How the F&O expiry calendar works

The F&O expiry calendar in India runs on a fixed weekday rule set by the Securities and Exchange Board of India rather than on a list you memorise. Every derivative on the National Stock Exchange expires on a Tuesday and every derivative on the Bombay Stock Exchange expires on a Thursday, a split that took effect on 1 September 2025 under the SEBI circular dated 26 May 2025. Learn the rule and you can place any contract on a calendar without looking up a date.

This article explains the rule, not a hardcoded table. Expiry tables go stale the moment a holiday shifts a date or an exchange recalibrates a contract, so the durable thing to know is the structure: which weekday each exchange uses, the difference between the weekly and monthly tenor, which indices carry a weekly contract, and how a trading holiday moves an expiry earlier. Once you hold those four pieces, you can read any Kite contract symbol and know exactly when it dies.

Conflict-of-interest disclosure. This article 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 page does not carry it and earns no referral commission from the procedure described here.

The two-weekday rule

Before September 2025, almost every Indian index and stock derivative expired on a Thursday, a convention that ran for about 25 years. SEBI ended the single-day pileup. Its circular of 26 May 2025 told each exchange to pick one of two fixed expiry days, Tuesday or Thursday, and apply it to its benchmark weekly and to every other derivative it lists. The NSE chose Tuesday. The BSE chose Thursday. The change went live on 1 September 2025, with contracts opened before 29 August 2025 running out on their old schedule and every new contract following the revised weekday.

The split does one structural thing: it separates the two exchanges’ expiry events by two days, so they no longer compress liquidity and volatility into the same session. An NSE option holder now gets Friday, Monday and Tuesday to adjust into expiry; a BSE option holder gets Wednesday and Thursday. The rule is exchange-wide, not index-specific: a single-stock future on the NSE expires Tuesday for the same reason a Nifty weekly does.

Weekly versus monthly tenor

Two tenors trade side by side, and they expire on the same weekday but at different frequencies.

A weekly contract expires every week on the exchange expiry weekday. Only index options carry a weekly tenor, and after the November 2024 contraction only one index per exchange does. The Nifty 50 weekly expires every Tuesday on the NSE; the Sensex weekly expires every Thursday on the BSE. A fresh weekly is introduced as the near one expires, so at any time several consecutive weekly expiries are listed.

A monthly contract expires once a month, on the last occurrence of the exchange weekday in that calendar month. The monthly Nifty, every monthly stock future and option, and the monthly contracts on Bank Nifty and the other indices expire on the last Tuesday of the month on the NSE. Everything monthly on the BSE expires on the last Thursday. Three monthly serial contracts trade at once: the near month, the next month and the far month, so you can take a position up to roughly three months out.

The single rule that ties them together: find the right weekday for the exchange, then take this week’s occurrence for a weekly or the month’s last occurrence for a monthly. For the decay and liquidity differences between the two tenors, see weekly versus monthly expiry .

One weekly index per exchange

Until 20 November 2024 the NSE and BSE between them ran five weekly index expiries across the week: Nifty Financial Services on Tuesday, Nifty Midcap Select and Bankex on Wednesday, Bank Nifty and Nifty 50 on Thursday, and Sensex on Friday. That calendar is gone. As part of the SEBI October 2024 derivatives framework , each exchange was restricted to a single weekly index expiry on its benchmark. The cutover, documented in detail under the weekly expiry contraction of November 2024 , reduced five weeklies to two.

The two survivors are the Nifty 50 weekly on the NSE and the Sensex weekly on the BSE. The discontinued weeklies, Bank Nifty , Nifty Financial Services, Nifty Midcap Select, Nifty Next 50 and Bankex, kept their monthly contracts. Bank Nifty, the most actively traded of the discontinued set, now trades only as a monthly contract expiring the last Tuesday of the month; the detail sits in the phaseout of Bank Nifty weekly options .

Sources: SEBI circular dated 26 May 2025; SEBI Measures to Strengthen the Index Derivatives Framework, 1 October 2024; NSE and BSE implementation circulars, November 2024 and 2025.

Reading the expiry off the contract

The contract symbol carries its own expiry. On Kite, a Nifty weekly option reads as the index name, the year, the month or week marker, the strike and the option type, for example a string that resolves to the Tuesday of that week. A monthly contract carries the month code and resolves to the last Tuesday of that month on the NSE. The options chain on Kite groups the strikes under their expiry date, so you can read the exact date directly above the chain rather than parsing the symbol.

Two checks before you place an order. First, confirm the tenor: a near weekly and a near monthly can both show as the closest expiry, and on the last week of an NSE month they coincide, since the last Tuesday is both the final weekly and the monthly expiry. Second, confirm the exchange: an NSE position resolves to a Tuesday and a BSE position to a Thursday, so a strategy built across both exchanges has its legs expiring two days apart, which matters for any hedge or calendar spread.

Holiday shifts

The weekday rule has one adjustment: if the scheduled expiry day is a trading holiday, the contract expires on the previous trading day. If the last Tuesday of an NSE month falls on a holiday, the monthly contract expires the working day before, usually the Monday. The same applies to a weekly: a Tuesday holiday pulls that week’s Nifty weekly back to the prior session, and a Thursday holiday pulls the Sensex weekly to the Wednesday.

You do not compute these shifts yourself. The NSE and BSE each publish a circular at the start of the calendar year listing every holiday and the resulting holiday-adjusted expiry dates for the year, and they issue a fresh circular if a special holiday is declared mid-year. The clearing corporations, NSE Clearing and Indian Clearing Corporation, settle against those published dates. The practical rule for a trader: never assume an expiry date in a week that contains a market holiday; check the exchange holiday circular.

Why the calendar changed

The two reforms behind the current calendar both trace to retail loss data. SEBI’s September 2024 study found that more than 90 per cent of individual F&O traders lost money over FY22 to FY24, with aggregate retail losses running to about Rs 1.81 trillion over three years, and that ultra-short-dated weekly options were the dominant loss vector. The one-weekly-per-exchange restriction of November 2024 removed the daily rotation of weekly expiries that had structured intra-day retail speculation across every weekday.

The May 2025 weekday standardisation addressed a second problem: with NSE and BSE both clustering expiries on Thursday, expiry-day volatility and order-book stress concentrated in a single session across both venues. Splitting the exchanges to Tuesday and Thursday spread that stress across the week. The BSE’s Thursday slot, alone on that day, drew volume; its share of index-derivatives premium turnover rose through 2025 while the NSE kept the larger overall derivatives share. Neither change altered the monthly-contract mechanics or the physical settlement of stock F&O ; both apply only to the index-options expiry structure.

Practical use of the rule

For a working trader, the calendar reduces to a short procedure. Identify the exchange your contract trades on, NSE or BSE. Apply its weekday, Tuesday or Thursday. Choose the tenor, this week for a weekly or the month’s last weekday for a monthly. Check whether that week holds a market holiday and pull the date back a session if it does. That sequence places any Indian F&O contract on a calendar without a lookup table.

The rule also governs the riskier decisions. An option held into its final session decays fastest on expiry day, so the expiry-day options trading profile is sharpest on Tuesday for NSE positions and Thursday for BSE positions. A stock option left open into its last Tuesday or Thursday goes to physical settlement , not cash, which is the single most expensive mistake the calendar can cause; the consequence sits in what happens to unsquared options at expiry . Knowing the date is the first defence against both.

See also

• Weekly versus monthly expiry
• Weekly expiry contraction (November 2024)
• Nifty weekly expiry on Zerodha
• Sensex weekly expiry on Zerodha
• The phaseout of Bank Nifty weekly options
• What happens to unsquared options at expiry
• Expiry day options trading
• Physical settlement of stock F&O
• SEBI F&O entry barrier rules 2024
• Corporate-action adjustments on F&O contracts
• Nifty 50 index
• Sensex index
• Bank Nifty index
• National Stock Exchange
• Bombay Stock Exchange
• NSE Clearing
• Securities and Exchange Board of India
• Zerodha
• Kite by Zerodha
• How to use the options chain on Kite
• Futures and options
• Zerodha F&O segment
• How to roll over an F&O position on Zerodha
• Do not exercise option
• STT on options exercise

External references

• 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
• NSE: Equity derivatives contract specifications
• BSE: Derivatives segment circulars and contract specifications
• Zerodha support: F&O expiry and trading FAQs

References

1. 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.
2. Securities and Exchange Board of India, “Measures to Strengthen the Index Derivatives Framework,” circular dated 1 October 2024, sebi.gov.in.
3. 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.
4. National Stock Exchange of India, equity derivatives contract specifications and annual expiry-calendar circulars, nseindia.com, accessed June 2026.
5. BSE Limited, derivatives segment contract specifications and expiry-day implementation circulars, bseindia.com, accessed June 2026.