These Indian Banks Have The Most Customer Deposits

India has no shortage of banks, but there are big differences in the scale and size of their customer deposits.

State Bank of India remains in a league of its own when it comes to holding the country’s money, with total deposits at ₹60.4 lakh crore, nearly double what second-placed HDFC Bank has on its books. Fresh numbers on deposits and customer bases across India’s largest banks reveal a lot about who actually banks with whom in the country, and the answers aren’t always what the balance sheets alone would suggest. ICICI Bank incidentally, is India’s third largest bank but isn’t in this data because it hasn’t disclosed these details.

SBI’s dominance is hardly a surprise given it remains the largest bank in India by nearly every measure, and its 53 crore customers translate to more than one account for every three Indians. HDFC Bank, despite carrying roughly a fifth of SBI’s customer base at 10.1 crore, holds deposits worth ₹31 lakh crore, making it the only private lender to break into the same tier as the public sector giant.

What stands out more than the headline deposit figures is what happens when you divide deposits by customers. HDFC Bank’s average deposit per customer comes to ₹3.07 lakh, comfortably the highest among the ten banks in this list. Axis Bank follows at ₹2.47 lakh, and Canara Bank rounds out the top three at ₹1.47 lakh. SBI, despite its scale, sits at ₹1.14 lakh per customer, a reflection of just how wide its retail net is cast across rural and semi-urban India.

At the other end, Union Bank of India has the lowest average at ₹0.80 lakh per customer, followed closely by Bank of India at ₹0.84 lakh and Indian Bank at ₹0.87 lakh. Punjab National Bank and Bank of Baroda land in similar territory, at ₹0.93 lakh and ₹0.89 lakh respectively. All five are public sector banks, and the pattern is consistent: large customer counts built through years of branch expansion and government scheme accounts, but comparatively thin average balances.

Private banks tell the opposite story. With fewer branches and a customer base skewed toward salaried professionals and urban India, HDFC Bank and Axis Bank pull in fewer accounts but much larger deposits per account. Kotak Mahindra Bank fits somewhere in between, with 5.2 crore customers and an average deposit of ₹1.09 lakh, putting it ahead of most public sector banks on this metric despite being the smallest bank in the list by total deposits.

The gap also says something about how banking penetration has evolved in India. Public sector banks, particularly PNB, Bank of Baroda and Union Bank, carry the legacy of decades of directed lending and financial inclusion mandates like Jan Dhan Yojana, which pushed millions of low-balance accounts onto their books. Private banks, on the other hand, have largely grown by chasing higher-value customers in cities, which shows up directly in their per-customer numbers even when their total customer count stays modest.

The Full Picture

Put together, these numbers show two very different banking models operating side by side in the country. One is built on scale and reach, the kind SBI and the public sector lenders have chased for decades. The other is built on wallet size, which is where HDFC Bank and Axis Bank have quietly built an edge. Both approaches show up as strength on a balance sheet, just measured in different ways.