Aggregate mutual fund AUM is a poor guide to household behaviour, because institutional allocation follows a charter. The individual split is the revealing series - it records what households choose when nothing constrains them.
AMFI and Crisil Intelligence publish that split monthly. What follows reads the June 2026 position, then compares it against a year earlier, with the caveats that comparison requires.
Nearly Two-Thirds in Equity
Individual investor AUM by scheme category, June 2026. *Other schemes include index funds, gold ETFs, other ETFs, and fund of funds investing overseas. Source: AMFI, Crisil Intelligence.
- Equity-oriented schemes hold 64.8% of individual AUM - by a wide margin the dominant category.
- Hybrid schemes are a distant second at 17.3%, more than double the 7.5% in debt-oriented schemes - individuals are not treating fixed income as a core holding.
- Other schemes - index funds, gold ETFs, overseas fund of funds - hold 9.4%, ahead of debt, while solution-oriented schemes remain negligible at 1.1%.
The ordering is the finding: debt sits fourth, behind passive and commodity exposure. Whatever role fixed income plays in Indian household portfolios, it is not being played through mutual funds.
The Year-on-Year Move Is Real but Overstated
Individual investor holdings by scheme category, July 2025. Individuals defined as HNIs or investors with a ticket size of ₹2 lakh or above. Source: AMFI, Industry Trends July 2025.
In July 2025, AMFI reported 87% of individual holdings in equity-oriented schemes, 8% in debt, and the remaining 5% split between ETFs/FoFs and liquid or money-market schemes. Read plainly, equity’s share has fallen more than twenty percentage points in a year.
Read carefully, two caveats apply. The two releases use different taxonomies - the July 2025 breakdown has no separate hybrid or solution-oriented buckets, so part of the apparent decline is money now visible in categories the earlier report never broke out. And the July 2025 report defines individuals narrowly, as HNIs or ₹2 lakh-plus ticket sizes, which is not necessarily the June 2026 population.
The direction is real: equity concentration has eased. The magnitude is not measurable from these two releases, and quoting the twenty-point figure without the taxonomy change attached would be reporting a definitional artefact as a behavioural shift.
What This Means for Allocators
Read the individual series, not the aggregate, when the question is household behaviour. Institutional allocation answers a different question and dilutes this one.
Check taxonomy before comparing two AMFI releases. Category definitions have changed inside a single year, and the change is large enough to manufacture a trend on its own.
And treat this as revealed preference rather than a recommendation. What the crowd holds this month says nothing about what any one household should hold - it records that given a free choice, individual money in India is overwhelmingly equity money.
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