PACS. 02.70.Ns -Molecular dynamics and particle methods. PACS. 05.40.-a -Fluctuation phenomena, random processes, noise, and Brownian motion. PACS. 66.20.+d -Viscosity of liquids; diffusive momentum transport.Abstract. -The equilibrium statistics of quantities computed by means of DPD (dissipative particle dynamics) are usually very sensitive to the time step used in the simulation. In this letter we show how to eliminate this sensitivity by considering the irreversible dynamics in DPD as the limiting case of a thermostat that leaves Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution invariant even for finite time steps. The remaining dependency on time step is solely due to the discretization of the conservative part of the dynamics and is independent of the thermostat.Introduction. -Dissipation particle dynamics (DPD) is a particle-based simulation technique. It was originally proposed to simulate fluids on a mesoscopic scale [1]. A DPD particle models a blob of atoms that have effective, soft interactions. By means of dissipative and fluctuating pair-forces, the equilibrium state of the system is made to satisfy the Boltzmann distribution. Alternatively, one can view upon DPD as a thermostatic scheme in a molecular dynamics (MD) code. In this case, the (conservative) interactions need not be soft.Because DPD is particle-based, it does not have problems associated with the use of a grid such as, e.g., lattice Boltzmann simulations. It is Galilean invariant and momentum is conserved. This is different from Brownian dynamics, Stokesian dynamics and the Andersen thermostat. Different from to the Nosé-Hoover thermostat, the DPD thermostating occurs locally in space through pair interactions. Therefore, the dynamics is expected to be more realistic.A drawback of DPD is that the results of the simulation depend on the chosen time step. None of the DPD schemes proposed up to now give the exact Boltzmann distribution when a finite time step is used. Lowe [2] has introduced a scheme that is similar to the Andersen thermostat, but considers relative velocities of nearby pairs instead of the velocity of individual particles. This scheme gives the Boltzmann distribution, even for finite time steps. It has similar characteristics as DPD, but is not equivalent. In this paper we show how to generalise the ideas of Lowe. The resulting scheme always gives correct equilibrium statistics and reduces to the DPD equations in the limit of zero time step.