EPF Scheme, 2026 — What Changed From the 1952 Scheme

What actually changed, confirmed from the Gazette text

• 25% minimum balance — a fixed floor, calculated on your whole corpus (employee + employer share + interest), that must remain after any partial withdrawal. See the rule explained.
• Partial withdrawal purposes grouped into three areas — illness/education/marriage, housing, and "special circumstances" — each gated on 12 months' total Fund membership. The exact category labels you'll see reported elsewhere aren't the Scheme's own wording; more on that in the dedicated post.
• Final settlement after leaving employment now needs 12 months of unemployment — up from 2 months under the 1952 Scheme, for the general "ceased to be an employee" route. Several other exit reasons (retrenchment, VRS, migration, retirement) still get immediate full withdrawal. See the full breakdown.
• Form 19/10C/31 don't appear in the new Scheme's own forms list — claims now route through a "designated portal" per paragraph 54, with no numbered claim form named in the Scheme text. See what replaced them.
• Contribution rate unchanged — still 12% employee / 12% employer (10%/10% for notified establishment classes), per paragraph 20(2). If you're only researching contributions, not withdrawals, this post on the new wage code's PF impact is still current.

What we could not confirm from this document

Two claims in wide circulation don't hold up cleanly against the Scheme's own text, and we're not going to repeat them as settled fact:

• "75% now, immediately after job loss; 25% after a year" — this isn't stated anywhere in the Scheme as a named rule. It's the combined effect of the 25% minimum-balance floor and the special-circumstances partial withdrawal route, not a standalone provision. See the real mechanism.
• "EPS pension withdrawal wait extended to 36 months" — this document is the Provident Fund scheme, not the Employees' Pension Scheme, 2026, which is governed separately and whose own text we haven't yet verified. We're flagging this as unconfirmed rather than repeating a figure we can't source directly. (We did find an unrelated 36-month figure in this Scheme — paragraph 55's "inoperative account" dormancy rule for unclaimed PF balances — which is a different concept entirely and shouldn't be confused with an EPS pension-withdrawal wait.)

A dated deadline bundled into the same notification

The same Gazette notification's Annexure launches the Employees' Enrolment Campaign, 2026 — an amnesty window for employers to enrol employees who should have been PF members before 31 March 2026 but weren't, at a flat ₹100 in damages rather than the usual escalating penalty. It closes 31 October 2026. See the deadline explained.

What this means for existing PF content

Our own New Wage Code PF Impact post and the Take-Home Salary Calculator both deal with the contribution side — the ₹15,000 wage ceiling and 12% rate — which this Scheme leaves unchanged. Nothing there needed correcting. The withdrawal side is new territory, covered in this cluster.