NEPSE Trading Hours, Circuit Breakers & Settlement

Before charts and signals matter, it helps to understand the plumbing: when the Nepal Stock Exchange is open, the rules that pause it, and when a trade actually becomes shares in your account. Here's the practical version.

Trading hours

NEPSE has revised its trading week over time, so always confirm the current schedule. As of this writing NEPSE trades Monday to Friday, with the market closed on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays. A typical trading day looks like:

• Pre-open session — roughly 10:30–11:00 AM NPT, where orders are collected and an opening price is discovered. No continuous matching happens yet.
• Continuous trading — about 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM NPT, where buy and sell orders match in real time.

Outside these hours you can still place orders in your broker's TMS, but they rest until the next session. Live order-book depth (the top buy/sell orders) is only meaningful during continuous trading.

The ±10% daily price band

Individual stocks can move only within a ±10% band from the previous day's close in a single session. If a stock is in strong demand it can rise up to +10% (an "upper circuit") and then trade no higher that day; if there's heavy selling it can fall to −10% (a "lower circuit"). This is why you sometimes see a stock "stuck" at a price with orders piled on one side — it has hit its daily limit.

Market-wide circuit breakers

Separately from the per-stock band, the whole market can be paused if the NEPSE index itself moves too fast in a day. The mechanism is tiered — a moderate move triggers a short halt, a larger move a longer halt, and an extreme move can stop trading for the rest of the day. The idea is to give participants a cooling-off period during panic buying or selling rather than let a cascade run unchecked. Exact thresholds are set by the exchange and have been adjusted over the years, so treat the tiers as "small move → short pause, big move → long pause, extreme move → done for the day," and check NEPSE's current notice for precise numbers.

T+2 settlement — when shares are really yours

When your buy order executes, you don't own tradable shares that same instant. NEPSE settles on a T+2 basis: the trade date is "T", and settlement completes two trading days later. In practice:

• Buy on Sunday (T) → shares settle into your DEMAT around Tuesday (T+2).
• You generally cannot sell shares before they've settled into your account.
• Weekends and holidays don't count as trading days, so they extend the calendar gap.

Other basics worth knowing

• Lot size: the minimum tradable quantity is typically 10 units (kitta) for most equities.
• No short selling: you can only sell shares you actually hold and that have settled. There is no built-in mechanism to profit from a falling stock by short selling.
• Brokerage & fees: each trade carries broker commission plus SEBON and DP charges; factor these in on small trades.
• DEMAT & TMS: you need a DEMAT account (for holdings) and TMS access through a broker (for placing orders).

Why this matters for your analysis

The rules shape the chart. The ±10% band caps how far a single candle can travel, circuit breakers create gaps and pauses you'll see in intraday data, and T+2 means you plan exits a couple of days ahead rather than assuming instant liquidity. Knowing the plumbing keeps you from misreading a "stuck" price or an unusually flat session as something it isn't.

Market hours, the ±10% band, circuit breakers, and T+2 settlement are the ground rules every NEPSE decision sits on. Rules do change — confirm current specifics on NEPSE's official notices before relying on exact numbers.

Follow the live index and per-stock moves on the NepseIQ dashboard.