The Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) has achieved remarkable growth, with its corpus rising to ₹28.4 trillion from ₹24.8 trillion a year ago, marking an increase of nearly 15%. According to the EPFO Annual Report 2024-25, the retirement body now serves over 8.1 million pensioners and settles more than 60 million claims annually. The Employees' Pension Scheme (EPS) corpus crossed the ₹10 trillion mark for the first time, having grown at a compound annual rate of nearly 14% over the past five years. As reported by Mint, Kunal Kabra, co-founder of Kustodian.Life, noted that EPFO has evolved from a paperwork department to one of the world's largest retirement funds, closer in scale to a sovereign wealth fund than a government office.
EPFO demonstrated significant improvement in claim settlement efficiency during FY25. According to the annual report, the organisation settled a record 60.2 million claims, up from 44.5 million in FY24—an increase of about 35%. During the year, it received 79.5 million claim applications, of which 22% were rejected, an improvement from the 25.5% rejection rate in FY24. As reported by Mint, Kabra attributed this improvement to the expansion of the auto-claim facility, where the auto-claim limit was doubled from ₹50,000 to ₹1 lakh and extended beyond illness to include housing, marriage and education. The improvement in rejection rates demonstrates EPFO's enhanced service delivery capabilities through technology adoption.
EPFO faced significant pressure from rising pension obligations in FY25. According to the annual report, the organisation paid pensions to 8.15 million beneficiaries, up nearly 4% from 7.85 million a year earlier. More concerning was the sharp rise in pension outgo, which increased by 25% in a single year. As reported by Mint, Kabra explained that this growth far outpaces the increase in corpus, membership or even the number of pensioners, noting that India's formal workforce is ageing and the fastest-growing category of pensioners isn't retirees but surviving spouses, whose numbers have risen 28% over the past five years. Despite significant digital reforms, EPFO received around 1.75 million grievances in FY25, broadly unchanged from the previous year, with pension-related claims continuing to be the most problematic at rejection rates of nearly 40%.
Digital adoption among pensioners accelerated significantly during FY25. According to the annual report, the number of Digital Life Certificates submitted through face authentication nearly tripled from 660,000 to 1.75 million and now accounts for more than half of all life certificate submissions. As reported by Mint, Kabra noted that getting older, less tech-savvy users to adopt a smartphone-based verification process is genuinely difficult, but the pace of adoption is impressive. Despite significant digital reforms, EPFO maintained the EPF interest rate at 8.25% for the third consecutive year, though its investment portfolio generated a yield of 7.33% in FY25, only marginally above its internal benchmark of 7.30%.
