The ₹10 lakh minimum is measured per PAN across all the SIF strategies of one AMC. It decides who can enter — not how much of a portfolio belongs in a SIF.
₹10 lakh. But the number is measured in a way most investors get wrong on first reading: it applies to your total investment across all the SIF strategies of one asset management company, at PAN level — not to each strategy separately. Put ₹4 lakh in one strategy and ₹6 lakh in another strategy of the same AMC and you have met it. Invest with a second AMC’s SIF and the ₹10 lakh applies again, to that AMC.
That is the rule. The more useful question sits just behind it: having ₹10 lakh available is not the same thing as having a ₹10 lakh SIF decision.
No. The SIF framework requires the AMC to ensure that your aggregate investment across all the investment strategies offered under its SIF, at PAN level, is not less than ₹10 lakh. Within that, you can spread the money across the strategies that AMC offers.
What it does not permit is a smaller entry. There is no ₹2 lakh way in, no minimum-waiver for existing clients of the AMC, and no partial start that becomes compliant later by intention alone.
How the threshold is measured
Fund house A — its SIF strategies
Aggregate across this AMC’s SIF: ₹10 lakh
Threshold met at this fund house.
Fund house B — its SIF strategies
Aggregate across this AMC’s SIF: ₹0
Investing here starts a separate ₹10 lakh requirement.
Illustration of how aggregation works only. The amounts are indicative and are not a recommendation, an allocation or a suitability test.
What does not count
No. The threshold applies exclusively to SIF investments. A large existing mutual fund holding with the same fund house does not carry across, and does not reduce what you need to commit to the SIF.
This matters more than it looks. Investors often assume a long relationship with an AMC counts for something here. It does not. The required amount has to be held within the SIF itself, so the question to work through is what committing that amount to a SIF does to your portfolio — not what your history with the fund house entitles you to.
Systematic routes
AMCs are permitted to offer SIP, STP and SWP for SIF strategies, provided the minimum investment threshold continues to be met. Systematic routes are therefore a matter of how the money moves, not of whether the floor applies. They are not a way to enter a SIF below ₹10 lakh and accumulate towards the threshold later. Where an AMC offers a systematic route into a SIF, the arrangement still has to satisfy the ₹10 lakh requirement — check the specific strategy’s documents, because practice varies by AMC.
If your honest position is that ₹10 lakh is an amount you could only reach by stretching over several years, that is usually the portfolio telling you something, and it is worth reading the second half of this page before looking for a payment route.
There are three different situations here, with three different consequences. Most explanations describe only the first, which is why the other two catch investors out.
The AMC monitors your aggregate SIF value daily and must ensure a redemption you initiate does not take you below ₹10 lakh. In practice, partial withdrawals are only available while you stay above the floor. Ask for one that would breach it and it does not go through.
Not every route runs through the AMC’s redemption desk. If your aggregate value falls below ₹10 lakh because of any transaction you initiated — including a sale on an exchange or an off-market transfer — that is an active breach, and the consequence is specific. All your units across that SIF’s strategies are frozen for debit. You are given 30 calendar days to rebalance back above the threshold. Rebalance in time and the units are unfrozen with nothing further to do. Miss it, and the frozen units are redeemed automatically at the applicable NAV on the next business day after the 30th day — the exit is made for you, at whatever price that day carries.
A decline in NAV that takes you below ₹10 lakh is a passive fall, not a violation. Nothing is frozen, no notice is issued, and you are not forced out. But from that point the only redemption you are permitted is the entire remaining amount.
Read the three together and a practical point emerges. Around the floor, a SIF stops behaving like a holding you can trim. In a drawdown — exactly when an investor is most tempted to take a little off the table — it is all or nothing. And an inattentive sale or transfer starts a 30-day clock that ends in an exit you did not choose the timing of. These are liquidity characteristics worth accepting deliberately rather than discovering later.
Three situations, three consequences
A redemption you ask for is stopped before it breaches
An active breach: units frozen, 30 days to fix it
A market fall: no breach, but only a full exit
Current as at the verification date stated in the sources section of this article.
The exemption, precisely
Yes — from the regulatory ₹10 lakh threshold. Accredited investors are outside that requirement, so the floor that applies to everyone else does not apply to them.
Two things follow that are easy to miss. First, this does not mean a SIF will accept any amount: an individual SIF or strategy can set its own minimum, and that product-level minimum still applies. Second, accreditation is a separate status with its own eligibility criteria and a verification process that has to be valid at the time you invest. It is a different door, not a shortcut — and being eligible to walk through it still says nothing about whether the strategy deserves a place in your portfolio.
Access is not fit
Meeting the minimum does not establish that:
There is also a structural trap in a fixed floor. Because the minimum is an absolute rupee number rather than a proportion, the same ₹10 lakh is a modest position in one portfolio and a concentrated bet in another. A fixed floor can quietly create a concentration problem when it is met by a portfolio that is not yet large enough to absorb it.
The number that matters
This is the number that actually matters. Not ₹10 lakh — ₹10 lakh as a share of everything you have invested, and as a share of what you are still going to invest towards goals that are already committed.
If the minimum would be a large slice of your investible portfolio, the answer is rarely “invest less” — the rule will not allow it. The answer is that the decision is early, and the portfolio’s core deserves the attention first.
The SIF Portfolio Fit Check works that proportion out with you: it tests how portfolio size, purpose, time horizon and existing structure change whether a SIF deserves further consideration. It does not recommend a strategy or an allocation.
Before you commit
If you are still working out whether a SIF belongs in your portfolio at all, that is the broader suitability question. If you have settled that and are choosing between strategies, selection is its own discipline. And if what you actually need is the rest of the rulebook — tax treatment, redemption terms and costs — that sits with the current SIF rules.
The threshold rules on this page were verified on 9 September 2026 against SEBI’s current published framework: the Master Circular for Mutual Funds dated 20 March 2026, which consolidates the SIF framework, and SEBI circular SEBI/HO/IMD/POD-1/P/CIR/2025/107 dated 29 July 2025, which sets out the monitoring mechanism for the minimum investment threshold, including the active-breach freeze, the 30-calendar-day rebalance notice and automatic redemption. The accredited-investor exemption is provided by Regulation 49(1) of the SEBI (Mutual Funds) Regulations, 2026. These are changing facts and should be reverified whenever the governing regulations or the SEBI framework change.
About the author
Co-founder & COO, FinEdge
Mayank Bhatnagar is the Co-founder and COO of FinEdge. His work focuses on the processes, systems and operating discipline that help FinEdge serve investors consistently as the organisation grows.
Writes on investing discipline, investment mechanics and how structured investing processes work in practice.
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The question worth answering is what ₹10 lakh would represent inside your complete portfolio.
