Near-inertial motions contribute most of the velocity shear in the upper ocean. In the Bay of Bengal (BoB), the annual-mean energy flux from the wind to near-inertial motions in the mixed layer in 2013 is dominated by tropical cyclone (TC) processes. However, due to the lack of long-term observations of velocity profiles, our knowledge about interior near-inertial waves (NIWs) as well as their shear features is limited. In this study, we quantified the contribution of NIWs to shear by integrating the wavenumber-frequency spectra estimated from velocity profiles in the upper layers (40?440 m) of the southern BoB from April 2013 to May 2014. It is shown that the annual-mean proportion of near-inertial shear out of the total is approximately 50％, and the high contribution is mainly due to the enhancement of the TC processes during which the near-inertial shear accounts for nearly 80％ of the total. In the steady monsoon seasons, the near-inertial shear is dominant to or at least comparable with the subinertial shear. The contribution of NIWs to the total shear is lower during the summer monsoon than during the winter monsoon owing to more active mesoscale eddies and higher subinertial shear during the summer monsoon. The Doppler shifting of the M2 internal tide has little effect on the main results since the proportion of shear from the tidal motions is much lower than that from the near-inertial and subinertial motions.