Where to Get Expired NIFTY & Bank Nifty Options Data in India (2026)
If you need historical or expired Indian index options data, there are more sources than most people realise — and they differ in ways that matter more than price.
This is a comparison rather than a pitch. MoneyTicks is one of the options listed, and the honest answer is that for several use cases it is not the right one.
First, work out what you actually need
Most bad purchases here come from not answering four questions first.
Granularity. Do you need end-of-day, or per-minute? This is the single biggest cost driver. An EOD option chain for a year is a manageable file. Per-minute OHLC and open interest for every strike across every expiry for a year runs into the tens of millions of rows. If your strategy makes one decision per day, per-minute data is an expensive irrelevance.
Depth. How far back? A rolling twelve months is enough to sanity-check a strategy. It is not enough to see how it behaves across volatility regimes, and a strategy that has only ever been tested on calm markets has not really been tested.
Access pattern. Will you click through a web interface, or does code need to pull thousands of contracts? A site with excellent free data and no API is useless to a backtest loop, and an API is overkill if you are studying three expiries by hand.
Coverage. Index options only, or stock options too? Several sources — including MoneyTicks — cover only index underlyings. If you need Reliance or HDFC Bank options, that rules a lot of options out immediately.
Free sources
NSE bhavcopy
The exchange itself, and the authoritative record. Daily files include end-of-day data for every contract, free, going back years.
The catch is that it is end-of-day only, distributed as daily files you must download and stitch together yourself, with a format that has changed over the years. There is no intraday series. Reconstructing per-minute history from NSE alone means capturing it live, every day, forever — starting from the day you begin, with no way to recover the past.
Best for: EOD studies, settlement prices, anything where authoritative source matters more than convenience.
Shoonya Trader
Publishes free historical expired NIFTY and Bank Nifty contract data as CSV downloads.
Best for: getting started at zero cost when the covered window matches your need.
StockMojo, NiftyTrader, OptionBacktesting, StocksRin
A cluster of free web tools offering historical and expired option chains with OI, IV and premium charting, several with backtesting built in. NiftyTrader lets you pull a historical chain snapshot and export it as CSV. OptionBacktesting advertises several years of chain history free.
These are genuinely useful and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. The constraints are consistent: web-first rather than API-first, snapshot-oriented rather than continuous time series, and you are dependent on a free service continuing to exist in its current form.
Best for: manual research, checking a specific expiry, visual OI analysis, and validating an idea before spending anything.
Kaggle datasets
Community-uploaded option datasets appear periodically — for example a NIFTY 2024 all-expiries set. Free and immediately usable.
The trade-off is that they are snapshots by definition: one contributor’s export, not updated, with provenance and cleaning methodology you have to take on trust.
Best for: a one-off study on a period that happens to be covered.
Broker APIs
ICICI Direct Breeze
Historical F&O data free to account holders, currently around three years.
Best for: existing ICICI Direct customers. Hard to beat on price.
DhanHQ
Expired options data on a rolling basis, up to five years, with OI, IV, OHLC, volume and spot. Well documented.
Best for: existing Dhan users, and anyone who wants a modern API without a separate data subscription.
Zerodha Kite Connect
Historical data available with a Kite Connect subscription. Widely used, well documented, large community.
The friction for options backtesting specifically is that you fetch per instrument token, and expired contracts’ tokens are not always straightforward to resolve retroactively. Assembling a multi-year options history means a lot of requests against rate limits.
Best for: existing Kite Connect users, especially where live and historical data through one interface matters.
Paid data vendors
TrueData and Global Datafeeds
Established Indian market data vendors offering real-time, snapshot, end-of-day and historical feeds including option chains and Greeks, with exchange-certified distribution.
Priced and packaged for professional and institutional use — more capability than most individual traders need, at a corresponding cost, and typically with contracts rather than month-to-month.
Best for: firms, funds, and anyone needing certified real-time distribution.
MoneyTicks
For completeness and with the obvious disclosure that this is our own product.
Coverage is deliberately narrow: three index underlyings — NIFTY, BANK NIFTY and SENSEX. No stock options, no FINNIFTY. NIFTY and BANK NIFTY history runs from August 2021, SENSEX from March 2024, at 1-minute OHLCV with open interest recorded alongside each candle, aggregated to 5m, 15m, 1h and 1d. That is roughly 250 million candles.
Access is by REST API or CSV/Excel/JSON export from a dashboard, for a one-time ₹999 payment plus 18% GST — the full archive plus one month of continuing data — rather than a recurring subscription.
Where it fits: intraday backtesting over a multi-year sample on index options, where you want per-minute contract history and bulk programmatic access without an enterprise contract.
Where it does not: if you need stock options, live streaming data, or Greeks computed for you, it is the wrong tool. If your strategy is positional and EOD data suffices, the free sources will serve you just as well and cost nothing — that is a genuine recommendation, not false modesty.
Choosing
| If you need… | Start with |
|---|---|
| EOD data, authoritative source | NSE bhavcopy |
| Free, manual research on specific expiries | StockMojo, NiftyTrader, OptionBacktesting |
| Free CSV downloads of expired contracts | Shoonya Trader |
| Historical data and you already have the account | Breeze, DhanHQ, Kite Connect |
| Per-minute index options history, multi-year, via API | MoneyTicks |
| Stock options, Greeks, certified real-time | TrueData, Global Datafeeds |
Two things worth checking before you commit
Verify the coverage claim yourself. Advertised start dates and actual data availability diverge more often than they should. Pull a contract from the earliest advertised period and one from a low-liquidity strike before paying for anything.
Check what happens at expiry. This is the difference that catches people out. Many tools show a rich option chain right up to expiry and then drop the contract entirely. If your work depends on studying how contracts behaved into settlement, confirm the history survives expiry rather than assuming it.
If you want to see what per-minute expired-contract data looks like before deciding anything, the MoneyTicks data catalogue is browsable free — every recorded expiry, every strike, with full daily price and open-interest history. For the analysis side, reading NIFTY open interest and backtesting options strategies in Python go into what to do with it.
Frequently asked questions
Is historical NIFTY options data available for free?
Yes, several sources offer it free, including Shoonya Trader, StockMojo, NiftyTrader and OptionBacktesting. The trade-offs are usually granularity (end-of-day rather than per-minute), history depth (a rolling window rather than several years), and bulk access (a web interface rather than an API).
Does NSE provide historical option chain data?
NSE publishes daily bhavcopy files containing end-of-day contract data, which is free and authoritative. What it does not provide is a convenient intraday time series per contract, so reconstructing per-minute history from NSE sources alone means capturing and storing the data yourself, in real time, indefinitely.
Can I get 1-minute options data for expired contracts?
Yes, but this is where free sources generally stop. Storing per-minute OHLC and open interest for every strike across multiple expiries and several years runs to hundreds of millions of rows, which is why it is usually a paid product. MoneyTicks, TrueData and Global Datafeeds all offer it in different forms.
Which broker APIs give historical options data?
Zerodha Kite Connect, ICICI Direct Breeze and DhanHQ all expose historical data to account holders. Breeze covers roughly three years free, and DhanHQ offers expired options data on a rolling basis of up to five years. These are good value if you already hold the account and are comfortable with per-request rate limits.
How much does historical options data cost in India?
It ranges from free to enterprise pricing in the lakhs per year. Broker APIs are typically free to account holders with rate limits. Retail-focused data vendors sit in the hundreds to low thousands of rupees per month; MoneyTicks instead charges a one-time ₹999 plus GST for the full archive plus a month of continuing data, rather than a recurring fee. Institutional feeds from established vendors are quoted per seat and cost considerably more.