Money in India

The Rupee Is a Closed Currency

The Indian rupee (INR, ₹) is a partially closed currency under the Foreign Exchange Management Act, and the practical consequence is one of the few genuinely India-specific things about money here: you cannot meaningfully buy rupees before you travel, and non-residents may carry only a limited amount of Indian cash in or out — currently capped at ₹25,000. So the standard arrival routine is not a currency desk but an ATM: every major Indian airport has several bank ATMs landside that take international Visa, Mastercard and Maestro cards, and withdrawing there is both the cheapest and the simplest way to start. Circulating notes are ₹10, ₹20, ₹50, ₹100, ₹200 and ₹500, with coins from ₹1 to ₹10; the ₹2,000 note was withdrawn from circulation by the Reserve Bank in 2023 and is increasingly refused at retail even though it remains exchangeable. Hotel desks and unlicensed street changers give poor rates and are worth avoiding on principle.

Use Major-Bank ATMs, and Carry Two Cards

ATMs operated by the large banks — HDFC, State Bank of India, ICICI, Axis, Kotak Mahindra, Punjab National — are the reliable ones for foreign cards, and they are everywhere: airports, city centres, railway stations, malls. Per-transaction limits typically fall in the ₹10,000-₹25,000 range, with your own bank's daily ceiling and cross-border fee deciding the rest of the cost, so check both before you fly. Two habits save real trouble. First, carry two cards on different networks: a card that one machine refuses is often accepted by the next bank's, and a single blocked card is a genuine problem in a cash-first economy. Second, prefer bank-branded machines over the white-label ATMs run by non-bank operators, which decline foreign cards more often and surcharge more heavily, particularly in small towns. Around major festivals and on Sunday evenings, popular machines can simply run empty — withdraw ahead of a holiday rather than during it.

UPI Is the Local Rail; Cards Work in the Cities

India runs on UPI, a QR-code payment system used for billions of transactions a month and for absolutely everything — rickshaws, tea stalls, grocery shops, market vendors. Indians pay by scanning with apps like PhonePe, Google Pay or Paytm, and in much of daily commerce a QR sticker is the only non-cash option offered. Foreign visitors are no longer locked out of it: prepaid tourist wallets that ride the UPI network let you load rupees and scan like a local, though where and how you can obtain one has changed more than once, so check the current position rather than assume airport availability. Alongside that, Visa and Mastercard contactless work smoothly in hotels, malls, supermarkets and mid-to-upmarket restaurants in the cities, with acceptance thinning quickly outside them and at smaller establishments; American Express is narrower again. The practical mix for most visitors is one international card, rupee cash from a bank ATM, and a UPI wallet if the trip runs longer than a few days.

Service Charge, Tipping and When to Bargain

Many urban restaurants and hotels add a service charge of around 8-10% to the bill, particularly in the big cities and tourist areas. A government advisory has made it explicitly optional — you are entitled to ask for it to be removed — but in practice it stays on most upmarket bills, and where it appears no further tip is expected. Where it does not, roughly 10% is the convention. Customary amounts elsewhere are modest and worth carrying small notes for: something in the region of ₹50-100 for a porter, about ₹100 a night for housekeeping, a few hundred rupees a day for a guide or a driver, and rounding up to the nearest ₹10 in an auto-rickshaw or taxi. Treat all of these as current-practice bands rather than fixed tariffs. Bargaining is expected at street markets, souvenir stalls and in unmetered auto-rickshaws — agree the fare before you get in — and is not appropriate in malls, supermarkets, branded restaurants or licensed taxi services, where the price is the price.