What is NEPSE? A plain-English guide to the Nepal Stock Exchange
Updated 25 October 2026 · Nepsense Markets
NEPSE is the Nepal Stock Exchange, the country's only stock exchange. It sits at Singha Durbar Plaza in Kathmandu, and it is the one place where a listed Nepali share changes hands.
Everything else in the market exists to feed it or to clean up after it: your broker's terminal, the depository that holds your shares, the regulator that writes the rules. This guide maps all of it, in the order you'll actually meet it.
What NEPSE is, and how old it is
NEPSE's history is shorter than most people assume. Nepal's first securities body, the Securities Exchange Center, was set up in 1976. In 1993 it was converted into Nepal Stock Exchange Limited under the Securities Exchange Act, and the trading floor opened on 13 January 1994 — 29 Poush 2050 on the Bikram Sambat calendar.
It trades more than shares. Government bonds, corporate debentures and mutual fund units are listed there too, and every one of them is held electronically. There are no paper certificates left in the system.
By Nepsense's records, 281 companies and 45 mutual fund schemes were listed at the 16 October 2026 close, and the listed companies were worth about Rs 4,52,405 crore (Rs 4,524 arba) combined.
Who owns NEPSE
NEPSE is not a private company chasing your attention. Its paid-up capital is Rs 1 billion, held like this:
| Shareholder | Stake |
|---|---|
| Government of Nepal | 58.66% |
| Rastriya Banijya Bank | 11.23% |
| Employees Provident Fund | 10.00% |
| Nepal Rastra Bank | 9.50% |
| Other shareholders | 10.60% |
The government controls it and the central bank sits inside it. That's why the exchange behaves like infrastructure. It publishes prices, runs the matching engine and enforces the rules. It doesn't sell you anything.
Who does what: SEBON, CDSC, brokers, and the rest
Five names come up constantly and they are not interchangeable. Knowing which one owns which problem saves you a wasted morning.
- SEBON — the Securities Board of Nepal, the regulator, working under the Securities Act 2006. It licenses brokers, approves public issues and writes the trading rules.
- NEPSE — runs the exchange, the matching engine and the index.
- CDSC — CDS and Clearing Limited, NEPSE's depository and clearing subsidiary. It holds your shares in demat form, runs MeroShare, clears and settles every trade, and withholds capital gains tax at settlement.
- Your broker — a licensed member of NEPSE with a broker number. You place orders through the broker's Trade Management System, or TMS.
- Nepal Rastra Bank and the Inland Revenue Department — the central bank is a shareholder and its rules touch the money side; the IRD owns the tax side.
If an order won't go through, it's your broker or the TMS. If your shares haven't arrived, it's CDSC and the settlement clock. If a rule changed, it's SEBON.
How the NEPSE Index is calculated
The NEPSE Index is a capitalisation-weighted index of every stock listed on the exchange. In plain words: multiply each company's share price by its number of listed shares to get its market value, add all of those up, and express the total as a number you can compare across days.
Because it's weighted by size, the biggest companies pull hardest. Nepal's market is bank-heavy, so the index leans on commercial banks more than on any other sector. A quiet day for a large bank can matter more to the number than a dramatic day in a small hydropower counter.
NEPSE publishes four headline indices: the NEPSE Index, the Sensitive Index, the Float Index and the Sensitive Float Index. The plain NEPSE Index is what people mean when they say "the market". As of October 2026, SEBON has proposed a new benchmark index built on free-float shares.
Our own records run from July 1997 to 16 October 2026 — 6,615 trading days. The index closed at 2,634.17 on that last day. Its all-time closing high is 3,198.19, set on 18 August 2021. Its lowest close in the data is 156.43, from 2 June 1998.
One year makes the point better than any definition. The index ended 2025 at 2,633.76 and sat at 2,634.17 on 16 October 2026 — four-tenths of a point apart. Over the same stretch it touched 2,960.40 and 2,513.42, a range of roughly 18%. A flat index is not a flat market.
Two more numbers worth keeping. The deepest fall in the record is 75.2%, from 1,175.38 on 31 August 2008 to 292 on 15 June 2011. And the 2021 peak gave back 43.2% by 25 September 2022. A three-decade index has been cut in half before. That's not a warning, it's a description.
You can see where it sits right now on today's NEPSE index.
The sub-indices, and why the headline number hides things
NEPSE sorts every listed security into 16 sectors, each with its own index. The equity sectors you'll hear named most:
- Commercial Banks
- Development Banks
- Finance Companies
- Hydropower
- Investment
- Life Insurance, and Non-Life Insurance
- Microfinance
- Mutual Funds
- Manufacturing and Processing
- Hotels and Tourism
- Trading, and Others
Preference shares, promoter shares and corporate debentures make up the rest of the 16.
Here's the part beginners miss. The NEPSE Index is a weighted average, and a weighted average can sit still while its parts move hard in opposite directions. Two sectors can each swing several percent and cancel each other out. If you hold hydropower and the index is flat, the index has told you nothing about your portfolio.
Browse the sectors to see which companies sit in each one.
How a trade gets from your screen to your demat
You need four things before you can buy a single share: a demat account, which gives you your 16-digit BOID; a MeroShare login; a CRN from your bank for C-ASBA; and a TMS login from a broker. The demat holds your shares, MeroShare handles IPO applications and delivery authorisation, and the TMS is where you place the order.
Then the trade itself runs on a clock set by CDSC:
| Day | What happens |
|---|---|
| T | Your buy or sell order matches and executes on NEPSE. |
| T+1 | You arrange payment through your broker; the seller's shares are blocked for delivery through EDIS; CDSC nets each broker's obligations. |
| T+2 | Funds and shares are exchanged. Your demat is credited, the seller is paid, capital gains tax is withheld and broker commission is settled. |
Two consequences follow, and both surprise people. First, NEPSE is a delivery market: you cannot sell shares that haven't settled in your demat yet, so there is no day trading. Second, cash from a sale lands on T+2, not the same afternoon. Sell on Monday and the money arrives Wednesday, unless a public holiday sits in between, because the count runs in trading days.
CDSC also runs a settlement guarantee fund and a close-out step, so if a broker or counterparty fails to deliver, settlement still completes. You'll never see that machinery unless something goes wrong.
SEBON has committed to a trial of intraday trading and a gradual move to T+1. No start date is fixed. Until then, T+2 is the clock. The full T+2 walkthrough covers the holiday and festival edge cases.
What a round trip actually costs
Four charges, not one. Two of them hit you on the way in and the way out.
| Charge | When | Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Broker commission | Buy and sell | 0.36% up to Rs 50,000; 0.33% to Rs 5 lakh; 0.31% to Rs 20 lakh; 0.27% to Rs 1 crore; 0.24% above Rs 1 crore |
| SEBON fee | Buy and sell | 0.015% of trade value |
| DP charge | Per scrip, per settlement | Flat Rs 25 |
| Capital gains tax | Sell, on profit only | 3.75% if held over 365 days; 5% if 365 days or less; 10% for institutions |
The commission slab applies to the whole trade value, not in bands — a Rs 1 lakh trade pays 0.33% on the full lakh. There's a Rs 10 minimum per transaction, and since 2025 SEBON treats these as ceiling rates, so a broker may legally charge less.
Of the commission you pay, roughly 79.4% goes to the broker, 20% to NEPSE and a sliver to SEBON. The other three charges are exactly what they say.
The flat Rs 25 is the one that distorts behaviour. It doesn't scale, so on a Rs 2,000 trade it costs you over 1% before any commission is added. Small lots are expensive on NEPSE in a way the percentage table never shows.
On tax: since 22 September 2026 a resident individual pays 3.75% on gains from shares held more than 365 days, and 5% on gains from shares held 365 days or fewer. CDSC withholds it at settlement, so you never write a separate cheque. If you've read 7.5% and 10% somewhere, those were the rates between 17 July and 21 September 2026. Losses still can't be set off against gains on another scrip — that was promised in September 2026 but isn't in force. The capital gains tax guide has the weighted-average cost maths.
The rules that shape the tape in 2026
SEBON rewrote the circuit breakers and price bands on 20 April 2026 under the Securities Trading Operation (Fourth Amendment) Regulations. If you learned the old numbers, they're dead. The current rules:
- Individual stock: 15% maximum move in a day, up from 10%.
- Pre-open session: orders must sit within 5% of the previous close, up from 2%.
- Index moves 5% within the first two hours: trading halts for 15 minutes.
- Index reaches 8%: trading is suspended for the rest of the day.
How often does that actually bite? In our records since 2015, 41 sessions closed 4% or more away from the previous close, 21 closed 5% or more, and none closed 8% or more. The average absolute daily move over the last 250 sessions is 0.72%. A halt is an event, not a habit.
The session itself is Monday to Friday, 11:00 to 15:00, after the trading week moved off Sunday to Thursday in April 2026. Pre-open runs 10:30 to 11:00, with orders accepted from 10:30 to 10:45 to set the opening price. Since 13 August 2026 the TMS also accepts after-market orders between 17:00 and 10:00, which queue rather than execute.
The full session timetable and how the circuit breakers work take each of these further.
Where to look next
Reading about an exchange is not the same as watching one. The live NEPSE index shows where the market is right now, the NEPSE chart puts thirty years of it on one screen, and a stock page like NABIL shows what a single scrip looks like with real order flow behind it.
If you want the charts, the screeners and the floorsheet in one place, that's what a Nepsense account is for. Start with the free plan and open the chart of a stock you already hold. You'll learn more in ten minutes of looking than in ten pages of definition.
Key takeaways
- NEPSE is Nepal's only stock exchange, trading since 13 January 1994, at Singha Durbar Plaza in Kathmandu.
- The Government of Nepal owns 58.66% of it; Nepal Rastra Bank, Rastriya Banijya Bank and the Employees Provident Fund hold most of the rest.
- SEBON regulates, NEPSE runs the exchange, CDSC holds and settles, and your broker's TMS is where your order starts.
- The NEPSE Index is capitalisation-weighted across all listed stocks, so large banks dominate it. Sixteen sector indices show what the headline number hides.
- Trades settle T+2 in a delivery-only market: no day trading, and sale proceeds arrive two trading days later.
- A round trip costs broker commission of 0.24% to 0.36%, a 0.015% SEBON fee, Rs 25 per scrip, and capital gains tax of 3.75% or 5% on a profitable sale.
- Since 20 April 2026, single stocks move at most 15% a day, and the index halts for 15 minutes at 5% and closes for the day at 8%.