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Yash Agarwal

← ResearchResearch7 min read

India's demat boom: how much more money went into stocks

Demat accounts grew almost six times since 2020, and households put in roughly seven times as much fresh money as in the 2000s. But individuals still directly own less than a tenth of the market.

India went from 4 crore demat accounts in 2020 to nearly 24 crore in 2026. A simple look at how many real investors that is, how much they put in compared with the 2000s, and who owns the market now.

In March 2020, India had about 4 crore demat accounts. A demat account keeps your shares in electronic form, the way a bank account keeps your money. By August 2026, India had 23.8 crore, almost six times as many in six years.1

But a jump in accounts is not the same as a jump in investors, or in money. How many real people joined? How much money did they put in, compared with the 2000s? And did they end up owning more of the market?

The account boom

Demat accounts at the end of each financial year (crore)
05101520252001200520092013201720212026

NSDL and CDSL combined, at the end of March each year.Source: NSE Indian Securities Market Review; SEBI Handbook of Statistics 2025-26

The chart adds up accounts at NSDL and CDSL. These are depositories, companies that keep demat accounts. For twenty years the line barely moved. In March 2001 there were 38 lakh demat accounts. Over the whole decade to March 2010, India added about 1.3 crore accounts.

Then the pandemic hit, trading apps made opening an account easy, and the line took off. In FY2025 alone (the year that ended in March 2025), India added 4.1 crore accounts. That is about three times as many as in the entire 2000s.1

Accounts are not people

Many people hold more than one demat account, and many accounts sit unused. So the numbers shrink as you move from accounts to active investors.

NSE is a stock exchange, a market where people buy and sell shares. A unique investor is one person, counted once even if they have more than one account. A mutual fund collects money from many people and invests it for them.

Mid-2026 Count
Demat accounts 23.8 crore
Unique investors on NSE 13.4 crore
Unique mutual fund investors 6.2 crore
Accounts used in the past year 7.8 crore
People who traded on NSE this year 3.55 crore

That means about two thirds of demat accounts sat unused for a whole year.2 Still, the number of real investors is impressive. Unique investors on NSE grew from 3.1 crore in March 2020 to 13.4 crore in July 2026.3 NSE took 14 years to reach its first crore of investors. Going from 12 crore to 13 crore took seven months.

Who the new investors are

New investors look very different from the investors who came before them:3

  • They are younger. The typical new investor is 27 or 28 years old. The median age of all investors fell from 38 in 2020 to 33, and people under 30 went from 23% of investors to 38%. (The median is the middle age: half of investors are younger, and half are older.)
  • More of them are women. Women are now 25% of investors, about one in four.
  • More of them come from outside the big cities. Uttar Pradesh now has the second-most investors of any state, with 11.9% of all investors, up from 7.2% in 2019. In July 2026, about 63% of new investors came from outside India’s 50 biggest investor districts.

How much money went in

The figures below are the best comparison the data allows. Since April 2020, households have put roughly ₹18 lakh crore of fresh money into shares. About ₹12.3 lakh crore of it went in through equity mutual funds, which are funds that buy shares.4 About ₹5.8 lakh crore went in when households bought shares directly on the NSE, including in IPOs.5 An IPO is when a company sells its shares to the public for the first time.

For the whole decade from April 2000 to March 2010, the broadest official figure is about ₹2.5 lakh crore.6 It is not a perfect match. It counts bonds and debt funds too, but leaves out shares bought on the stock exchange. Bonds are loans to companies or governments, and debt funds are mutual funds that invest in such loans.

Fresh money into shares FY01 to FY10 FY21 to FY26
Equity mutual funds ₹1.3 lakh cr ₹12.3 lakh cr
Direct buying on NSE not available ₹5.8 lakh cr
Broadest total ~₹2.5 lakh cr ~₹18 lakh cr

In six years, households put in roughly seven times what they put in over those ten years. Per year, that is about twelve times as much.

But India’s economy is also far bigger than in the 2000s. GDP is the value of everything a country produces in a year. Measured against GDP, households are putting roughly twice as much into shares as they did then, not seven times as much.4

The 2000s had boom years too. In FY2006 and FY2008, the money flowing into equity mutual funds was about 1% of GDP. That is the same level as in FY2026. After the 2008 crash, the 2000s flows collapsed. Today’s flows have stayed large for five years in a row.

Most of the new wealth, though, is not new money. The shares households own, directly and through funds, are now worth about ₹90 lakh crore. NSE estimates that about ₹56 lakh crore of the rise since April 2020 came from share prices going up.7 Roughly three quarters of the new wealth is gains from rising prices, and one quarter is fresh money.

Who owns the market now

The market itself grew enormously. A listed company is one whose shares people can buy and sell on a stock exchange. On the BSE, another stock exchange, the total value of all listed companies was ₹5.7 lakh crore in March 2001. That total rose to ₹113 lakh crore in March 2020, and to about ₹486 lakh crore by July 2026.8

Did all these new investors end up owning a bigger slice of the market?

Who owns NSE-listed companies (% of total market value)
  • Individuals, directly
  • Mutual funds
  • Foreign investors
0510152025200120052010201520202026

At the end of March each year. The 2001 figures cover a much smaller market.Source: NSE India Inc. Ownership Tracker, NSE Market Pulse, August 2026

Mostly, no. Individuals directly owned 8.4% of NSE-listed companies in March 2020. In June 2026, after six years of record sign-ups, they owned 9.5%.9 That is well below the 16.9% of 2001, though the market back then was much smaller. So you cannot compare the two exactly.

The new money went mainly through mutual funds. Mutual funds now own a record 11.6% of NSE-listed companies, up from 7.9% in 2020. Counting shares owned directly and through mutual funds, individuals own a record 19.3% of the market.9

That shift changed who owns India’s market. Domestic institutions are Indian organisations that invest money, such as mutual funds, insurance companies and banks. In the quarter (three months) to March 2025, they owned more of NSE-listed companies than foreign investors did: 17.62% compared with 17.22%. It was the first time this had happened in Prime Database’s records, which go back to 2009.10 By June 2026, foreign investors’ share had fallen to 15.1%, its lowest level in 69 quarters.9

Footnotes

  1. NSDL and CDSL data, from the NSE Indian Securities Market Review (2001 to 2010) and the SEBI Handbook of Statistics 2025-26, Table 55. August 2026 figure from CDSL and NSDL statistics. ↩ ↩2

  2. SEBI Bulletin, August 2026: 7.82 crore active demat accounts (at least one transaction in 12 months) out of 23.44 crore in July 2026; 6.24 crore unique mutual fund investors. The count of people trading on NSE is from NSE Market Pulse, August 2026 (individuals who traded the cash market at least once in the 12 months to July 2026). ↩

  3. NSE, Market Pulse, August 2026, investor profile section. The 63% is my arithmetic from NSE’s figure that the top 50 districts brought 36.7% of new registrations in July 2026. ↩ ↩2

  4. Net inflows into equity-oriented mutual fund schemes: FY2001 to FY2010 from the SEBI Handbook of Statistics 2011, Table 27; FY2021 to FY2026 from the SEBI Handbook 2025-26 (Table 67), AMFI annual reports, and media reports of AMFI data for FY2021. Equity fund inflows also include some money from companies and institutions. Relative to GDP, equity fund inflows were 0.35% of GDP over FY2001 to FY2010 and 0.75% over FY2021 to FY2026, and the broader RBI measure rose from 0.66% to 1.03% (my arithmetic). ↩ ↩2

  5. NSE Market Pulse, August 2026, Table 118: individual investors’ net buying in the NSE cash market plus retail IPO bids, FY2021 to FY2026. SEBI’s household savings study measures direct secondary-market buying differently and shows net selling in some years, so the direct figure is the less certain half of the total. ↩

  6. RBI, Handbook of Statistics on Indian Economy 2025-26, Table 12: household financial savings in shares and debentures, FY2001 to FY2010, from the National Statistics Office. This series includes debentures and all mutual fund units, including debt funds, and leaves out buying on the stock exchange, so it is the broadest available measure rather than an exact one. ↩

  7. NSE Market Pulse, August 2026: individuals’ direct and mutual fund holdings of NSE-listed companies were worth ₹90.3 lakh crore in June 2026, and NSE estimates household equity wealth accretion of about ₹56 lakh crore since April 2020. The three-quarters split is my approximate arithmetic from these NSE figures. ↩

  8. SEBI Handbook of Statistics 2011 and 2025-26 (BSE market capitalisation at the end of March); SEBI Bulletin, August 2026, for July 2026. ↩

  9. NSE India Inc. Ownership Tracker, June 2026 edition, in NSE Market Pulse, August 2026. Early-2000s figures cover a much smaller set of companies (a market worth about ₹6 lakh crore), so compare them with care. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  10. Prime Database, as reported by Business Standard, 2 May 2025. NSE’s own tracker, which uses revised data, dates the crossover to the December 2024 quarter. ↩