FII and DII flows by day of the week, 2025 and 2026

The question

Traders like a pattern: Mondays are for catching up on weekend news, Fridays for squaring positions before a gap. If foreign institutions sold more on one weekday than another, it would be worth knowing. NSE publishes each day's FII and DII buying and selling in cash equities, so the data to check this is on our FII and DII data page.

This post splits every session from 1 January 2025 to 9 October 2026 by weekday. Figures are NSE's provisional cash-market net values in ₹ crore; net means buys minus sells. No day-of-week pattern in these numbers clearly holds from one year to the next.

2026: Friday and Thursday heaviest

FIIs were net sellers on average every weekday of 2026, by ₹2,328 crore a session across all five. Thursday stands out for consistency rather than size: FIIs net sold on 33 of its 38 sessions, 87%, against 65% to 71% on the other four days. Friday had the largest average and the largest median (a net sale of ₹3,112 crore) but the fewest net-sell sessions, 24 of 37: its sales were large when they came, and it also had more buying days than any other weekday.

There was also one Sunday session in the data, on 1 February 2026, when FIIs sold ₹588 crore and DIIs ₹683 crore. It is left out of the table.

2025: a different order

In 2025 the heaviest day was Monday and the lightest Thursday. In 2026 Thursday became the second-heaviest day and Wednesday the lightest. A weekday that was the gentlest of the week one year and the second-harshest the next is not behaving like a pattern.

Why it's mostly noise

FII selling is lumpy. A few huge days dominate any average: in 2026 the standard deviation of a single session's FII net was about ₹3,740 crore, bigger than the average itself. With 37 to 40 sessions per weekday, the margin of error on one weekday's average is roughly ₹600 crore. The gap between the heaviest and lightest weekday was ₹1,148 crore in 2026 and ₹1,051 crore in 2025, about what you would expect by chance when comparing the best and worst of five noisy averages.

One thing does repeat: Monday was among the three heaviest weekdays in both years, and its DII buying was the highest in both. But a similar pattern across two years from five candidate days is weak evidence, and two years is a small sample.

DIIs were steadier

The domestic institutions bought on 172 of the 190 weekday sessions of 2026 and averaged ₹3,582 crore a session against the FIIs' net sale of ₹2,328 crore. Their heaviest day was Monday (₹4,204 crore) and their lightest Tuesday (₹3,162 crore); a range of ₹1,042 crore, similar to the FIIs' in scale. DIIs bought the most on the weekday FIIs sold the third-most, which hints at DII flows partly offsetting foreign selling, but the weekday numbers are too noisy to say more than that.

What this means

If you were hoping to time a purchase to a weekday, these flows give no basis for it. The pattern that does exist is in the size of the selling over weeks and months, which FII and DII flows in the third quarter and FII selling in 2026 so far lay out, and in the lack of a link between a day's FII flow and the next day's Nifty move, covered in does FII selling move the Nifty.