer mechanics for that broker. Some investors deliberately keep a secondary demat account for specific purposes such as ring-fencing long-term holdings, so more than one account is not automatically a problem, as long as you know it is there and are comfortable with the maintenance costs.
If an account on the statement is one you do not recognise at all, treat it seriously. Review the participant and account details, and raise the matter with both the depository and the depository participant named against it. Keeping a saved copy of the CAS makes that follow-up easier.
For a broader understanding of how demat accounts, depositories, and participants fit together in the Indian market structure, see our explainer on demat accounts and depositories .
Frequently asked questions
The FAQs above answer the most common questions about counting demat accounts, including how the CAS spans both depositories, whether you can hold more than one account, and why an unfamiliar account might appear against your PAN.