BANKNIFTY monthly expiry — 28 July 2026

The last session of a BANKNIFTY monthly option contract. Since NSE ended BANKNIFTY weekly options in November 2024 this has been the index's only expiry, so the whole of its option positioning now turns over on one date a month rather than on four or five.

Who decides

The exchange decides it, not the market. NSE publishes the contract calendar well in advance, so the date is known months ahead, and it computes the settlement value from BANKNIFTY's own closing calculation at the end of the session. Every contract in the series is cash settled against that one number: nothing is delivered and no position carries into the next day.

What moves

BANKNIFTY moves more than NIFTY on an ordinary session and the same holds here, so the figures below sit above NIFTY's on the same dates. With no weekly series to absorb short-dated positioning, the monthly contract carries all of it, and the open interest closed or rolled on this day is correspondingly larger than it was before 2024.

What it is not

The expiry is not an announcement. Nothing is published on the day and no new information about the economy arrives with it — what changes is that one set of contracts stops existing and the positions held in them have to be closed, rolled or settled. So the figures below are a record of what BANKNIFTY did on these sessions, not a claim that the expiry caused any of it, and they carry their own count so a reader can see how much they rest on.

going into the last 224 of these, the option market was asking about 1.0% by expiry and the market travelled about 0.7% — the move was the larger of the two about 36 times in 100.

half of them landed between 0.31% and 1.47% either way