Financial Inclusion Data 2026: Jan Dhan, Findex 2025 and the Unbanked

A woman in a village outside Gaya opened a Jan Dhan account in 2015 because a bank mitra came to her lane with a form and a fingerprint scanner. Ten years later the account still exists, and a government transfer lands in it now and then. Whether she counts as financially included depends entirely on which statistic you read, and in 2026 the statistics have started to disagree in interesting ways.

India's financial inclusion story is usually told with one number: accounts opened. That number is extraordinary. But the World Bank's Global Findex 2025, the Jan Dhan dashboard, parliamentary replies on inoperative accounts and the RBI's own inclusion index all point to the same conclusion. Access is close to solved. Use is not. This piece puts the latest figures side by side and argues that the next decade of inclusion policy should be judged on activity, not enrolment.

The global baseline: 79% banked, 1.3 billion not

The Global Findex 2025, based on surveys of more than 145,000 adults in 141 economies during 2024, found that 79% of adults worldwide had an account at a bank, similar institution or mobile money provider, up from 74% in 2021 and 51% in 2011, according to the World Bank's Findex portal. In low- and middle-income economies the figure was 75%.

That still leaves about 1.3 billion adults without an account. A summary of the report describes who they are: 55% are women, 52% live in the poorest 40% of households and 62% have primary education or less. Around 650 million of them live in just a handful of large economies, including India, China, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Egypt and Mexico. Globally, 77% of women and 81% of men had an account in 2024, a four-point gap.

The more striking findings are about use. In developing economies, 61% of adults made or received a digital payment in 2024, which is 82% of account owners, up 27 percentage points since 2014, according to a summary of the Findex data by the Visa Economic Empowerment Institute. Forty percent saved in a financial account, up 16 points in three years, the fastest rise in more than a decade. Mobile money reached 40% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa, up from 27% in 2021, and 37% in Latin America and the Caribbean, up from 22%. Findex also found that 1 in 4 adults in developing economies had faced a natural disaster in the previous three years, which is why account use in a crisis matters as much as account ownership.

India: ownership solved, usage still catching up

For India, Findex 2025 shows account ownership around 90% for both men and women, which effectively closes the gender gap in ownership, and South Asia overall near 80%. That parity is a genuine policy achievement. Most countries with India's income level still have a gender gap.

Inactivity is where India stands out. The World Bank's 2021 data had shown 35% of Indian account holders with an inactive account, meaning no deposit or withdrawal in the previous year, about seven times the 5% average for other developing economies, as Business Standard reported. In that survey, 42% of women account holders had inactive accounts against 30% of men. The 2024 survey shows a sharp improvement, with roughly 16% of Indian account holders inactive, about 20% of women and 12% of men, according to an analysis by Data For India. The low- and middle-income average was about 4%. So the gap is closing, but India is still an outlier, and the gender gap has moved from ownership to use.

Jan Dhan by the numbers

Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, launched on 28 August 2014, is the main reason for India's ownership numbers. The finance ministry's eleventh-anniversary note put accounts at 56.16 crore in August 2025, up from 14.72 crore in 2015, with deposits of Rs 2,67,755 crore against Rs 15,670 crore in March 2015. Women held 56% of accounts and 67% were in rural or semi-urban areas. Banks had issued 38.68 crore RuPay debit cards to account holders, and 327 government schemes were linked through DBT.

By December 2025, the total had reached 57.07 crore, and the Minister of State for Finance told the Lok Sabha that 15.09 crore of them, about 26%, were inoperative, according to PTI's report of the reply. Data on public sector banks published by Business Standard showed the inoperative share in those banks rising from 21% to 26% between September 2024 and September 2025.

An account is classed as inoperative after two years without a customer-initiated transaction. A government credit does not count, which matters: an account that only ever receives DBT and is emptied in cash by a business correspondent may still look dormant to the bank's systems.

Worked example: what the averages hide

Start with the August 2025 figures. Rs 2,67,755 crore spread over 56.16 crore accounts gives an average balance of about Rs 4,768. Deposits grew about 17 times between March 2015 and August 2025, while accounts grew about 3.8 times, so the average account holds far more money than it used to.

Now apply December's inoperative share. If 15.09 crore of 57.07 crore accounts are inoperative, about 41.98 crore are active. Inoperative accounts tend to hold very little, so the operative ones probably hold somewhat more than the headline average. That is an inference, not a published figure, but it points the right way: Jan Dhan is turning into two populations. One uses the account as a real savings and payment tool. The other holds an account that exists mainly on paper.

The policy implication is concrete. A DBT payment into an inoperative account still arrives, but if the holder has to re-do KYC at a branch before withdrawing, the transfer's value is reduced by the travel, time and lost wages involved. The government's July to September 2025 saturation campaign re-verified KYC for about 4.73 lakh inactive Jan Dhan accounts in its first month. Measured against 15 crore inoperative accounts, that pace would take decades.

India answered the question of who has an account. The question for the next decade is who uses one on an ordinary Tuesday.

The RBI's index says usage is rising

The RBI's Financial Inclusion Index, which weights access at 35%, usage at 45% and quality at 20%, stood at 67 for March 2025 against 64.2 a year earlier, with the improvement driven mainly by usage and quality, according to the central bank's July 2025 release. That is consistent with Findex's falling inactivity number and with the rise of UPI as the default way to pay small amounts. Our explainer on UPI shows how far digital payments have spread, and the account is what UPI sits on.

The two sets of numbers can coexist. National usage is rising fast because the people who already use accounts are using them much more. Inoperative Jan Dhan accounts are concentrated among those who never started. Both things are true, and the second is the harder problem.

There is also a measurement problem worth naming. Jan Dhan's dashboard counts accounts and deposits, Findex counts people and their behaviour in a survey year, and the RBI index blends dozens of indicators into one score. None of them tells a district officer which villages have accounts that receive money but never spend it digitally. Publishing inoperative-account data by district, alongside DBT credit volumes, would let states target re-KYC camps and business correspondent placements where they would do the most good, instead of running nationwide saturation drives that mostly reach people who are already active.

What would actually move usage

The evidence from other countries suggests three levers. The first is regular inflows: people use accounts that receive money they need, which is why wage and benefit payments matter more than enrolment drives. Our pieces on direct benefit transfer and government wage payments cover how those inflows are routed.

The second is cash-out access close to home. Mobile money in East Africa grew because agents were everywhere, as our explainer on M-Pesa and mobile money describes. India's business correspondent network plays the same role, and its density in a district tends to predict activity better than account counts do.

The third is confidence. Findex found that women in South Asia are at least 19 points more likely than men to say they would need help using an account, according to the same Visa institute summary. That lines up with India's gender gap in inactivity. Our piece on women and remittances looks at how money sent home can change who controls the household account.

What to watch next

• Mid-July 2026: the RBI's Financial Inclusion Index for March 2026. A reading above 67 led by the usage sub-index would confirm the trend; a stall would suggest UPI growth is concentrated among existing users.
• 28 August 2026: Jan Dhan's twelfth anniversary, when the finance ministry usually publishes updated account, deposit and RuPay card figures. Watch whether it reports an inoperative share at all.
• Monsoon session of Parliament, July to August 2026: written replies are the most reliable source for inoperative-account data by bank and state.
• Next Findex round: the survey has run in 2011, 2014, 2017, 2021 and 2024. The next edition will show whether India's inactivity rate converges towards the developing-economy average.

Survey-based Findex figures and administrative Jan Dhan data measure different things and are not directly comparable. Inactivity definitions also differ: Findex uses one year without deposits or withdrawals, while banks classify an account as inoperative after two years without a customer-initiated transaction.

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