India's corporate bond market just had a breakout year. It settled 28,41,854 trades in FY26, up about 139%, with the value that changed hands rising to ₹22.07 tr, up roughly 29%. Put those two together and a third number falls out: the average trade shrank to ₹0.78 cr, nearly half of a year ago. More trades, in smaller lots. That is a market shifting into a higher gear, and the best part is what is driving it.
The numbers below come from SEBI's Trades in Corporate Bonds settlement statistics, which count every corporate bond trade that cleared, whether through the exchange clearing corporations or settled off-market and reported to the depositories. We have aggregated the venue-level source into two cuts it does not print, listed and unlisted, and converted everything to rupee trillions (1 tr = ₹1 lakh crore) so a decade reads in one glance.
FY26 is a genuine break, not a drift
For most of the last decade, value settled sat in a band. It crossed ₹14 trillion around FY18 and then went almost nowhere for six years, ₹13 to ₹15 trillion through FY24. Trade counts told a livelier story, stepping up from roughly 6 lakh a year before FY20 to about 13 lakh after, as electronic request-for-quote (RFQ) trading took hold. Then FY26 broke both trends at once. Trades jumped to 28.4 lakh, about 4.3 times the FY15 level, and value pushed through ₹22 trillion for the first time.
Trades, FY25 → FY26
11.9 lakh → 28.4 lakh
+139%
Value, FY25 → FY26
₹17.10 tr → ₹22.07 tr
+29%
Avg ticket, FY25 → FY26
₹1.44 cr → ₹0.78 cr
-46%
The timing makes it stand out more. FY26 was a soft year for equities: India's cash equity market, which turns over on the order of ₹250 lakh crore a year (about ₹250 trillion, more than ten times the bond market), actually cooled, with average daily turnover slipping roughly 6% as the Nifty drifted lower. Money did not leave the market so much as rotate, and a good slice of it rotated into bonds. A debt market accelerating into an equity lull is exactly the kind of broadening a maturing financial system wants to see.
The scissors: trades up, ticket down
The clearest way to see what changed is to plot the count and the ticket together. They move in opposite directions, and in FY26 the gap between them snaps open.
A falling average ticket alongside a rising count is the textbook signature of a market that is taking in smaller lots. It is the opposite of what you see when growth is driven by a few large institutional blocks, which would push the ticket up. The natural suspects are structural: SEBI cut the standard bond face value first to ₹10,000 and the rise of online bond platforms and the RFQ window has made it cheaper to print a small ticket and have it clear.
Where the ticket actually shrank
The headline average can hide a mix shift, so it is worth splitting it. Do that, and the story gets sharper rather than weaker. The compression is almost entirely in listed, exchange-settled paper. Unlisted, privately placed blocks did not get smaller at all.
Average ticket by listing status · ₹ cr per trade
| Segment | FY25 | FY26 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Listed (exchange-settled) | ₹1.39 cr | ₹0.71 cr | -49% |
| Unlisted (off-market) | ₹2.20 cr | ₹2.24 cr | ~flat |
Source: SEBI settlement statistics, Capera aggregation. Listed ticket = listed value / listed trades.
That is the point worth holding on to. The exchange-settled, transparent, retail-reachable side of the market is the side that got more granular. The privately placed side, which a household cannot easily touch, kept trading in ₹2 crore-plus blocks. So the broadening, such as it is, is happening exactly where broadening would matter.
Listed vs unlisted: a decade in one chart
Stacking the value by listing status shows two things at once. Listed settlement carried the FY25 to FY26 breakout. And the unlisted slice, which had drifted down for years to under 9% of value, turned and nearly doubled in FY26 to ₹2.79 tr, about 12.6% of the total.
The long arc is a market that moved onto the exchanges. Unlisted was over a quarter of value back in FY15; by FY25 it had been squeezed to single digits as listed, cleared trading took over. The FY26 rebound in unlisted is the one counter-current in the data, worth watching to see whether it is a one-year blip in private placement settlement or the start of a turn.
The full decade, year by year
India corporate bond settlement · FY15 to FY26
| FY | Trades | Value (₹ tr) | Avg ticket (₹ cr) | Listed (₹ tr) | Unlisted (₹ tr) | Unlisted % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY15 | 6,57,354 | 7.54 | 1.15 | 5.47 | 2.06 | 27.4% |
| FY16 | 5,56,165 | 7.67 | 1.38 | 5.81 | 1.86 | 24.3% |
| FY17 | 6,61,713 | 11.49 | 1.74 | 9.38 | 2.11 | 18.4% |
| FY18 | 5,58,162 | 14.53 | 2.60 | 11.66 | 2.87 | 19.8% |
| FY19 | 5,99,701 | 14.45 | 2.41 | 11.59 | 2.86 | 19.8% |
| FY20 | 10,82,921 | 14.93 | 1.38 | 13.19 | 1.74 | 11.7% |
| FY21 | 13,46,218 | 14.88 | 1.11 | 13.48 | 1.40 | 9.4% |
| FY22 | 13,06,186 | 13.12 | 1.00 | 11.96 | 1.16 | 8.8% |
| FY23 | 13,05,931 | 13.57 | 1.04 | 11.77 | 1.80 | 13.3% |
| FY24 | 12,91,437 | 13.73 | 1.06 | 12.38 | 1.35 | 9.8% |
| FY25 | 11,90,822 | 17.10 | 1.44 | 15.64 | 1.46 | 8.5% |
| FY26 | 28,41,854 | 22.07 | 0.78 | 19.28 | 2.79 | 12.6% |
Source: SEBI corporate bond settlement statistics (ICCL, NSCCL, MSE Clearing, and off-market via NSDL/CDSL). Listed and unlisted are Capera aggregations across all venues; components reconcile to each year's published total. 1 ₹ trillion = ₹1 lakh crore. FY27 is a part-year stub (about 3.3 lakh trades, ₹1.81 tr so far) and is left out of the trend.
The best part: how much runway is left
Here is what makes FY26 read as a beginning rather than a peak. Even after the ticket halved, ₹0.78 cr is still an institutional number, so most of this broadening has come from the wholesale market itself getting more granular. The retail crowd has barely started: SEBI puts corporate bond awareness near 10% and household penetration below 1%. Set that against an outstanding stock that has swelled from about ₹17.5 trillion in FY15 to roughly ₹59 trillion in FY26, and the headroom is enormous. SEBI chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey has named exactly this, a deeper secondary market and more retail involvement, as the next thing to build, and is moving on it with bond ETFs, lower thresholds and regulated online platforms.
That is the optimistic read, and the data backs it. The rails for broader access, smaller face values, online bond platforms and RFQ clearing, are now in, and the traded numbers are the first place it shows up: lot sizes shrink before the crowd arrives. A market that already settles ₹22.07 tr a year, with fewer than one household in a hundred yet owning a corporate bond, is a market with most of its growth still in front of it. FY26 looks like the year the engine caught.
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This piece is the decade in aggregate. For the live tape, Capera tracks the Indian corporate bond market instrument by instrument:
For the wider rates picture, watch the 10-year G-sec yield and the whole India yield curve, the risk-free line every corporate bond is priced against.
Note on the data. Figures are from SEBI's published corporate bond settlement statistics. Listed and unlisted splits are Capera aggregations across settlement venues; component sums reconcile to each year's published total. This is an informational data read, not investment advice, and Capera is not a registered investment adviser. See Legal & disclosures for regulatory positions.
