The Annual Financial Calendar for NEPSE

First published 26 Aug 2026 · Last verified 29 Aug 2026

Lesson 113.1 — The Shape of the Nepali Financial Year

Every farmer in Nepal knows the rhythm of the land without needing to check a diary. Maize goes in after the first monsoon showers. Paddy is transplanted in Ashad and Shrawan. Rice is harvested in Kartik. Mustard and wheat follow in the winter fields. A farmer who plants paddy in Poush, out of season, will get nothing for the effort, no matter how hard he works. The land has its own calendar, and working with that calendar, not against it, is what separates a good harvest from a wasted one.

NEPSE, the Nepal Stock Exchange, has a calendar too. It is not written on any wall calendar sold in New Road, but it repeats every year with the same reliability as Dashain and Tihar. The national budget is read out in Jestha. The fiscal year closes at the end of Ashad. Companies close their books and call their shareholders to Annual General Meetings between Kartik and Falgun. Nepal Rastra Bank, the central bank that regulates all banks and sets the country's monetary direction, announces its big annual monetary policy at the start of the new fiscal year and reviews it again six months later. Dividends and bonus shares arrive in waves, not in a steady drip. Festivals pull money out of the market before they arrive and sometimes bring it back afterward. Tax deadlines fall on fixed days every single year.

An investor who does not know this calendar is like the out-of-season farmer. He buys shares in a panic during Dashain because trading has gone quiet and he mistakes silence for danger. He misses an AGM notice because he was not looking in Mangsir. He forgets to file his tax return by the Ashwin deadline and pays a fine that eats into the very dividend he was celebrating. An investor who does know the calendar, on the other hand, moves through the year with a plan, the same way a farmer moves through the seasons with a plan.

This chapter is that calendar, laid out month by month, in the order the Nepali fiscal year actually runs — starting from Shrawan, not from Baisakh. This matters because Nepal's government, its companies, and its regulators do not organise their financial life around the Nepali New Year in Baisakh. They organise it around the fiscal year, which begins on the first day of Shrawan (mid-July) and ends on the last day of Ashad (mid-July the following year). Shrawan to Ashad is to a Nepali company's finances what a full crop cycle is to a farmer's field: everything is measured from one Ashad-end to the next.

To make this concrete, this chapter will follow one person through a full year of investing. His name is Devi Prasad Wagle. He is fifty-four years old, and he works as a Section Officer in a government ministry in Kathmandu, a modest but steady job he has held for close to three decades. Devi Prasad is not a big trader. He does not sit refreshing share prices on his phone all day. But over fifteen years he has built a portfolio of bank shares, a couple of hydropower companies, and one insurance company, using savings from his salary and a portion of his provident fund. He is six years from retirement, and he has one clear goal: to turn this portfolio into a dependable stream of dividend income for the years when his government pension alone will not be enough. Devi Prasad has learned, slowly and sometimes expensively, that the way to manage this portfolio well is to know exactly what tends to happen in each month of the year, and to plan around it rather than be surprised by it.

Think of the fiscal year as a length of pipe carrying water from a village tap. Water does not arrive at every point in the pipe at the same time; it moves in a sequence, and if you know the sequence, you know exactly when to place your bucket. The budget announcement in Jestha is the moment the tap is turned on for the coming year, deciding tax rates and sector priorities. The fiscal year-end in Ashad is when the pipe is checked and the year's flow is measured and recorded. The AGM season from Kartik to Falgun is when that measured water is actually handed out to shareholders as dividends and bonus shares. Understanding this sequence is the single most useful habit a NEPSE investor can build, more useful, in Devi Prasad's experience, than trying to predict which stock will rise in a given week.

Devi Prasad keeps a small notebook, the kind sold for ten rupees at any stationery shop, in which he has written out this twelve-month cycle by hand. Every Shrawan, he opens to a fresh page and writes the year's plan at the top. He does not need to guess when the AGM season will begin or when his tax instalment is due. He already knows, because the pattern repeats. The rest of this chapter walks through that same pattern, quarter by quarter, the way Devi Prasad experiences it every single year.

Lesson 113.2 — Shrawan and Bhadra: A New Fiscal Year, Monetary Policy, and Setting the Plan

For Devi Prasad, the first day of Shrawan feels a little like the first day of Baisakh feels for everyone else, except quieter. There is no tika, no new clothes, no family gathering. But inside the Ministry where he works, and inside every company listed on NEPSE, Shrawan 1 is when the books reset to zero. The old fiscal year's revenue and expense counters go back to nil, and a new twelve-month accounting period begins.

Within the first few weeks of Shrawan, Nepal Rastra Bank, the country's central bank, publishes its annual Monetary Policy statement. In plain language, this is the central bank's yearly instruction manual for how much money should flow through the banking system over the coming year, what interest rates commercial banks should broadly work within, how much capital banks must hold in reserve, and what limits apply to different kinds of lending, including margin lending against shares. Think of it as the central bank turning a large tap that controls how freely water, meaning credit and liquidity, flows into the economy. Turn the tap open a little more, and banks lend more freely, businesses expand, and often share prices respond well. Turn the tap tighter, and credit becomes scarcer, loan interest rates rise, and the stock market often cools.

Devi Prasad has learned to read the Monetary Policy statement not as a technical document for bankers, but as a weather forecast for the year ahead. If the policy signals a loosening of margin lending rules, meaning the rules that govern how much money investors can borrow against their existing shares to buy more shares, he expects more retail money to enter NEPSE in the following months, which often pushes prices for popular sectors like banking and hydropower upward. If the policy tightens capital adequacy requirements for banks, meaning it requires banks to hold more of their own safety cushion relative to what they lend out, he expects some banking shares to come under pressure, and he watches for signs that certain banks may need to raise fresh capital through a rights issue later in the year.

Bhadra, the month that follows, is usually quieter on the surface, but it is when the real preparation work happens behind the scenes at listed companies. Auditors are going through the books. Finance departments are finalising the numbers that will eventually be presented to shareholders. A few companies with early accounting cycles begin issuing their first book closure notices in this period, though the bulk of that activity is still a few months away.

A book closure is a term every NEPSE investor must understand clearly, because so much of the annual calendar revolves around it. When a company decides to pay a dividend, meaning a share of its profit, in cash, in bonus shares, meaning additional free shares given out of the company's reserves, or both, it must first decide exactly who counts as a shareholder eligible to receive it. Since shares change hands every trading day, the company needs a fixed date to draw the line. It announces a book closure date, and whoever is registered as the owner of a share in the company's official shareholder ledger as of that date receives the dividend or bonus, regardless of whether they sell the very next day. Anyone who buys the share after that date misses out on that particular payment, even if they hold it for years afterward.

For Devi Prasad, Shrawan and Bhadra are planning months, not action months. He rereads his notebook, checks which of his holdings reported strong or weak previous-year results, and makes a short list of companies whose book closure and AGM announcements he expects to watch closely later in the year. He compares this year's Monetary Policy statement to last year's, noting what has changed. He does not buy or sell heavily in these two months. He prepares, the way a farmer checks his tools and seed stock before the real planting season begins.

Lesson 113.3 — Ashwin and Kartik: Dashain, Tihar, and the Festival Liquidity Cycle

If Shrawan and Bhadra are quiet preparation months, Ashwin and Kartik are the two months when the ordinary rhythm of Nepali life visibly collides with the stock market. This is Dashain and Tihar season, the two largest festivals of the year, and both have real, measurable effects on how NEPSE behaves.

The first effect is on trading volume, meaning the total value or number of shares changing hands each day. In the weeks leading up to Dashain, many investors, especially those who also run small businesses or farms, pull money out of savings and out of shares to cover festival expenses: new clothes for children, meat and goods for family gatherings, gifts, and travel back to home villages. Devi Prasad has observed this pattern for fifteen years running. Trading volume on NEPSE tends to thin out in the fortnight before Dashain, and it is common to see several days of little movement as the exchange itself closes for the main festival holidays.

The second effect runs in the opposite direction. Dashain and Tihar are also the two festivals when remittance inflows, meaning money sent home by Nepali workers abroad, typically peak. Families working in the Gulf countries, Malaysia, and elsewhere send extra money home so that their relatives can celebrate properly. Once the festivals pass and the immediate spending need is satisfied, a portion of this remittance money historically finds its way into savings, and a smaller portion into share purchases, particularly from Kartik into Mangsir. Devi Prasad thinks of this the way he thinks of monsoon rain filling a village pond: the rain, in this case the remittance inflow, arrives heavily around the festivals, some of it is used immediately for the fields, meaning festival expenses, and what remains slowly fills the pond that other activities, including share buying, can later draw from.

Tihar itself, following close behind Dashain in Kartik, brings its own short closure of the exchange for the main festival days, plus Laxmi Puja, when many households worship wealth and prosperity directly, a cultural moment that Devi Prasad half-jokingly calls the most appropriate day of the year to review one's investment portfolio, even though the exchange itself is closed.

It is also in Kartik that the first real wave of the AGM season begins. Some companies with earlier accounting cycles or faster audit completion start issuing book closure notices and AGM invitations as early as late Kartik, right after the festival dust settles. This is often the first genuine signal of the year that dividend season has begun, and Devi Prasad treats the first two or three AGM notices each year as an early indicator of how generous the overall dividend season is likely to be.

Sitting alongside the festivals, and easy to forget in the excitement of Dashain preparations, is one of the most important fixed deadlines of the entire fiscal calendar: the income tax return filing deadline, which falls at the end of Ashwin, roughly three months after the fiscal year closed at the end of the previous Ashad. Any investor who earned taxable income, including capital gains from selling shares or dividend income above certain thresholds, needs to be sure their tax affairs for the previous fiscal year are filed correctly by this date, or apply through the proper channel for an extension where one is available.

For Devi Prasad personally, Ashwin and Kartik are months of patience rather than action. He does not rush to buy into thin, quiet pre-Dashain trading, and he does not panic-sell either. He uses the festival lull to finish his own tax filing early, well before the crowd at the tax office builds up in the final week of Ashwin. He watches the first AGM notices that begin appearing in Kartik as an early weather signal for the dividend season ahead, jotting the details into his notebook, but he generally waits until Mangsir before making any real buying or selling decisions.

Lesson 113.4 — Mangsir through Magh: AGM Season, the Dividend Wave, and the Mid-Year Policy Review

If Ashwin and Kartik are the quiet, festival-heavy months, Mangsir through Magh is when the NEPSE calendar becomes genuinely busy, and it is Devi Prasad's favourite stretch of the year, because it is when the work of the previous months finally turns into cash in his bank account.

An Annual General Meeting, usually shortened to AGM, is the yearly meeting every listed company is legally required to hold, where the board of directors presents the past year's audited financial results to shareholders, proposes a dividend or bonus share distribution, and asks shareholders to vote on various resolutions, including sometimes the appointment of auditors or changes to company rules. Under the governing company law, a company must hold its AGM within a set period after its fiscal year-end, and in practice this pushes most AGMs into the window between Kartik and Falgun, with Mangsir, Poush, and Magh carrying the heaviest concentration.

The mechanics work like this. First, the board proposes a dividend, whether in cash, in bonus shares, or a combination of both, based on the profits and reserves shown in the audited accounts. Second, the company announces a book closure date, the cutoff described in the previous lesson, fixing exactly who is entitled to receive that dividend. Third, the AGM itself is held, where shareholders formally approve the proposal, sometimes with adjustments. Fourth, once approved, the actual cash is credited to shareholders' bank accounts linked to their demat account, meaning their electronic share-holding account, and bonus shares are credited to the same demat account, typically within a defined period after the AGM.

Devi Prasad thinks of this whole sequence like a joint family's harvest festival. The crop, meaning the company's annual profit, is gathered and measured after Ashad. The family elders, meaning the board of directors, then decide how much of that harvest to distribute to each family member now, in this case as dividend, and how much to keep stored for next season's seed and hard times, meaning retained reserves. The formal family gathering where this division is announced and confirmed is the AGM. And just as in a real joint family, not every member receives an equal share; it depends on how many shares, meaning how large a stake in the family's collective land, each person holds.

Poush brings with it a second fixed deadline that has nothing to do with dividends directly but matters enormously to any investor with taxable income: the first instalment of advance tax. Taxpayers whose income is not fully covered by tax deducted at source are required to pay advance tax in three instalments across the fiscal year, calculated as a percentage of their estimated annual tax liability. The first instalment, covering forty percent of the estimated liability, falls due at the end of Poush. Devi Prasad, whose government salary is taxed at source but whose share-related income sometimes requires separate estimation, treats this deadline with the same seriousness as the Ashwin tax filing deadline, because penalties for underpayment can accumulate quietly over the year if ignored.

Magh brings the second major NRB event of the calendar: the mid-year review of the Monetary Policy. Roughly six months into the fiscal year, once half a year of actual economic data is available, Nepal Rastra Bank reviews its original Shrawan policy statement and adjusts it if circumstances have changed, tightening or loosening specific provisions based on how inflation, remittances, bank liquidity, and credit growth have actually behaved so far that year. Devi Prasad reads this review the same way he reads the original Shrawan statement, as an updated weather forecast, except now it is a mid-season correction rather than a full forecast, and it often has a sharper, more immediate effect on bank and finance company shares because it responds to real numbers rather than projections.

By the end of Magh, Devi Prasad's notebook usually shows several completed rows: dividends received, bonus shares credited, tax instalment paid, monetary policy review noted. This is the busiest and, for him, most rewarding stretch of the year, because it is when patient holding over the previous months converts into visible, bankable results.

Lesson 113.5 — Falgun through Chaitra: The Late AGM Rush, IPOs, Rights Issues, and the Second Tax Instalment

By the time Falgun arrives, the heaviest wave of AGMs has usually passed, but the season is not over. Companies that delayed their audits, or that simply have accounting cycles running slightly later, hold their AGMs in Falgun and into Chaitra, right up against the six-month regulatory deadline described earlier. Devi Prasad treats this period as the closing innings of the dividend season: fewer announcements arrive each week than in Mangsir, but they still matter, and he keeps checking his notebook of predicted dates so that no late book closure catches him unprepared.

Falgun and Chaitra are also, historically, the months when Devi Prasad sees the most activity in new share issuance, meaning IPOs, short for Initial Public Offerings, where a company sells shares to the public for the first time, and rights issues, where an already-listed company offers additional new shares to its existing shareholders, usually at a discounted price, in proportion to what they already hold, in order to raise fresh capital.

There is a practical reason so much of this activity clusters in the second half of the fiscal year rather than spreading evenly across all twelve months. Companies, particularly banks and financial institutions that must meet regulatory capital requirements, and hydropower companies that need funds to complete construction of a project, often plan their capital-raising to be completed and formally recorded before the fiscal year closes at the end of Ashad. Since the whole approval chain, board decision, regulatory clearance from SEBON, allotment, and listing, takes real time to complete, Falgun and Chaitra become the natural window to start that process if a company wants everything finished before Ashad-end. Waiting until Baisakh or Jestha to begin the same process risks missing the fiscal year-end deadline entirely.

For a rights issue specifically, an existing shareholder like Devi Prasad receives a formal notice of how many new shares he is entitled to buy, at what price, and by what deadline, based on how many shares he already holds on the relevant book closure date for the rights issue. He then applies to subscribe, in Nepal now most commonly done electronically through a system where a shareholder's linked bank account is used to apply, and if he does not apply within the deadline, his right to buy those discounted shares simply lapses; it is not automatically carried forward or refunded as shares.

Chaitra also carries the second instalment of advance tax, covering up to seventy percent of the estimated annual liability, cumulative with the forty percent already paid at the end of Poush. Devi Prasad treats this the same way he treated the Poush instalment: a fixed date, not a flexible suggestion, with a real financial penalty attached to missing it.

As Chaitra draws to a close, Devi Prasad also begins a quieter kind of preparation, thinking ahead to Baisakh and the Nepali New Year. He does not treat the New Year as a market event in the way Dashain or the budget are market events, but he has noticed, over many years, that retail buying interest in NEPSE often picks up in the weeks around Baisakh, as investors treat the new year psychologically as a fresh start and put new savings to work. He does not chase this pattern blindly, but he keeps it in mind as he decides whether to hold cash in reserve heading into Baisakh or deploy it earlier while prices in Chaitra are sometimes comparatively quieter.

Lesson 113.6 — Baisakh through Ashad: New Year, the National Budget, and Closing the Books

The final stretch of the fiscal year, Baisakh through Ashad, brings the calendar full circle, ending exactly where the next year's Shrawan will begin.

Baisakh 1 marks the Nepali New Year, a cultural and personal milestone far more than a market event, but Devi Prasad has come to see it as a natural moment to review the whole portfolio from a fresh vantage point. He treats it the way many households treat New Year's Day itself: not a day to trade, but a day to sit down, look at everything acquired over the past year, dividends received, bonus shares credited, any new positions bought during rights issues, and honestly assess what worked and what did not.

Jestha is the month every serious NEPSE investor watches most closely of all, because this is when the Government of Nepal presents its national budget, usually on Jestha 15, roughly one month before the new fiscal year begins. The budget speech sets out the government's spending priorities, revenue targets, and, crucially for investors, any changes to tax policy affecting specific sectors. A change to the capital gains tax rate on shares, a new customs duty affecting imported raw materials for a manufacturing company, incentives announced for hydropower or tourism, or changes to the tax treatment of dividends can all move share prices within days of the budget speech, sometimes even within hours, as investors reprice their expectations for affected sectors.

Devi Prasad has learned to read the budget the way a farmer reads the first announcement of the government's fertiliser subsidy for the coming season: it tells him which crops, meaning which sectors, are likely to be favoured and which may face new costs. He does not act impulsively on budget day itself, when trading can be volatile and prices can overreact in both directions, but he reads the full budget document carefully over the following days, checking specifically for any provisions touching banking, hydropower, insurance, and manufacturing, the four sectors where his own holdings sit.

Ashad, the final month of the fiscal year, is when everything comes to a close. Companies finalise their accounts for the year that is ending, several use this exact window to hold their own book closure for annual accounts purposes, and the third and final advance tax instalment, covering the remaining balance up to the full estimated liability, falls due at the very end of the month. It is also, historically, a month of last-minute rushes: banks and finance companies racing to complete a capital increase before the fiscal year-end deadline that regulators have set, and companies finalising any rights issue or bonus share process that needs to be reflected in the closing accounts.

By the last week of Ashad, Devi Prasad's notebook for the year is nearly full. He totals up the dividends received, the bonus shares credited, the tax instalments paid across Poush, Chaitra, and Ashad, and the net change in the value of his holdings across the twelve months. He closes the notebook, and on the first day of the new Shrawan, he opens a fresh page and begins again, because the fiscal year, like the agricultural year his grandparents once lived by, does not truly end. It only turns over into the next cycle of the same recurring calendar.