Two articles on this blog, working out what a future UPI merchant fee would cost different counters, named LPG as sharing fuel’s regulated-margin structure but left its distributor commission “named and not numbered” — the number wasn’t in the documents this blog had already verified. It is on PPAC’s own commission page. Once it’s in, the LPG counter turns out to sit nowhere near fuel on the leverage curve — it is nearly twice as well protected.
Payments · Energy · LPG
LPG's Missing Number: A ₹73.08 Commission, and Why Gas Is Safer From an MDR Than Petrol
Published · v1.0.0 · PPAC Dealers/Distributors Commission page, retrieved 8 August 2026 · Delhi domestic cylinder price of 7 August 2026
The gap this article closes
Two earlier pieces flagged the number as missing. It wasn’t missing from PPAC’s own page.
This blog’s pieces on a possible UPI merchant discount rate — on the fuel forecourt and on categories beyond it — both grouped LPG with petrol, diesel and PDS kerosene as “government-administered margins, full-ticket fees,” and both stopped short of a number: “the current commission value is not in the PPAC documents used here, so it is named and not numbered.” That was true of the PPAC Ready Reckoner and Snapshot documents this blog had already verified for the fuel pieces. It is not true of PPAC’s dedicated commission page, which this article checked directly.
Exhibit 1
The domestic LPG distributor commission, and how it got there
Per 14.2kg cylinder unless noted. Selected years from PPAC’s full revision history.
| Effective date | Commission, ₹/cylinder |
|---|---|
| 1 April 2004 | 16.71 |
| 1 August 2019 | 56.20 |
| 19 May 2022 | 64.84 |
| 4 October 2023 (current) | 73.08 |
PPAC, Dealers/Distributors Commission on Petrol, Diesel, PDS Kerosene & Domestic LPG, sourced to MoP&NG/OMC circulars, retrieved 8 August 2026. The 5kg cylinder commission is fixed at exactly half the 14.2kg rate throughout this history — ₹36.54 today. A separate, smaller “additional commission for sale at market-determined price” existed between January 2016 and August 2019 (₹0.06–₹0.63/cylinder) and was discontinued; PPAC’s page shows no entry after October 2023, so this article treats ₹73.08 as the current rate rather than assuming a later unannounced revision.
What that number is worth as a margin
Same arithmetic as the fuel pieces: commission ÷ ticket.
A domestic 14.2kg cylinder in Delhi cost ₹942 on 7 August 2026. Against that ticket, the ₹73.08 commission is a margin of 7.76% — not the thin regulated sliver this blog assumed when it filed LPG next to fuel. The petrol dealer keeps 3.87% of the pump price; the diesel dealer, 3.5%; PDS kerosene, 4.5%. The LPG distributor keeps roughly double any of them.
Exhibit 2
LPG on the leverage curve, against the counters already priced on this blog
Fee share of margin = MDR rate ÷ margin. LPG and kerosene rows use this article’s and the companion articles’ verified margins; the rest of the curve is the same arithmetic table published earlier.
| Counter | Margin, % of ticket | 0.25% MDR eats, % of margin | 0.30%, % | 1.00%, % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Petrol/diesel dealer (blended) | 3.87 | 6.5 | 7.8 | 25.8 |
| PDS kerosene | 4.5 | 5.6 | 6.7 | 22.2 |
| Domestic LPG (14.2kg) | 7.76 | 3.2 | 3.9 | 12.9 |
Author’s computation. Fuel and kerosene margins as previously verified on this blog (PPAC Ready Reckoner FY2025-26 H1). LPG margin from Exhibit 1 and Exhibit 2’s Delhi price above. All three are government-administered, full-ticket-fee counters, which is why the comparison is fair — but the size of the administered margin, not the fact of regulation, is what determines an MDR’s bite.
The pool this commission adds up to
One subsidised segment, priced the way the fuel articles priced the national UPI pool.
India’s Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana had roughly 10.58 crore beneficiaries as of July 2026, refilling at an average 4.71 cylinders a year in FY2025-26. That alone — before counting any of India’s roughly 31–33 crore total LPG connections outside the scheme — is enough to price:
Exhibit 3
Distributor commission on Ujjwala refills alone, one year
10.58 crore beneficiaries × 4.71 refills/year × ₹73.08 commission. PMUY-only; this article does not extrapolate to the wider ~31–33 crore connection base because non-PMUY refill rates are not established here.
| Quantity | Value |
|---|---|
| PMUY beneficiaries, July 2026, crore | 10.58 |
| Per-beneficiary consumption, FY2025-26, cylinders/year | 4.71 |
| Implied PMUY refills, one year, crore cylinders | ~49.8 |
| Distributor commission on those refills, ₹ crore/year | 3,642 |
| PMUY’s own 2025-26 subsidy budget (Cabinet-approved), ₹ crore/year | 12,000 |
PMUY beneficiary count and per-consumer consumption — government statements reported via press coverage, July–August 2026, cross-checked against a NITI Aayog April 2026 evaluation citing 86.6% of Ujjwala households using LPG as primary cooking fuel. Subsidy figure — Cabinet approval of ₹300/cylinder PMUY subsidy for 2025-26 at a ₹12,000 crore outlay, reported August 2025. Commission figure is this article’s own computation and is not a government-published total.
The distributor commission on PMUY refills alone — ₹3,642 crore a year — is about 30% of the scheme’s entire subsidy outlay. It is also, for scale against this blog’s other fee-pool comparisons, more than eight times the ₹437 crore UPI incentive budget that the fuel-retail article measured the national MDR fee pool against. LPG’s distributor network runs on a commission larger, as a share of its own ticket, than fuel’s — and larger in aggregate, on the subsidised segment alone, than the entire incentive scheme built to keep UPI free.
What would change this
Two things this article does not know.
Related — gas & LPG. Thermal Parity Is Dead · City Gas Just Became India's Largest Gas Consumer · Europe Bought a Record Amount of LNG · The CBG Incentive Stack.
Sources. Domestic LPG distributor commission, current rate and revision history — PPAC, Dealers/Distributors Commission on Petrol, Diesel, PDS Kerosene & Domestic LPG, retrieved 8 August 2026. Domestic cylinder price, Delhi, 7 August 2026 — Goodreturns LPG price tracker. PMUY beneficiary count and per-consumer consumption — government statements reported in press coverage, July–August 2026; NITI Aayog evaluation (April 2026) on Ujjwala primary-fuel usage. PMUY 2025-26 subsidy — Cabinet approval of a ₹300/cylinder subsidy at ₹12,000 crore outlay, reported by Business Standard and PIB, August 2025. Total LPG connections (~31–33 crore) — multiple 2026 government statements to Parliament and press coverage; cited here as a range rather than a single pinned figure because sources gave different as-on dates. Fuel and kerosene margins, and the ₹437 crore UPI incentive figure — as verified in this blog’s fuel-retail MDR article and its companion piece. The ₹3,642 crore PMUY commission-pool figure is this article’s own computation, not a government-published total, and does not include the roughly 20–22 crore non-PMUY LPG connections, whose refill rates were not established in this research.
About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.
