Buy 500 shares of TATASTEEL in the morning and sell them before the close, and nothing moves in your demat account. The two legs net off inside the day. Buy and hold them, and 500 shares are delivered to you at settlement. Delivery percentage is the second quantity divided by the day’s total traded quantity, expressed for every listed scrip, every day.
NSE publishes it directly. The security-wise price volume and deliverable position file carries TTL_TRD_QNTY, DELIV_QTY and DELIV_PER for each symbol and series, available from NSE’s reports page. On 31 July 2026, 20MICRONS traded 8.08 lakh shares of which 1.64 lakh were delivered, giving a delivery percentage of 20.30. BSE publishes an equivalent figure.
What the distribution looks like
Across the 2,409 EQ-series securities in NSE’s file for 31 July 2026:
| Percentile | Delivery percentage |
|---|---|
| 5th | 26.1 |
| 25th | 44.5 |
| 50th | 55.4 |
| 75th | 67.8 |
| 95th | 90.0 |
On that day HDFCBANK delivered 74.8 percent, RELIANCE 65.3 percent and INFY 49.0 percent. One session is not a distribution you should anchor on, and the upper tail is populated largely by thinly traded names where almost nothing is churned. Read the number against the stock’s own history rather than against a fixed cut-off.
Why people watch it
The common reading is that delivery-heavy volume reflects positioning that survived the day, while low-delivery volume reflects intraday churn. That is a description of what the ratio measures, not evidence that it predicts returns. Delivery percentage is also one of the objective parameters NSE uses to shortlist stocks for the Additional Surveillance Measure framework, alongside price variation, client concentration and unique PAN counts (NSE ASM FAQ).
Caveats
A delivered sale is delivery too. High delivery says shares changed hands and stayed changed, not that buyers were more committed than sellers.
The ratio moves when the denominator moves. A day when volume collapses will often print a high delivery percentage without any change in accumulation, so read the level and the traded quantity together.
Single large trades distort it. A bulk deal or a block deal, both of which settle as delivery, can lift a day’s figure on their own.
The file is published after market hours. A strategy that reads today’s delivery percentage can only act from the next session’s open, and a backtest that assumes a same-day fill has introduced lookahead.