What is on this page
Every NIFTY 50 options expiry MoneyTicks has recorded, grouped by year. Each expiry opens its full option chain — every strike, calls and puts, with closing premium and open interest. Each strike opens that individual contract’s complete daily history: open, high, low, close, volume and open interest, from the day it started trading to the day it settled.
All of it is free to browse. No account required.
Why expired contract data is hard to find
A live option chain shows what is trading now. The moment a contract expires it drops off — which is unremarkable until you need to study it.
That is a problem, because the interesting questions are all retrospective. How did premium decay through the final week? Where did open interest build before a move? What did implied volatility do into an event? Every one of those questions is about contracts that have already expired, and most tools have already discarded them.
Broker APIs mostly do not fill the gap either. Zerodha’s Kite Connect does not serve expired-contract data, and neither does Angel One’s SmartAPI — a recurring question in both developer forums. Some brokers offer a rolling window. NSE’s bhavcopy files are authoritative and free, but end-of-day only, distributed as daily files you must stitch together yourself, with a format that has changed over the years.
Capturing per-minute data yourself is possible, but it only works forward: you can start recording today, and there is no way to recover what you did not capture yesterday. That asymmetry is the entire reason an archive is worth anything.
What the data contains
Each 1-minute candle carries:
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
ts |
Candle timestamp, IST |
open / high / low / close |
Option premium in rupees for that minute |
volume |
Contracts traded in that minute |
oi |
Open interest — contracts outstanding at that point |
Open interest recorded alongside price at the same granularity is the part that is genuinely uncommon. Most sources give you an end-of-day OI figure, which tells you where positions ended up but not when they were built. Minute-level OI shows the building.
Coverage for NIFTY runs from 2 August 2021. Aggregations to 5-minute, 15-minute, hourly and daily are derived from the same 1-minute base, so they are internally consistent.
Reading a NIFTY option chain
The chain pages on this site show, for each strike, the call and put closing premium and open interest at the recorded snapshot.
A few things worth knowing when reading them:
Open interest has no direction. Every contract has a buyer and a seller, so a large OI figure at a strike tells you a lot of contracts exist there — not that anyone is bullish or bearish. It becomes informative when read alongside price change, which is covered in detail in how to read NIFTY open interest.
The distribution matters more than any single strike. Where OI concentrates, and how that concentration drifts across sessions, carries more information than the level at any one strike on any one day.
Expiry day distorts everything. Contracts expiring worthless are abandoned rather than closed, so their OI stays elevated until settlement clears it. Strikes near the money see genuine fast unwinding at the same time. Both effects run at once, which is why expiry-day OI charts look dramatic and mean comparatively little. Analyse expiry day separately or exclude it.
Weekly and monthly expiries
NIFTY has both, and they are not interchangeable.
Weeklies carry more open interest near the money and decay far faster in their final two sessions. Monthlies accumulate positions over a longer horizon and behave more smoothly. A strategy validated on weeklies may fail on monthlies for reasons that have nothing to do with the underlying idea.
The expiry list below is grouped by year; weekly and monthly contracts appear together, so check the date against the calendar when you need one or the other specifically.
What people use this for
Strategy backtesting. The largest use by far. Testing an options strategy requires the actual traded premium of the actual contracts — you cannot derive an option’s price from the index level without assuming a pricing model and an implied volatility you do not have. There is a worked example in backtesting an options strategy in Python.
Post-trade review. Pulling the exact contract you traded and seeing what happened around your entry and exit, at minute resolution.
Volatility research. Implied volatility behaviour around events, and how it collapses once uncertainty resolves — visible in what expired contract data shows about premium decay.
Open interest studies. Whether OI buildup patterns had any predictive value, tested on recorded data rather than assumed.
Getting the data out
Browsing is free. For bulk work there are two routes:
Exports. CSV, Excel or JSON from the dashboard, filtered by symbol, expiry, strike and interval.
REST API. Endpoints for symbols, expiries, strikes, candles, chain and open interest, authenticated with a Bearer key. Keyset pagination for large pulls. Full reference in the API documentation.
curl -s "https://api.moneyticks.com/api/v1/options/NIFTY/candles?expiry=2026-07-28&strike=25000&optionType=CE&interval=1m" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer mt_live_your_api_key"
Both are unlocked by a one-time ₹999 payment plus 18% GST, which buys the complete archive plus one month of continuing data from your purchase date. Rate limits and the full data dictionary are in the docs.
Other indices
BANK NIFTY history runs from the same August 2021 start; SENSEX begins March 2024 when its options became actively traded. See BANK NIFTY options data for that index.
MoneyTicks covers index options only — NIFTY, BANK NIFTY and SENSEX. No stock options, and no FINNIFTY. If you need those, the comparison of Indian options data sources covers which providers do.
Frequently asked questions
Where can I download historical NIFTY options data?
Every expiry recorded since August 2021 is browsable free on this page — pick an expiry to see its full option chain, then any strike to see that contract's daily price and open-interest history. Bulk download as CSV, Excel or JSON, and REST API access, are unlocked by a one-time ₹999 payment plus 18% GST, which buys the complete archive plus one month of continuing data from your purchase date.
Does NIFTY options data disappear after expiry?
On most platforms, yes. Live option chains carry only contracts currently trading, so the moment a contract expires it stops being visible — which removes exactly the data a backtest needs. MoneyTicks keeps expired contracts permanently, which is the main reason it exists.
What interval is NIFTY options data available at?
1-minute OHLC with open interest recorded alongside each candle, aggregated to 5-minute, 15-minute, hourly and daily. Nothing is interpolated — if a contract did not trade in a given minute, no candle exists for that minute rather than a synthetic one being generated.
How far back does NIFTY options history go?
NIFTY and BANK NIFTY contracts are recorded from 2 August 2021. That covers several distinct volatility regimes, which matters because a strategy tested only on calm markets has not really been tested.
Can I get NIFTY option chain data for a specific past date?
Yes. Each expiry page shows the option chain as recorded, and the API's chain endpoint accepts an `at` parameter to pin the snapshot to a particular timestamp rather than the latest one — which is what keeps a backtest honest about what was knowable at decision time.
Is NIFTY weekly and monthly expiry data both available?
Both. Every expiry with recorded data appears in the list on this page, grouped by year. Weekly and monthly contracts behave quite differently near expiry, so it is worth analysing them separately rather than pooling them.