NEPSE trading hours: when the market is open, and when it isn't
Updated 25 October 2026 · Nepsense Markets
NEPSE opens at 11:00 and closes at 15:00, Monday to Friday. That's the answer, and if it's the only thing you needed, today's NEPSE index will show you what's happening right now.
The rest of this page is for the parts that catch people out. What happens between 10:30 and 11:00. Why an order you placed on Saturday morning sat there doing nothing. Why the market sometimes stops at 11:40 and doesn't come back. And why shares bought on the last session before Dashain didn't reach your demat for nine days.
Everything below is current as of October 2026. The rules changed twice this year, so a fair amount of what's still written about NEPSE hours is out of date.
NEPSE trading hours at a glance
| Session | Time (NPT) | What actually happens |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-open order entry | 10:30 – 10:45 | Orders placed, changed or cancelled. Nothing executes. Each order must sit within 5% of the previous close. |
| Pre-open matching | 10:45 – 11:00 | Queued orders are matched to set each stock's opening price. The rest of the half hour is buffer. |
| Continuous trading | 11:00 – 15:00 | Live matching on price-time priority. The index, sector indices, gainers and turnover all move here. |
| After-market orders | 17:00 – 10:00 next day | Order entry only. Orders queue for the next session. Nothing executes, no price moves. |
| Closed | 15:00 Friday to 10:30 Monday, and public holidays | No trading, no matching, no price movement. |
Only the continuous session changes prices. Everything else on that table is preparation or queuing, and treating it as trading is how people end up confused about why their order didn't fill.
The Sunday to Thursday week is over
NEPSE moved to a Monday to Friday trading week in April 2026. The old schedule, Sunday to Thursday with Friday and Saturday off, no longer applies. If a guide still lists Sunday to Thursday, it's out of date, and it's probably out of date about the circuit breakers too.
The change came from the government, not the exchange. A Cabinet decision in Chaitra 2082 set the official working week to Monday to Friday, declaring Saturday and Sunday public holidays. NEPSE's board then confirmed that securities trading would run Monday to Friday, Friday included, from 23 Chaitra 2082.
So the market is open on a Friday and closed on a Sunday. Traders who learned the old calendar still turn up on Sunday morning and wonder why nothing is moving. Nothing is broken. It's the weekend.
If you're new to the exchange itself rather than just its hours, start with what NEPSE is and come back.
The pre-open session, and why it matters
Between 10:30 and 10:45 you can place, change or cancel an order, and none of it trades. Every order has to sit within 5% of the previous close, a band that was widened from 2% in April 2026. Once that window shuts, the exchange matches what's queued to work out an opening price for each stock, and the rest of the half hour is buffer before continuous trading starts at 11:00.
Two consequences worth knowing. An order placed at 10:35 helps set the opening price; an order placed at 11:00 chases it. And if you're wrong about direction, pre-open is where you find out. A stock can open at the edge of that 5% band and there's nothing you can do about it until 11:00.
Nothing at all is accepted between 10:00 and 10:30.
Placing orders when the market is shut
Since 13 August 2026 the TMS accepts After Market Orders from 17:00 to 10:00 the following morning. It appears in the terminal as a named session: AFTERMARKET, 17:00:00 to 10:00:00.
Be precise about what this is. Order entry, not trading. Your order queues, nothing matches, and no price moves until the next session opens. The window closes at 10:00 rather than running into pre-open at 10:30, which leaves a half hour where the system takes nothing.
The weekend is where this matters most. An order entered on a Saturday sits in the queue until Monday's pre-open and goes into Monday's book at whatever price Monday opens at. It doesn't get you Friday's close, because Friday's close is gone.
NEPSE holidays
NEPSE is closed every Saturday and Sunday, plus Nepal's public holidays. The exchange publishes an official calendar each year, and for a specific date that's the only list worth trusting. The exact dates move because they follow the Bikram Sambat calendar.
The closures that matter most to traders:
- Dashain — multiple days, including Phulpati, Maha Ashtami, Maha Nawami, Vijaya Dashami and Ekadashi
- Tihar — multiple days, including Laxmi Puja and Bhai Tika
- Chhath Puja
- Nepali New Year (Baishakh 1)
- Buddha Jayanti, Maha Shivaratri, Holi
- Republic Day, Constitution Day, Loktantra Diwas
- Indra Jatra (Kathmandu Valley only)
Dashain is the long one. In 2026 NEPSE was closed from 17 to 23 October for the festival, which made Friday 16 October the last session before the break and Monday 26 October the next one. Nine calendar days with no trading at all.
When the session ends early
Trading hours are the schedule. They're not a promise that all four hours run.
Since 20 April 2026, when the Securities Trading Operation (Fourth Amendment) Regulations took effect, NEPSE runs a two-tier market-wide circuit breaker. If the index moves 5% in either direction within the first two hours of the session, trading halts for 15 minutes. At 8%, the market closes for the rest of the day. Any single stock can move 15% in a day, up from 10% before the change.
A halt freezes everything, not just the stock that moved. Resting orders don't execute while trading is paused, and if the rest-of-day suspension triggers, unmatched orders simply don't fill that session.
The system this replaced was a three-step ladder: 4% for a 20-minute halt, 5% for 40 minutes, 6% and the day was done, with a 10% daily limit on individual stocks. That regime last ran on 18 September 2025. Any of those numbers you still see quoted are obsolete. The mechanics are in NEPSE circuit breaker.
What a holiday does to settlement
Trading hours decide when you can trade. Settlement decides when the shares are actually yours, and it runs on a different clock.
NEPSE settles on T+2. You buy on day T, you pay your broker by T+1, and the shares credit to your demat on T+2, with CDSC netting each broker's obligations in between. You can't sell a share before it settles, which is why there's no day trading on NEPSE.
The part people get wrong: T+2 counts trading days, not calendar days. A weekend or a festival pushes the date out.
Take the Dashain break. Buy on Friday 16 October, the last session before the closure. T+1 isn't Saturday, it's Monday 26 October, the next trading day. T+2 is Tuesday 27 October. Two trading days, nine calendar days, and the cash left your account long before the shares arrived.
It works the same way on a sale. Sell on the last session before a long holiday and the money is two trading days away, not two days away. Even an ordinary Friday is slower than people expect: a Friday trade settles on Tuesday, because T+1 is Monday and T+2 is Tuesday.
The full mechanics are in T+2 settlement on NEPSE.
How many sessions that actually adds up to
Nepsense's own records go back to 20 July 1997, and cover 6,615 trading days to 16 October 2026. Four hours a session, five days a week, minus holidays.
In 2026 to that date, the index has traded 187 sessions. It opened the year at 2,620.92 and closed on 16 October at 2,634.17, having run as high as 2,960.40 and as low as 2,513.42. The average absolute daily move over the last 250 sessions is 0.72%.
Read that against a four-hour window. Most days, very little happens relative to the noise made about them. The index has moved 4% or more in a single session 41 times since 2015, and the four largest single-day falls in the whole record all date from 1998 to 2001. The long-run picture is in NEPSE index history.
A short session rewards preparation. The work is worth doing before 10:30, not at 11:05.
Checking the market time today
Today's NEPSE index shows the current session state, whether that's pre-open, continuous or closed, along with the index, gainers, losers and turnover. Sectors breaks the same session down by industry. The NEPSE chart is where you'd look to see what the last four hours did.
One caution for anything you read outside market hours. The feed freezes on the last close. There's no after-hours trading on NEPSE, so a price you see at 8pm is the day's close, not a live quote, and it won't move again until pre-open the next trading morning.
If you want that session state, your watchlist and your charts in one place before 10:30, that's what a Nepsense account is for.
Key takeaways
- NEPSE trades Monday to Friday, 11:00 to 15:00 NPT. Closed Saturday, Sunday and public holidays.
- The Sunday to Thursday week ended in April 2026. Any guide still listing it is wrong about other things too.
- Pre-open order entry runs 10:30 to 10:45, within 5% of the previous close. Matching sets the opening price, and continuous trading starts at 11:00.
- After Market Orders can be entered from 17:00 to 10:00, but they only queue. Nothing executes until the next session opens.
- Since 20 April 2026, a 5% index move in the first two hours halts trading for 15 minutes, and 8% closes the market for the day. Individual stocks can move 15%.
- Settlement is T+2 in trading days. A festival can stretch two trading days into nine calendar days.
- The last session before the 2026 Dashain break was Friday 16 October. The next was Monday 26 October.