Railways PSU P/E at 19.6: price down 41%, earnings flat

The number

Nifty India Railways PSU closed at 2,519.05 on Friday, 9 October 2026, at a price-to-earnings ratio of 19.64. Its price-to-book ratio was 2.46. The day before, it closed at 2,487.25, its lowest level since its daily history here began.

These are NSE's published end-of-day figures, charted on the Nifty India Railways PSU valuation page.

The dividend yield is as of 8 October, at 2.04%. NSE's file for 9 October raised the yield of 109 of the 145 indices it prices by more than a tenth in one session while their P/E and P/B barely moved, so we leave that day's yield out.

A short history, and where today sits

The daily series starts on 27 November 2024: 463 sessions. The page also holds one isolated earlier reading, from 12 April 2023, at a P/E of 12.46; that single print is why the page shows a low from 2023. Everything below uses the daily run.

• P/E: one session of 463 closed lower, the day before. The high, 33.19, came on 11 December 2024, the same day as the record close.
• P/B: again only 8 October was lower, at 2.43.
• Dividend yield: 2.04% on 8 October was the highest in the series, up to that day.

On all three yardsticks the index is at the cheap end of its own short record. That record is under two years long, and it began near the top of a rally.

The price fell; the earnings did not

Dividing the close by the P/E gives the earnings behind one unit of the index.

From the record close the index is down 40.8%. The earnings behind it are up 0.1%. Over the past year the price fell 28.3%, the P/E fell 29.0% and earnings rose 0.9%.

So none of the fall came from lower profits. It is a re-rating: in December 2024 investors paid ₹33 for each rupee of these companies' annual earnings, and now they pay under ₹20.

Earnings did move inside the period. They climbed about 9% into July 2026, then dropped 7.8% in a single session on 24 July, during the June-quarter results season, and are back where they started. The book value behind the index rose 5.5% over the year, which is why the P/B fell slightly more than the P/E.

Against the Nifty 50 and the wider PSU indices

Price changes exclude dividends.

The railway index's P/E is 1.02 times the Nifty 50's. Its median multiple since November 2024 is 1.19, and 438 of 464 sessions on the page showed a higher one. Between 29 June and 23 July 2026 it was briefly the cheaper of the two, for 18 sessions, until the 24 July earnings drop lifted its P/E back above.

Against other government-owned companies it is still dear: about 1.9 times the PSE's P/E and 1.7 times the CPSE's. Our CPSE and PSE post found those two at half the Nifty 50's multiple. Railway PSUs fell further this year, but from a much higher starting price.

What is in the index

The Groww Nifty India Railways PSU Index Fund, which tracks it, held 17 companies on 30 September 2026. Four made up 69.4% of the portfolio:

• Indian Railway Finance Corporation, 20.1%
• Container Corporation of India, 18.8%
• IRCTC, 16.7%
• Rail Vikas Nigam, 13.9%

The rest are smaller railway companies such as IRCON, RITES and RailTel, plus government companies that supply the railways: NTPC at 5.3%, Bharat Electronics at 4.8%, ONGC, BPCL, BHEL, HPCL and SAIL among them.

The fund's first published NAV, on 7 February 2025, was ₹9.86. On 9 October 2026 it was ₹6.95, and its one-year return was −27.77%, close to the index's price fall. It sits among the index funds rather than the sectoral and thematic funds, though its risk is that of a single theme.

What this does not tell you

The history is short and starts high. A median of 26.03 comes from a period that began at the peak of the rally. A low reading against that is not the same as cheap against a full cycle.

Four companies set the ratios. A lender, a container-rail operator, a ticketing and catering company and a construction contractor earn in different ways. One of them reporting a weak quarter moves the index's P/E noticeably, as 24 July showed.

The earnings figure is derived. It is the close divided by NSE's P/E, so it also moves when the basket is reweighted. How to read an index P/E ratio explains the arithmetic, and the P/E ratio and P/B ratio glossary entries define the terms.

None of this is a recommendation. A low P/E against a two-year record says where the price stands, not where it goes. Our PSU fund returns post and the guide to infrastructure and PSU funds cover how these themes have behaved inside diversified portfolios; NSE's index factsheets are at niftyindices.com.