You may soon receive good news from the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO). More than six crore beneficiaries will soon get 8.5% interest in their PF accounts as the Ministry of Finance recently approved the 8.5 per cent rate of interest on provident funds for 2020-21.
The Central Board of Trustees of the EPFO, headed by the Labour Minister, had in March this year approved the same interest rate of 8.5% for 2020-21 as last year. However, the Labour Ministry needs to compulsorily take approval from the Finance Ministry on the proposed rate. With the ministry’s approval on Friday, EPFO subscribers will likely receive the interest before Diwali.
Earlier this month, higher officials of the labour ministry met finance ministry officials and asked them to expedite the process after answering their queries. EPFO had an estimated income of around Rs 70,300 crore in the last financial year, which included around Rs 4,000 crore from selling a part of its equity investments and Rs 65,000 crore from debt.
Notably, last time in the financial year 2019-20, due to the disturbance in KYC, many subscribers had to wait for a long time. The EPFO had kept the interest rates unchanged for the financial year 2020-21 at 8.5%, which is the lowest interest rate of the last 7 years. You can easily check your PF account balance sitting at home through a missed call or SMS.
To check your PF money, you have to give a missed call on 011-22901406 from your registered mobile number. After this, you will get the details of PF through the message of EPFO. Here also, it is necessary to have your UAN, PAN and Aadhaar linked.
- Log on to the EPFO website at epfindia.gov.in.
- Click on e-passbook.
- You will be redirected to passbook.epfindia.gov.in.
- Now fill in your username (UAN number), password and captcha.
- After filling in all the details, you will come to a new page and here you will have to select the member ID.
- Here you will get your EPF balance on e-passbook.
If your UAN number is registered with EPFO, then you can get information about your PF balance through a message. For this, you have to send EPFOHO to 7738299899. After this, you will get the information of PF through SMS. If you want information in the Hindi language, then you have to send it by writing EPFOHO UAN. This service to know PF balance is available in English, Punjabi, Marathi, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Bengali. For PF balance, it is necessary that your UAN, bank account, PAN and Aadhaar (AADHAR) must be linked.
