Nepal policy interest rate
The policy rate of Nepal Rastra Bank — the fixed repo rate that sits in the middle of NRB's interest rate corridor and anchors the operating target (the weighted average interbank rate). Set in the annual Monetary Policy issued under section 94 of the Nepal Rastra Bank Act, 2058 for each Bikram Sambat fiscal year (mid-July to mid-July) and adjusted in the quarterly reviews (first-quarter, mid-term and third-quarter).
| Current value | 4.25 percent |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2025-12-01 |
| Official source | Nepal Rastra Bank — 'आर्थिक वर्ष २०८२/८३ को मौद्रिक नीतिको पहिलो त्रैमासिक समीक्षा' (First Quarterly Review of Monetary Policy for FY 2082/83), Kathmandu, 2082 Mangsir 15 (1 December 2025), policy provision para 41: the standing liquidity facility rate forming the upper bound of the interest rate corridor is cut from 6.00% to 5.75% and the policy rate (नीतिगत दर) from 4.50% to 4.25%, with the standing deposit facility rate held at 2.75%, expressly to narrow the corridor and make it symmetric around the policy rate |
| Last verified | 2026-07-24 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
BS YEAR: the level was set in the first-quarter review of the Monetary Policy for FY 2082/83 BS (2025/26), dated 2082 Mangsir 15 = 1 December 2025, and carried unchanged into FY 2083/84 BS (2026/27). CORRIDOR — SERVE THE MIDDLE RATE, NOT THE EDGES. NRB runs a three-rate interest rate corridor and all three are quoted as 'rates' in Nepali press: floor = standing deposit facility rate / deposit collection rate 2.75%; middle = policy rate (fixed repo rate) 4.25%, THIS SERIES; ceiling = standing liquidity facility (SLF) rate 5.75%, which under a rule in force since 16 August 2012 is set identical to the BANK RATE, so bank rate is also 5.75%. Table A4 of NRB's Macroeconomic Report, July 2026 prints the whole corridor month by month and confirms 4.25% from mid-December 2025 through mid-May 2026 (https://www.nrb.org.np/contents/uploads/2026/07/Macroeconomic_Report_July_2026.pdf). The corridor is now symmetric: 4.25% +/- 150 bps. OPERATING TARGET: para 13 of the FY 2083/84 Monetary Policy makes the weighted average interbank rate of banks and financial institutions the operating target and commits NRB to open market operations that keep it 'around the policy rate' — in practice it has sat well BELOW the policy rate (2.73% at mid-June 2026) because the banking system is running large excess liquidity, so anyone using the interbank rate as a proxy for the policy stance will read Nepal far too loose. STRUCTURAL — THE PEG TO INDIA IS THE REAL ANCHOR. Nepal has run a fixed exchange rate against the Indian rupee since 1993 at INR 1 = NPR 1.60 (NRB quotes it as INR 100 = NPR 160.00 buy / 160.15 sell, published on nrb.org.np/forex/ under the heading 'Fixed by Nepal Rastra Bank', separate from the open-market rates for other currencies). Para 12 of the FY 2083/84 Monetary Policy states in terms that the fixed exchange rate of the Nepalese rupee against the Indian rupee 'has been taken as the anchor (अङ्कुश) of monetary policy' and is retained as the INTERMEDIATE TARGET. Because India supplies roughly two-thirds of Nepal's merchandise imports and the peg is defended with reserves, NRB has very limited independent room: its policy rate follows Indian inflation and RBI policy with a lag, and its own analysis reasons from India (para 37 of the first-quarter review projects Nepal's inflation partly off the RBI's 2.6% forecast for India; para 10 of the 11-month macro report sets Nepal's 5.22% inflation against India's 3.93%). Compare series IN (India) in this dataset: the RBI repo rate is 5.25%, one full percentage point ABOVE Nepal's 4.25% — the gap is sustainable only because Nepal's excess liquidity and capital controls insulate it, not because NRB is running an independent stance. DIRECTION OF TRAVEL: easing. 5.00% until mid-July 2025, cut to 4.50% by the annual Monetary Policy for FY 2082/83, cut again to 4.25% on 1 December 2025, then HELD. The 25th Monetary Policy, for FY 2083/84 BS (released 2083 Asar 23 = 7 July 2026, in force from 2083 Shrawan 1 = 17 July 2026), states at para 14 that 'the policy rate, standing deposit facility rate and bank rate under the interest rate corridor have been kept unchanged', and at para 11 targets inflation of around 5.5% and growth of 7.0% with reserves covering at least seven months of imports. ACCESS: NRB publishes the annual Monetary Policy and the quarterly reviews in Nepali first; the English full text lags by about six weeks (the FY 2082/83 English text appeared on 20 August 2025). Both the FY 2083/84 policy and the first-quarter review PDFs are text-extractable, but the first-quarter review uses a legacy Preeti-style font encoding that mangles in most extraction tools — the figures survive, the words do not. Reviews list: https://www.nrb.org.np/category/monetary-policy/
Earlier values
| From | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2024-07-16 | 5 | Nepal Rastra Bank — Macroeconomic Report, July 2026, Table A |
| 2025-07-17 | 4.5 | Nepal Rastra Bank — Monetary Policy for FY 2082/83, made pub |
Get it programmatically
curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/np/policy-rate
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/np/policy-rate/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://asiaref.dev/provenance/np/policy-rateOther Nepal series: VAT rate · minimum wage · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates