The plain answer
The DP charge is the fee collected when shares leave your demat account on a sell. It is charged once per scrip per day, never on buys, and never on intraday or F&O trades, which do not touch the demat. At Upstox it is ₹20 + GST per scrip per day; at Zerodha ₹15.34 per scrip including GST.
The charge is two fees stacked: the depository's debit fee plus the broker's service fee. That split explains everything else about it, including why the number differs across brokers while the underlying depository fee is nearly identical, and why the charge is flat instead of a percentage of the trade.
For a first-time investor the charge usually shows up uninvited: you sell for the first time, and the contract note carries a line you never saw on any buy. That asymmetry is the whole design. Buys credit shares into the demat for free; only the exit is tolled, because the exit is the one event that makes the depository's machinery move your securities.
When it applies
The trigger is the demat debit. A delivery sell settles by moving shares out of your account, and the DP charge applies at that movement. The rule is one sentence: the charge follows the exit. Everything that enters the account or never touches it is outside the rule.
- Buys: never trigger the charge, because they credit shares in.
- Intraday and F&O: never trigger it, because those positions never enter the demat at all.
- IPO allotments, bonus shares, rights credits: enter free, with the charge waiting for the day you sell them.
- Pledging: carries its own schedule, separate from the sell-side DP charge.
- Off-market transfers: carry a transfer fee instead, again separate.
One more mechanical detail: multiple sell orders of the same scrip on the same day collapse into one debit and one DP charge. The exchange settles the day's net delivery per scrip, so five sells of Reliance on a Tuesday produce a single charge line on Tuesday's contract note.
Profit and loss play no part. The charge applies to a sell that gained, a sell that lost and a sell that recovered exactly the purchase price. It is priced per debit, not per outcome, which is why it appears on losing trades just as surely as on winning ones.
The two layers inside the fee
The depository (NSDL or CDSL) levies its own small debit fee every time securities leave an account, and the broker adds a service fee on top. The published DP charge is the sum, which is why the number differs across brokers even though the underlying depository fee is nearly identical. Zerodha publishes ₹15.34 per scrip including GST, made of ₹3.50 to the depository, ₹9.50 to Zerodha and ₹2.34 of GST. Groww splits its ₹20 into ₹3.50 depository and ₹16.50 Groww.
Which depository sits behind your account depends on the broker's registration, not your choice, and for this fee it barely matters: the two depositories' debit fees are in the same neighbourhood, and the visible difference across brokers comes from the service layer, not the depository layer. That is the useful reading of any DP charge comparison: subtract the depository component mentally, and the rest is the broker's own pricing decision.
The split also matters when you compare brokers, because the service portion is where the difference lives. The depository fee itself is not the broker's to set, which is also why the discount for women as first holder exists: the depository charges less on those debits, and brokers pass the difference through.
A worked split shows the mechanism. On a Groww sell, the published ₹20 is ₹3.50 to the depository and ₹16.50 to Groww; GST on the ₹20 makes ₹23.60 in total. On the same sell at Zerodha, ₹3.50 goes to the depository, only ₹9.50 goes to the broker, and with the ₹2.34 GST the total is ₹15.34. The depository's share is identical; the ₹7 of difference sits entirely in the service layer, which is the one layer a broker sets.
DP charge vs other fees
The demat world has three fees that sound related and are not. The table separates them:
| Fee | What it pays for | When it hits | Who keeps it |
|---|---|---|---|
| DP charge | The debit of securities on a sell | Per scrip per day on sells | Depository + broker |
| AMC | Maintaining the account itself | Yearly (often waived in year one) | The depository, via the DP |
| Brokerage | Executing and clearing the trade | Per executed order | The broker |
The three combine on one day's paperwork without ever being the same thing. A year of holding and two sells produces two brokerage charges, two DP charges and one AMC, each on its own line, each with its own rules. When a charge surprises you, the first question is which of the three it is, and the contract note answers it in the label of the line.
Across brokers
| Broker | DP charge on a sell | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Upstox | ₹20 + GST per scrip per day | Sell side only |
| Zerodha | ₹15.34 per scrip, GST included | Irrespective of quantity |
| Groww | ₹3.50 depository + ₹16.50 Groww | ₹3.25 depository for women first holders |
| Angel One | ₹20 + GST per ISIN | ₹0.25 discount per debit for women first holders |
When you compare, do it on the GST-inclusive number, because that is what leaves your account. Upstox's ₹20 + GST is ₹23.60 in practice, which is the figure to put next to Zerodha's ₹15.34. The two numbers are close, and for most investors the DP charge is not a reason to choose a broker; it is a line to understand, not a decision input on its own.
Worked sells
You sell 50 shares of one company worth ₹2,00,000 through Upstox. The contract note shows one DP charge line: ₹20 plus 18% GST, ₹23.60, for that scrip that day. The same day you sell 10 shares of another company: a second ₹23.60 appears, because it is a second scrip. The charge does not scale with order size or value; it is a flat per-scrip-per-day debit.
A three-scrip day makes the design visible in one line each: selling Company A, Company B and Company C on the same Tuesday produces three DP charge lines of ₹23.60 each, ₹70.80 in total, regardless of whether each sell was ₹2,000 or ₹2,00,000. The day count, not the rupee count, drives the fee.
To see where the DP charge sits among everything else, here is the complete charge line-up on a single ₹50,000 delivery sell at Upstox:
| Charge line | Amount | How it is computed |
|---|---|---|
| Brokerage | ₹20 | ₹20 or 0.1%, whichever is lower |
| STT | ₹50 | 0.1% of the sell value |
| DP charge | ₹23.60 | ₹20 + 18% GST, once for the scrip |
| Exchange transaction charges | ₹1.49 | NSE rate of 0.00297% |
| SEBI fees | ₹0.05 | ₹10 per crore of turnover |
| GST on brokerage and fees | ₹3.88 | 18% on the chargeable lines |
| Total | About ₹99 |
The GST on the DP line is worth seeing once: 18% of ₹20 is ₹3.60, which is why the published ₹20 leaves your account as ₹23.60. The other chargeable lines, brokerage, exchange charges and SEBI fees, carry the same 18%, while STT and stamp duty, being statutory taxes, do not carry GST at all.
Three observations fall out of the table. The DP charge is the second biggest line after STT on a modest sell. The total is dominated by statutory charges nobody negotiates. And every line except the DP charge scales with the order, which is the point of the next section.
Why it is flat, not a percentage
Brokerage and STT are computed on the order value. The DP charge is not, because what it pays for is fixed: processing one debit instruction in the depository system, whether the instruction moves one share or a lakh of them. The same cost structure explains the per-scrip-per-day design, since the depository processes one consolidated debit per scrip per day.
The flat design has an arithmetic consequence worth knowing, not as advice but as a fact you can verify on any contract note. On a ₹2,00,000 sell, the ₹23.60 DP charge is 0.012% of proceeds. On a ₹2,000 sell, the same ₹23.60 is 1.18% of proceeds, before brokerage, STT and the rest. Small sells carry the flat fee's full weight, and the number sits there to read on every note.
Contrast that with a percentage-based charge like STT, which shrinks automatically as the order shrinks. A flat fee never shrinks, which is the entire difference between the two pricing designs in one sentence.
The arithmetic on a genuinely small sell completes the picture. Selling ₹2,000 of one share at Upstox produces roughly ₹28 of total charges: ₹23.60 DP charge, ₹2 STT, ₹2 brokerage, ₹0.06 exchange charges and the GST on the chargeable lines. That is about 1.4% of the proceeds, and the DP charge alone is 1.18%. On small exits, the flat fee, not the percentage ones, is the line doing the work.
Where it shows on your records
The charge is not hidden; it appears in three places. The contract note prints it as its own line, usually labelled DP charges or depository charges, with the GST either inside the figure or on the line below. The ledger in the broker app carries the same entry, so the running total is always visible. And the order window shows the estimated DP charge before you confirm a sell, so the number is known before the trade, not discovered after it.
On the annual statements, the DP charge sits inside the sell-side expenses for delivery trades. When you reconcile a capital gains statement against your own arithmetic, the DP charge is one of the reasons the reported net sale proceeds are a little below the gross sale value, along with sell-side brokerage.
The charge in the calculators
Because the DP charge applies to every delivery sell, the tools on this site include it by default. The brokerage calculator adds the DP line to the sell leg of a delivery trade, and the breakeven calculator uses it when it works out what a position needs to recover before a sell is worthwhile. The estimate shown in the broker's own order window does the same thing at the moment of the trade.
The rule for reading any of them: the DP charge appears once per scrip per day, on the sell side only. If a calculation shows no DP charge on a delivery sell, the number is incomplete; if it shows one on a buy, the tool is wrong. The same check applies to any estimate, however it was produced.
The charge across a year
Individually small, the charge adds up in proportion to how many different holdings you sell. Twelve sells of twelve different scrips in a year produce 12 times the charge: 12 × ₹23.60 is ₹283.20 at Upstox, against 12 × ₹15.34, ₹184.08, at Zerodha. The gap of about ₹99 a year is real money, but it is the size of one brokerage cap per quarter, not a decision that should rearrange anyone's investing.
The number that does change behaviour, if anything, is frequency. The same ₹60,000 of stock sold in one go produces one charge; sold in six monthly pieces of the same company, it still produces one charge per sell day, six in total. The arithmetic is neutral: this page reports it, and you decide what it is worth.
Two accounts, one day
The per-scrip-per-day rule runs per demat account, not per investor. Two accounts at two brokers, each selling the same scrip on the same day, produce two charges: the depository processes each account's debit separately, and each broker passes its own line through.
The counting rule is short enough to memorise. One scrip in one account on one day is one charge; two scrips in one account are two charges; one scrip in two accounts is two charges; two orders of the same scrip in the same account are one charge. Whenever a statement surprises you, count the account and scrip pairs on the sell side, and the charge count follows.
Pledge, transfer and other exit fees
The DP charge has relatives, and the demat fee card is worth seeing whole so nothing gets misattributed to the wrong line:
| Fee | What it is for | When it appears |
|---|---|---|
| DP charge | The debit of securities on a delivery sell | Per scrip per day on sells |
| Pledge fee | Creating or invoking a pledge against your holdings | When you pledge for margin or a loan, per the broker's schedule |
| Off-market transfer fee | Moving shares between demat accounts outside the exchange | Per transfer, per the depository and DP schedule |
| Rematerialisation fee | Converting holdings back to paper certificates | Rare, per the DP schedule |
The sell-side DP charge this page covers is one row of that card. The other rows appear only when you use those services, which most first-time investors never do. The point of the table is attribution: when a fee appears on a statement, the label tells you which row it came from.
How the tariff is set
The charge is not invented per broker. The depository component is part of the depository's own tariff for debiting securities, and the service component is the DP's published pricing, both filed with SEBI as part of the depository system's fee structure. That is why the charge is published on every broker's pricing page rather than hidden inside trade confirmations.
The per-scrip-per-day convention follows the settlement mechanics rather than a marketing decision. The depository settles one consolidated delivery debit per scrip per day for the broker, the broker passes the consolidated charge through, and the result is the rule you see: one scrip, one day, one charge. Everything else on this page, the exemptions, the flat amount and the GST treatment, falls out of that single mechanism.
What people usually get wrong
The DP charge applies on every order
It follows the demat debit: per scrip per day on sells. Buys, intraday and F&O never carry it.
The DP charge is set by my broker alone
It is the depository's debit fee plus the broker's service fee. The depository component is not the broker's to set.
A ₹20 DP charge is negligible
On a ₹2,000 sell it is over 1% of the proceeds before other charges. The flat fee's weight on small sells is plain arithmetic on the contract note.
Receiving bonus or IPO shares costs the DP charge
Credits never carry it. The charge waits for the sell, which is why it is called a charge on the exit.
The published DP charge is what I pay
GST sits on top where the broker quotes a pre-GST figure: ₹20 becomes ₹23.60. Compare GST-inclusive to GST-inclusive.
Questions people ask
Per scrip per day. Five sells of the same share in one day produce one DP charge; sells of three different companies produce three. The charge follows the demat debit, not the order count. Quantity and order value do not enter the calculation at all.
At some brokers, yes: Groww applies the depository's ₹3.25 rate for women as first holder instead of ₹3.50, and Angel One gives a ₹0.25 discount per debit for women first holders. The discount comes from the depository's pricing, which the brokers pass on. The full charge still carries GST.
No. Brokerage is the broker's trading fee; the DP charge is the depository debit fee plus the broker's service fee. They appear as separate lines on the contract note and are computed differently, so they should never be compared as one number.
GST applies on top of the published figure: Upstox's ₹20 becomes ₹23.60 with 18% GST. Compare against the GST-inclusive number, and check the contract note line, which always prints the actual amount. Some brokers publish the GST-inclusive figure outright, which is why the totals differ even when the base fee is similar.
No. Buys, IPO allotments, bonus shares and rights credits all enter the demat without any DP charge. The charge is a toll on the exit only, which is why it shows up on sells and almost nowhere else. Pledging shares and off-market transfers have their own separate fee schedules.
No. The charge is flat per scrip per day, so selling 1 share and selling 10,000 shares of the same company on the same day carry the same charge. That flat design means the charge is proportionally heavier on small sells, which is worth knowing before selling tiny quantities often.