The DP charge is the fee that arrives after you sell.

Every DP charge has the same skeleton. The depository charges the depository participant a per-debit fee: CDSL publishes ₹3.5 for a male holder and ₹3.25 for a female holder, the ₹0.25 difference also applying to mutual fund and bond ISINs at the brokers that mention it. The depository participant then adds its own charge, and 18% GST applies to the total. What most brokers publish is only the resulting single figure.

Every other broker in our set publishes one figure with no split, so the depository portion inside it cannot be verified from that broker’s own pages.

That is not a criticism of any of them: a single combined figure is a legitimate way to publish a fee. But the depository portion inside those figures cannot be verified from the broker’s own page, and this page does not fill that gap with a guess. Your monthly statement is the place to look, because it itemises what was deducted.

STT on equity delivery is 0.1% of the value and is charged on both sides, so a sell carries it, while stamp duty is buy side only, so a sell does not carry it at all. The NSE transaction charge is 0.00307% per trade from 1 March 2026. The SEBI turnover fee is ₹10 per crore and IPFT is ₹0.01 per crore. GST at 18% applies to brokerage, transaction charges, SEBI fees, IPFT and the DP charge.

Those rates come from Upstox’s own rate card, read on 16 September 2026.

The GST line differs by column. Upstox charges 18% on the ₹20 brokerage, the ₹20 DP charge, the ₹0.31 transaction charge and the ₹0.01 SEBI fee, which is ₹7.26. Groww charges 18% on ₹10 brokerage, ₹20 DP, ₹0.31 and ₹0.01, which is ₹5.46.

Zerodha charges 18% only on the transaction charge and the SEBI fee, because its brokerage is zero and its ₹15.34 DP figure already includes its own GST, which is why the line reads ₹0.06.

Upstox’s ₹57.58 on a ₹10,000 sale is dominated by two fixed charges, ₹20 of brokerage and ₹20 of DP charge. Zerodha’s ₹25.72 is roughly half DP charge and half statutory. On a sale this size, the choice of broker moves the total by ₹31.86 between the highest and the lowest column.

The ₹50,000 sale is spread across five scrips, and the DP charge is five times the single-scrip figure: ₹100 at Upstox and Groww before GST, ₹76.70 at Zerodha. The same ₹50,000 spread across ten scrips would pay it ten times, and in one scrip it would pay once.

The value of the sale is the same in both cases; the count of debits is not. That is why the number of lines on your sell order matters more to this charge than the size of the order.

Groww’s published threshold is a debit value under ₹100, where the Groww portion of the DP charge is nil and only the depository fee applies. At ₹99 the total comes to ₹10.13, which is 10% of the sale value, because three fixed charges are stacked on a very small trade: the ₹5 minimum brokerage, the ₹3.50 depository fee and the GST on both.

At exactly ₹100 the debit is no longer under ₹100 on the published wording, so the ₹16.50 Groww portion applies and the total rises to ₹29.60. If a sale of yours lands on that line, confirm the charge on Groww’s pricing page before you place the order.

Read those two columns as a general lesson: small sales are expensive in percentage terms at every broker, because the fixed parts of the bill do not shrink with the order. Share.Market publishes a comparable small-value tier, ₹3.50 per instruction per ISIN where the transaction value is under ₹100, and the ₹2 minimum brokerage on its equity rows applies on top.

BSDA saves you the annual charge while your holdings stay inside the threshold, and it does nothing for the cost of selling: if your holdings are under ₹4 lakh, the AMC on that account should be nil, and the DP charge on each sale is whatever your broker publishes.

The AMC rules, the ₹4 lakh and ₹10 lakh thresholds and the change that took effect on 31 March 2026, when suspended, delisted and Zero Coupon Zero Principal securities stopped counting toward the threshold, are set out in full in what BSDA means for your account.