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.