UPI and Everyday Spending: An Exploratory Pilot Survey of Young Users in India

India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) now handles billions of payments each month, yet little is knownabout how its effortlessness shapes the everyday spending habits of young users. Drawing on behaviouralresearch on the “pain of paying” and on recent Indian studies linking UPI to impulse buying, this pilot studyasked how a small group of mostly young UPI users describe their payment habits, their awareness of theirown spending, and the situations in which they make unplanned purchases. An online questionnaire wascompleted by 27 respondents (aged 16–47; median age 17), recruited by convenience sampling. Results aredescriptive. Over half (52%) used UPI daily or more often, and 89% used it for payments of ₹100 or less. Only15% said they knew their weekly UPI spending accurately. Hunger was the most commonly cited trigger ofunplanned purchases (57% of those who reported making them), followed by seeing something whilescrolling (29%), and 52% said UPI makes them spend more or more often. Contrary to what thepain-of-paying literature would predict, respondents who chose a payment mode were more likely to say theywould hesitate to spend ₹300 online (70%) than in cash (30%), although this difference was not statisticallydistinguishable from an even split. Willingness to order a meal rose from 48% to 93% when the same menuwas shown with a ₹120 discount, but because the discounted option also carried a lower final price, thiscannot be attributed to framing. Given the small, non-random sample, the findings are indicative only and areoffered as hypotheses for larger studies.