Should You Stop Your SIPs?

On 28 Sep 2026, the Nifty 50 was 12.2% below its November 2025 high. If you run a SIP, you have probably seen that fall as a red number in an app, and felt the question that comes with it: "should I stop?"

You are not the first to ask it. Since the start of 2020, the Nifty 50 has fallen 9.9% or more from a high 4 times, and each time, SIP investors faced the same choice. AMFI, the mutual fund industry body, publishes how much money comes in through SIPs every month, going back to April 2016. Set against those 4 falls, it shows what investors actually did, and what it cost the one time many of them pulled back. Every Nifty figure here counts dividends as reinvested, so it will differ a little from the index level an app shows.

What SIP investors did in each fall

2020. By the end of March 2020, with COVID shutting the country down, the Nifty 50 was 29.1% below its December 2019 high. Yet SIP investors paid in ₹8,641 crore that month, a record for any month since AMFI's figures begin in April 2016. The pullback came afterwards. SIP money fell in 7 of the next 8 months, to ₹7,302 crore in November 2020: 15.5% less than in March, and the lowest month since April 2018. By then the market had already recovered, and at the end of November 2020 the Nifty 50 was above its old high. SIP money only passed its March 2020 level again in March 2021, at ₹9,182 crore.

AMFI's figures cannot say why. A paused SIP can mean an investor who lost their nerve, or one who lost income in the lockdown and had nothing to spare. Either way, the data shows the money stopping in the months when the market was climbing back.

The falls since went the other way. In 2022 and in 2024-25, SIP money rose while the Nifty 50 fell, and kept rising after it recovered. The fall that began in November 2025 has followed the same path so far: SIP money hit a record ₹32,087 crore in March 2026, the month the Nifty bottomed, and a new record of ₹32,297 crore in August. The only wobble was April 2026, when 51.29 lakh SIPs closed and 50.71 lakh started.

SIP money shrank only once, after the 2020 bottom

Change in monthly SIP money in the big Nifty 50 falls since 2020. It rose during every fall, and kept rising afterwards, except after 2020's bottom.

% CHANGE IN MONTHLY SIP MONEY

From the Nifty's high to its bottomIn the 8 months after the bottom

Mar to Nov 2020: from ₹8,641 cr to ₹7,302 cr, as the Nifty recovered

Month ends: Dec 2019 to Mar 2020, Oct 2021 to Jun 2022, Sep 2024 to Feb 2025. In the 2025-26 fall (14.7%), SIP money rose 9.0% from the high to the bottom; 8 months on from that bottom is November 2026.

AMFI, SIP contribution by month; NIFTY 50 TRI month ends · Dec 2019 to Oct 2025

These are industry totals, so they describe the money as a whole, not every investor: new investors starting SIPs can hide others stopping. Even so, the pattern is clear. Taken together, SIP investors kept paying through most falls, and the one time the total shrank, in 2020, it shrank after the crash, in the months when prices were climbing back from their lows.

This also sharpens an earlier answer. In February, How Systematic Are SIPs? asked the same question using equity fund assets, and found that they grow more slowly when the Nifty falls. But fund assets fall with prices, so they slow in a fall even if every investor keeps paying. AMFI's SIP collections measure the money itself, and they show it rising during each fall, with the one real pullback coming after the 2020 bottom.

Those "record stoppage" headlines

A month like April 2026 is also the kind that produces headlines about record numbers of SIPs being stopped. A stopped SIP in AMFI's count is not always someone giving up. It also counts SIPs that simply finished their term, and SIPs with 3 missed instalments in a row, often because a bank mandate failed. Even so, more SIPs started than closed in each of the last 3 financial years. In 2025-26, 719.22 lakh started and 679.75 lakh closed.