NEPSE trading hours and session timings.

The short answer

NEPSE trading hours: Monday to Friday, 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM Nepal Standard Time (NPT, UTC+5:45). The exchange is closed on Saturday, Sunday and Nepali public holidays.

The schedule changed in April 2026

NEPSE used to trade Sunday to Thursday. In April 2026 the exchange shifted to a Monday to Friday trading week to align with most global markets and to give Nepali investors a clean Saturday and Sunday weekend. Any older guide that still lists "Sunday to Thursday" is out of date; that schedule no longer applies.

The sessions of the NEPSE trading day

Pre-Open · 10:30 to 11:00 NPT

Members place, modify and cancel orders, but no orders execute. At exactly 11:00 NPT the system runs a single call auction to fix an opening price for each security based on the queued orders. Pre-Open is useful if you want your buy order to participate in the opening price-discovery rather than chase the first real-time tick.

Continuous trading · 11:00 to 15:00 NPT

The main session. Order matching happens in real time on a price-time priority basis. This is the four-hour window during which the NEPSE index, sector indices, top gainers and turnover all update tick by tick.

After-market orders · 17:00 to 10:00 NPT

Not a trading session, and worth being precise about. Since 13 August 2026 the TMS accepts After Market Orders (AMO) between 5:00 PM and 10:00 AM the following day, and shows the window as a named session in its Active Sessions strip: AFTERMARKET (17:00:00 - 10:00:00). Orders entered there do not execute. They queue, and are sent to the market when the next session opens, which is why the window closes at 10:00 rather than running into Pre-Open at 10:30.

Read how After Market Orders work for the detail, including what happens to an order left queued over a weekend.

NEPSE holiday list

On top of every Saturday and Sunday, NEPSE closes for the following Nepali public holidays (representative; exact dates shift year to year on the Bikram Sambat calendar):

• New Year (Baishakh 1)
• Loktantra Diwas
• Buddha Jayanti
• Tihar (multiple days including Laxmi Puja and Bhai Tika)
• Dashain (multiple days including Phulpati, Maha Ashtami, Maha Nawami, Vijaya Dashami, Ekadashi)
• Chhath Puja
• Republic Day
• Constitution Day
• Indra Jatra (Kathmandu Valley only)
• Maha Shivaratri
• Holi

NEPSE publishes the official annual calendar on its website each year. Punji's home tab shows the live market status pill (Pre-Open, Continuous, or Closed) so you never have to guess what session you're in.

What about live prices outside market hours?

Outside NEPSE hours, the live feed snapshot is the last close. There is no after-hours trading on NEPSE. Sector indices, top movers and the floorsheet all freeze on the day's final values until Pre-Open the next trading day. Punji explicitly stops polling outside market hours so your phone battery isn't drained checking a static feed.

How Punji handles trading hours

Punji's market clock reads the live session state from our servers and surfaces it as a status pill on the home tab. Polling for live data is gated to market hours only. Tap the pill to see a session-by-session breakdown for the day and the upcoming open / close times. See market data features for the full story, or read what NEPSE is first if you're new to the exchange.