Nifty weekly expiry on Zerodha
Nifty 50 weekly options are the National Stock Exchange surviving weekly benchmark, the single weekly index contract the NSE is permitted to run under the Securities and Exchange Board of India one-weekly-per-exchange rule of November 2024. They are options on the Nifty 50 , the NSE 50-stock benchmark, expiring every Tuesday since 1 September 2025, cash-settled, and the most actively traded index option in India, listed on Zerodha in the NSE F&O segment on Kite .
When SEBI restricted each exchange to one weekly index expiry, the NSE kept the Nifty 50 and discontinued its Bank Nifty, FinNifty, Nifty Midcap Select and Nifty Next 50 weeklies. The Nifty weekly then moved from its 25-year-old Thursday slot to Tuesday in the September 2025 weekday standardisation. This article sets out the expiry day, the lot size, the cash settlement, why the contract carries the deepest liquidity in the Indian options market, and how Zerodha lists it.
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Expiry day and the move from Thursday to Tuesday
The Nifty weekly expires every Tuesday. For about 25 years it expired Thursday, the day so identified with expiry that traders treated the two as synonyms. The SEBI circular dated 26 May 2025 required each exchange to fix one expiry weekday, Tuesday or Thursday, and the NSE chose Tuesday for every derivative it lists. The change went live on 1 September 2025, with contracts opened before 29 August 2025 finishing on the old Thursday schedule and every new contract expiring Tuesday.
The weekday rule covers the whole NSE derivatives book: weekly Nifty on Tuesday, monthly Nifty on the last Tuesday of the month, and every monthly stock and index contract also on the last Tuesday. A fresh weekly contract lists as the near one expires, so several consecutive Tuesday expiries trade at once. If a scheduled Tuesday is a trading holiday, the contract expires on the previous trading day, and the NSE publishes the holiday-adjusted dates by circular at the start of each year. The general structure is in how the F&O expiry calendar works .
Lot size and the Rs 15 lakh notional floor
The Nifty 50 lot was 25 until November 2024. SEBI’s October 2024 derivatives framework raised the minimum contract notional from about Rs 5 lakh to a band of roughly Rs 15 lakh to Rs 20 lakh, and the NSE raised the Nifty lot from 25 to 75 so the contract value would clear the floor.
The lot is a function of the index level: notional equals the Nifty level times the lot, and the exchange sets the lot to keep the notional inside the prescribed band. With the Nifty near 24,000 a lot of 75 puts the notional around Rs 18 lakh. As the index appreciated through 2025 the notional pushed toward the upper limit, so the NSE recalibrated the Nifty lot downward in late 2025; the lot is reviewed roughly semi-annually against average index levels. Read the current lot from the Kite contract before trading, because the margin you post scales directly with it. The margin computation is in SPAN margin on Zerodha .
| Parameter | Nifty 50 weekly option |
|---|---|
| Underlying | Nifty 50, 50-stock benchmark |
| Exchange | National Stock Exchange (NSE) |
| Weekly expiry | Every Tuesday since 1 September 2025 |
| Monthly expiry | Last Tuesday of the month |
| Lot size | Raised 25 to 75 in November 2024, recalibrated since |
| Settlement | Cash, against Nifty closing value |
| Kite segment | NSE F&O (NFO) |
Sources: SEBI Measures to Strengthen the Index Derivatives Framework, 1 October 2024; SEBI expiry-day circular, 26 May 2025; NSE equity derivatives contract specifications, accessed June 2026.
Cash settlement
A Nifty option is cash-settled. On expiry, an in-the-money option is settled against the Nifty closing value: the holder receives the intrinsic value, the writer pays it, and no shares move because the underlying is an index. An out-of-the-money option lapses worthless. The same mechanism applies to the Sensex weekly and stands in contrast to a single-stock option, which goes to physical settlement and a delivery obligation.
A forgotten in-the-money Nifty option therefore costs the cash settlement and its charges, not a stock delivery. The securities transaction tax on an exercised option is computed on the intrinsic value at settlement and is generally higher than the STT you would pay squaring off the position, so for most strategies it is cheaper to close an in-the-money index option before Tuesday’s close than to let it settle. The full sequence is in what happens to unsquared options at expiry .
Liquidity
The Nifty weekly is the deepest options market in India. Before November 2024 the NSE ran five index weeklies; the contraction left the Nifty weekly as the only NSE weekly, and the displaced volume from the discontinued Bank Nifty, FinNifty, Nifty Midcap Select and Nifty Next 50 weeklies concentrated into it. The result is the tightest bid-ask spreads of any Indian index option, particularly in the at-the-money strikes in the final two sessions, and the deepest order book at each strike.
That liquidity has three practical effects. Entry and exit slippage on at-the-money Nifty strikes is small relative to other contracts, so a position can be sized larger before market impact bites. Multi-leg strategies, straddles, strangles, spreads, fill closer to their theoretical net price because every leg has a deep book. And the open interest on Nifty weekly strikes is large enough that the strike-wise distribution carries information, feeding the put-call ratio and max-pain readings that traders watch into expiry. The flip side is that the same concentration raises systemic risk: an expiry-day move of more than about 2 per cent on the Nifty now moves a larger aggregate short-option book than five separate weeklies did, so the tail loss is larger.
How Zerodha lists Nifty options
Nifty options trade in the NSE F&O segment, shown as NFO on Kite , and need the F&O segment activated on your account, covered in how to activate F&O on Zerodha . Search the Nifty derivative in the Kite marketwatch, open the options chain , and the Tuesday expiries appear as selectable dates above the strikes, with the lot size and expiry date shown directly so you confirm both before ordering. Nifty strikes are spaced at 50-point intervals around the money, finer than Sensex strikes because the index level is lower.
One coincidence to note: in the last week of the month the final weekly Nifty and the monthly Nifty both expire on the same last Tuesday, so that session carries the combined open interest of both tenors, and the weekly versus monthly expiry liquidity stacks into a single date.
Charges, margin and risk
Selling a Nifty option requires SPAN plus exposure margin plus the extreme loss margin , including the 2 per cent expiry-day add-on from the October 2024 framework. Buying requires only the premium, which can decay to zero by Tuesday. The trade charges, brokerage, STT, exchange transaction charges, GST, SEBI and stamp duty, are in Zerodha F&O charges ; the STT on options sale rose to 0.1 per cent of premium on the sell side from 1 October 2024 under the STT hike , and to 0.15 per cent from 1 April 2026.
The governing risk warning applies in full. SEBI’s September 2024 study found more than 90 per cent of individual F&O traders lost money over FY22 to FY24, with weekly options the dominant loss vector, detailed in the SEBI study on retail F&O losses . A short Nifty call carries theoretically unlimited loss and a short put carries large loss, both concentrated into the high-gamma final session each Tuesday. Size against an adverse expiry-day move of more than 2 per cent, not against an average week.
See also
- How the F&O expiry calendar works
- Weekly versus monthly expiry
- Sensex weekly expiry on Zerodha
- The phaseout of Bank Nifty weekly options
- Weekly expiry contraction (November 2024)
- Nifty 50 index
- National Stock Exchange
- Sensex index
- Bank Nifty index
- Securities and Exchange Board of India
- Expiry day options trading
- What happens to unsquared options at expiry
- Physical settlement of stock F&O
- STT on options exercise
- Open interest
- Put-call ratio
- Max pain theory
- Theta decay
- SPAN margin on Zerodha
- Extreme Loss Margin (ELM)
- Zerodha F&O charges
- STT hike on F&O (October 2024)
- SEBI F&O entry barrier rules 2024
- SEBI 90 per cent retail F&O loss study
- Zerodha
- Kite by Zerodha
- How to use the options chain on Kite
- How to activate F&O on Zerodha
External references
- NSE: Equity derivatives contract specifications
- SEBI: Final Settlement Day (Expiry Day) for Equity Derivatives, circular dated 26 May 2025
- SEBI: Measures to Strengthen the Index Derivatives Framework, 1 October 2024
- Zerodha support: F&O trading FAQs
- Zerodha Varsity: Options theory for professional trading
References
- Securities and Exchange Board of India, “Final Settlement Day (Expiry Day) for Equity Derivative Contracts,” circular dated 26 May 2025, sebi.gov.in, accessed June 2026.
- Securities and Exchange Board of India, “Measures to Strengthen the Index Derivatives Framework,” circular dated 1 October 2024, sebi.gov.in.
- National Stock Exchange of India, equity derivatives contract specifications and lot-size circulars, nseindia.com, accessed June 2026.
- Securities and Exchange Board of India, “Study on Profile and Performance of Individual Traders in Equity Futures and Options (F&O) Segment,” September 2024, sebi.gov.in.