NSE Q1 FY27 vs Q1 FY26— What the Numbers Say? Core Profit Growth, One-Off Adjustments & the IPO Narrative

03 August 2026

NSE's June 2026 quarter results dropped on July 30, 2026, and there's a lot more texture here than "profit up 7%." Let's unpack it properly.

1. The headline numbers (Consolidated)

At first glance, a 6.7% profit growth on 13% revenue growth looks like margins are slipping. They're not — the gap is almost entirely a base-effect quirk, which is worth explaining in any write-up so readers don't draw the wrong conclusion.

2. Why "6.7%" is the wrong number to anchor on

Last year's Q1 (June 2025) carried a ₹112.04 crore one-off gain tucked into "discontinued operations" — proceeds from NSE's education-business subsidiary (NAL Academy) selling its stake in TalentSprint. That gain inflated the year-ago base.

Strip out discontinued operations and compare the core, continuing business:

• Q1 FY27 continuing-ops PAT: ₹3,122 cr
• Q1 FY26 continuing-ops PAT: ₹2,812 cr
• Real growth: 11%

That 11% is the number that actually reflects how the core exchange business performed. The 6.7% headline is just an artifact of comparing against a quarter that had an unusual boost baked in.

3. Where the revenue growth came from (segment-wise)

Trading is still the dominant engine — it's roughly 85% of segment revenue — but the "Others" bucket (data feeds, data terminals, index licensing) is the fastest grower by a wide margin, even if it's small in absolute terms. That's a bucket worth watching over the next few quarters since it's the more diversified, less market-volume-dependent part of NSE's business.

Segment profit tells a similar story — Trading segment result was ₹2,960 cr vs ₹2,599 cr, Clearing was ₹317.4 cr vs ₹303.4 cr, and Others jumped to ₹106 cr vs ₹71.1 cr (+49%), so profitability is actually growing faster than revenue in the smaller segments.

4. Cost side — expenses grew, but not alarmingly

Total expenses rose 11.3% YoY, slightly faster than total income (9.5%) but slower than core operating revenue (13.1%). The main movers:

• Employee benefits expense: ₹242.6 cr vs ₹197.6 cr (+22.8%) — the biggest percentage jump, partly tied to the new Labour Code transition (more on that below)
• Regulatory fees: ₹188.3 cr vs ₹169.9 cr (+10.9%)
• Depreciation: ₹162.5 cr vs ₹150.1 cr (+8.3%)
• Other expenses: ₹578.6 cr vs ₹535 cr (+8.1%)

Nothing here looks like a red flag — it's a business scaling its cost base roughly in line with growth, not overspending.

5. Two "exceptional items" worth knowing about

These sit below operating profit and are one-offs, so they don't reflect the ongoing business, but they explain some of the swing between PBT lines:

• Profit on sale of investment in associates: ₹20.3 cr gain — from partial stake sales in Indian Gas Exchange (IGX) by NSE Investments Ltd, done to meet shareholding-norm requirements, not a strategic exit
• Impact of new Labour Code: ₹48.3 cr reversal of provision (a gain) — this relates to gratuity accounting changes under India's new labour codes that kicked in this year

Together these added about ₹68.6 cr to pre-tax profit, on top of the operating performance.

6. The SEBI settlement — the real story behind the story

NSE's board approved paying ₹714.7 crore to close out the Colocation and Dark Fibre cases with SEBI — disputes that have been running since 2019, through SEBI's Whole-Time Member orders, Adjudicating Officer orders, SAT appeals, and Supreme Court proceedings. The total settlement is ₹1,491.2 crore, of which NSE had already deposited ₹776.5 crore earlier; this payment closes the gap.

Why this matters for anything investor-facing: NSE had already provisioned ₹1,391.2 crore for this in FY26, so the P&L hit isn't sitting in this quarter — the cash settlement is largely pre-funded. What it does do is remove a near-decade-old regulatory overhang right as NSE moves toward its IPO, which is likely to matter more to unlisted-market sentiment than the quarter's actual profit number.

7. Standalone vs Consolidated — the associate/subsidiary gap

• Standalone PAT: ₹2,634.8 cr vs ₹2,408.61 cr (+9.4%)
• Consolidated PAT: ₹3,120.08 cr vs ₹2,923.85 cr (+6.7%)

The ~₹485 crore gap between standalone and consolidated comes from subsidiaries (NSE Clearing, NSE Indices, NSE Data & Analytics, etc.) and NSE's share of profit from associates like NSDL — a reminder that a meaningful chunk of NSE's overall earnings power sits outside the parent entity, in the ecosystem it has built around itself.