An employer pays the contribution every month. The money leaves the account, the challan is stamped, the file grows. A year later an employee opens his own record and finds nothing in it, and the employer cannot understand how both things can be true at once. They can, because the month has two halves and only one of them was done. The challan carries the money. The monthly statement is what tells the authority whose money it is. Without the statement there is a sum sitting with an authority and not one rupee credited against any named person. That is the first half of this page. The second half is sharper, and it is about the other scheme. The provident fund accumulates; the insurance scheme buys cover — and cover is bought for a period that opens long after the contributions that earned it. Under the Regulations, what is paid between 1 April and 30 September decides entitlement from 1 January to 30 June of the following year. Read that gap and the real danger of a missed insurance month becomes visible. It is invisible on the day it is committed. It surfaces on the day an employee needs treatment — and medical care, unlike money, cannot be credited retrospectively. There is also one figure in every month that does not behave like the others. Section 40(4) of the Employees State Insurance Act says that any sum deducted by the employer from wages shall be deemed to have been entrusted to him for the purpose of paying it over. The criminal law uses the same word for the same money. So the amount you withheld from somebody’s wages is not a payable you can rank against your suppliers. What lateness costs is in the Acts and we have printed it: twelve per cent simple interest under section 7Q and under section 39(5)(a), and separately damages not exceeding the amount of the arrears under section 14B, levied only after a hearing. Payment is due within fifteen days of the close of the month, and the five-day grace period that half the internet still quotes was withdrawn in 2016. Where we stop: we print no contribution rate, no wage ceiling, no exemption limit and no headcount threshold, because every one of those is fixed by a notification and has moved. We do not calculate interest or damages for anybody, and we do not estimate what a backlog will cost.
What this guide covers
Where the statute now sits. The Central Government brought all four labour codes into force with effect from 21 November 2025, rationalising twenty-nine central labour laws. The Employees Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952 and the Employees State Insurance Act, 1948 named on this page are among them, subsumed into the Code on Social Security, 2020. This code is therefore the text a fresh filing is made under, read together with the rules the Centre and your State notify beneath it, while the Act named here remains the source of the settled position this page describes and of every order passed before that date. We check which text applies to your establishment before we file, and we say so in writing.
Begin with the structure of a month, because almost every problem on this subject is a problem of thinking there is one task where there are two.
Every month, for each of the two schemes, something has to be lodged and something has to be paid. The lodging is a statement of who was on the roll, what each person earned, and what each person contributed. The paying is a transfer of money against a challan generated from that statement.
Those are two acts, with two outputs, and an employer who performs only one of them has not performed a reduced version of the month. He has performed a different month from the one the law describes. That is not a pedantic distinction, as the rest of this page will show. It is the difference between a credited employee and an uncredited one.
Take the payment side first, because it is the part employers are confident about and the part they over-trust.
A paid challan establishes one fact and establishes it well: a sum of money left your account on a date and reached the authority. Nobody disputes a paid challan, and you should keep every one of them.
What it does not contain is any information about people. It is an amount and a date against an establishment code. Read it carefully and you will find that it does not say who the money is for, because that is not what a challan is for.
Now the other side, which is the one that does the work nobody notices until it has not been done.
The monthly statement is where the money acquires owners. It sets out each person, each person’s wages for the month and each person’s share, and it is on the basis of that statement that an amount is written into an individual record rather than sitting in a lump.
So the statement is not paperwork attached to a payment. It is the instrument of allocation, and the payment is its cargo. Reverse the mental order of those two and most of the confusion in this area disappears in a sentence.
Follow each half through on its own and the asymmetry becomes obvious.
A statement lodged with no payment produces a recorded, quantified, dated admission of exactly what you owe. It is a bad position but it is an honest one, and it is the position from which things get fixed. A payment made with no statement produces money with no owner and a record that shows nothing for anybody.
And the second is the position that destroys employee trust, because the employee has no way of seeing your good faith. He has only his own record, which is empty. From where he stands, an employer who paid without filing is indistinguishable from an employer who kept the money.
One question, asked of every month, settles most of what follows.
Not whether the contribution was paid. Whether it was credited.
Arrived and credited are different events, separated by a document. An employer who asks the second question about each month of last year will find out in an afternoon what some employers only discover when a worker walks in with a phone in his hand.
Which turns into a practical test, and it is worth writing down because it is the whole of the reconciliation anybody needs.
Three things exist for a properly closed month: the paid challan, the statement acknowledgement, and the credit in each individual record. Line them up for any month and the month tells you what it is.
All three present: the month is sound. Challan but no acknowledgement: the statement was never lodged. Acknowledgement and challan but no credit against a particular person: that person’s identification number is wrong somewhere. There is no fourth possibility worth worrying about, and this test costs nothing.
And the answer dictates the remedy, which is why guessing is expensive.
An unlodged statement is corrected by lodging it, with interest running from the original due date. A wrong identification number is corrected by a correction exercise against the authority’s record, which is slower and involves documents rather than money.
The second is the one employers underestimate, and it is the reason an EPF name correction sometimes has to be completed before a single rupee can be allocated properly. Money is easy to move. A name on somebody else’s record is not.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
A point about perspective that changes how an employer should think about the whole exercise.
You hold the challans. The employee cannot see them, has never asked for them, and would not know what to do with one. Nothing you keep in your own file is visible to the person the money belongs to.
Which means that your proof and his proof are two different documents, and only one of them is in his hands. An employer who understands that stops thinking of the monthly statement as a formality for the department and starts seeing it as the only thing his staff can actually check.
And what he does see is now on a phone, which has changed this subject permanently.
On the provident fund side he sees a passbook with monthly credits in it, with gaps where there are gaps. On the insurance side he discovers his position at a dispensary or hospital counter, when somebody checks whether he is entitled.
The second is the harsher of the two, because a gap in a passbook is a conversation and a refusal at a counter is an emergency. That difference is the subject of a later part of this page, and it is the reason the insurance filing deserves more attention than it usually gets.
A short honest note about our own listing, because the way we sell this contributes to the confusion.
We list this as one monthly service with a slash in its name. Every consultant does something similar, every employer thinks of it as one monthly job, and the slash quietly suggests that the two sides are variations of each other.
They are not. The slash is a billing convenience. What sits on either side of it are two statutes, two authorities, two funds, two sets of rules and two entirely different ideas about what the money is for — which is the subject of this part.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Name them properly once, because the difference between them is a difference of purpose rather than of administration.
The provident fund side operates under the Employees’ Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952, with its Scheme made under it. The insurance side operates under the Employees’ State Insurance Act, 1948, with its Regulations.
Two Acts passed four years apart, answering two different questions about the same worker. One asks what he will have when he stops working. The other asks what happens to him if something goes wrong while he is working. Nothing in either one is a version of the other.
Which produces the distinction that this part exists to make, and it is the single most useful idea for an employer who has to care about both.
The provident fund accumulates. Every properly credited rupee is added to a balance standing in one person’s name, and it stays there, earning, until he takes it out. The insurance scheme does not accumulate anything. It buys cover for a defined period, and when the period passes, the cover passes with it.
So one of these schemes is a savings machine with a statutory engine, and the other is a premium paid for a term. Everything else in this part follows from that, including the part employers find hardest to accept.
Stated bluntly, because it is the honest description and employers deserve the honest description.
Provident fund money comes back. It is the employee’s balance and he will withdraw or transfer it. Insurance contributions do not come back to anybody. They are spent on cover, and if the cover is never used, the money is still gone.
Which is exactly how every insurance arrangement anybody has ever bought behaves. Nobody expects a refund of last year’s motor premium because the car was not damaged. The discomfort here comes from the contribution being compulsory, not from the economics being unusual.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Worth isolating as a sentence, because once it is said the complaints about this scheme become easier to answer.
The insurance contribution is a premium. It purchases medical care, and benefits in sickness, maternity, disablement and death arising from employment, for a period, for a defined set of people.
The thing it purchases is of no interest to anybody on the day it is bought and is the only thing that matters on the day it is needed. That is the nature of insurance and it is the reason it is always the first thing an employer stops paying when a month is tight.
Said with sympathy rather than as a lecture, because the grievance is coherent and gets dismissed too quickly.
An employer with fourteen healthy young workers watches a contribution leave every month for a scheme none of them has used in three years. He is not being asked to save for them, which he could at least see the point of. He is being asked to buy something nobody has consumed.
That reaction is reasonable and it is also exactly backwards, in the way that complaints about insurance always are. The three years in which nobody used it are not evidence that it was wasted. They are the three years in which you were covered and did not need to find out what the alternative costs.
And from the other side of the table the two schemes are not substitutes in any respect.
A provident fund balance is useless to a man whose wife is admitted to hospital this week, unless he breaks into his own retirement savings to pay for it, which is precisely the outcome the insurance scheme exists to prevent. Cover is useless to a man who has stopped working and needs something to live on.
They answer different failures. Which is why the law does not let an employer choose between them, and why an employer who quietly prioritises one filing over the other has made a decision about somebody else’s life without telling them.
Closing this part with the practical consequence, which is small and saves a great deal.
The two filings do not have to be thought about separately. They have to be done separately, in one sitting, in the same week, with two acknowledgements and two challans as the output.
The habit is one habit. The outputs are four documents, not two. An employer whose monthly routine ends with four items in a folder has closed the month. An employer whose routine ends with two has closed half of it, and will not know which half until somebody asks.
It is also worth naming the other monthly and annual obligations that arrive beside these two, because an employer who builds one routine usually builds it for all of them at once: professional tax where the State levies it, the professional tax registration that has to exist before it can be paid, the shop and establishment registration under which the premises itself is recorded, and a labour card where the workers are in a category the State maintains a register for.
Now the part of this subject that is almost never set out for employers, and that explains the worst experiences people have with the insurance scheme.
The insurance scheme does not work month to month like a subscription that lapses when you stop paying and resumes when you start. It runs on paired periods, fixed by the Regulations, and the pairing is the whole point.
Contributions are collected in one period, and they decide entitlement in a different period that begins months later. Nothing else on this page is as important for an employer to understand, and nothing else is as rarely mentioned.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Here are the pairs, which are worth copying out and keeping somewhere.
| Contribution period | Corresponding benefit period |
|---|---|
| 1 April to 30 September | 1 January to 30 June of the following year |
| 1 October to 31 March | 1 July to 31 December |
Read the first row slowly. What an employer pays and reports for a worker in, say, June does not decide anything about that worker in June. It decides something about him from the January after.
The gap is the reason this scheme behaves unlike every other monthly obligation an employer has.
A month of tax paid is a month of tax settled. A month of insurance contribution reported is a brick in a wall that will be inspected much later, by somebody at a hospital counter, on a day nobody can predict.
Which is why the usual instinct — catch up later, nothing has happened — is sound for most filings and unsound for this one. Most filings can be caught up. A benefit period cannot be reopened after it has passed.
And the delay is not a mercy. It is what makes the default hard to govern.
Miss a month on this side and nothing happens. No letter arrives that week, no worker notices, no system objects. The month passes, the period closes, and the consequence is loaded into a future that has not arrived.
An employer therefore receives no feedback at the moment he could still act cheaply. By the time there is feedback, the feedback takes the form of a person who has been refused something, and the conversation is no longer about compliance.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
It is worth describing the day plainly, once, because it is the day this page is really about.
A worker’s wife is admitted, or he is injured, or a child is ill. He goes where he has been told for three years that he can go. Somebody checks a record, and tells him he is not entitled, and uses a phrase about a contribution period that he has never heard before and cannot argue with.
He then comes back to his employer, who has every challan in a file and no idea what went wrong. Both men are telling the truth. The money was paid. He is not covered. The document that would have connected those two facts was never lodged.
And the position he is actually in, described without drama because the facts are enough.
He pays for the treatment himself, out of whatever he has, which for most workers at this wage level means borrowing. His provident fund balance, which exists and is his, is the obvious thing to break into, which converts a medical event into the loss of his savings.
That is the exact outcome the insurance scheme was legislated to prevent, and it is reached by a route that involves no bad intention anywhere. Just an unlodged statement, repeated for a few months, by somebody who thought the payment was the compliance.
Which is the sentence this part exists to deliver.
Every other default on this page is a money problem. Arrears can be paid, interest can be paid, damages can be assessed and paid, and at the end of it the position is restored and somebody is poorer.
A missed benefit period cannot be bought back. Treatment that was not available in March cannot be made available retrospectively in August by paying a contribution with interest. The payment heals the employer’s file. It does nothing for what happened to the man.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Generalising it, because the principle is worth more than the example.
Where a statutory obligation funds a payment, lateness costs money and the money is recoverable. Where it funds a cover, lateness costs the cover, and the cover existed for a window that closes.
So the test for how seriously to treat any contribution is whether what it buys expires. Apply that test to the two filings in this service and they stop looking like a pair. One of them is forgiving and expensive. The other is cheap and unforgiving.
Ending this part with the only action it asks for.
Mark the two contribution periods in whatever you use to run the business, and at the end of each one check that all six months inside it carry an acknowledgement and a paid challan on the insurance side. Not the money. The acknowledgement.
Twice a year, six boxes to tick, and the single worst day in this subject never arrives for anybody who works for you. That check takes less time than reading this section, and it is the reason we have written the section at all.
Now to the part of a monthly contribution that behaves differently from the rest of it, under both statutes and under the criminal law as well.
What goes to each authority every month is one amount made of two halves. One half is the employer’s own contribution, which is his cost of employing somebody, as real a cost as the wage itself. The other half was taken out of the worker’s wages before they were paid.
Those two halves travel together, arrive together and appear on one challan — and the law does not treat them as the same kind of money at all. An employer who learns only one thing from this page should learn this one, because it decides what to clear first when there is not enough for everything.
Take that half first, because its character is straightforward.
It is an obligation the statute places on the employer out of his own pocket. If he does not pay it, he owes it, with interest from the due date, and damages may follow. It is a liability of the business, recoverable by machinery stronger than an ordinary creditor’s.
One thing he may never do with it is pass it on. Section 40(3) of the insurance Act provides that notwithstanding any contract to the contrary, neither the principal employer nor the immediate employer shall be entitled to deduct the employer’s contribution from any wages payable to an employee, or otherwise to recover it from him. A clause in an employment agreement or an appointment letter purporting to allow it is drafting that the sub-section was written to defeat.
The same caution applies to everything upstream of the wage figure, because these returns are only as good as the documents the wages come from: an offer letter that states one figure and a payslip that shows another will eventually be read side by side, a salary certificate issued to a bank has to agree with what was reported, and an employment verification answered years later is answered from the same record. Where people are engaged through somebody else, the position is set by the contractor agreement, by the labour licence where contract labour law applies, and by an internship agreement where what is being engaged is genuinely an intern rather than a worker under another name.
The other half is where this part of the page actually lives.
That money was the worker’s wage. It was computed, deducted and retained, and the only reason it is lawful to retain somebody’s wage at all is that it is being retained in order to be paid somewhere specific on his behalf.
So the deduction and the remittance are one act performed in two steps, and the second step is not optional in the way an employer’s own payment might feel optional in a bad month. Stopping halfway does not produce a smaller compliance. It produces a different situation entirely.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
And it is not a word the drafters chose loosely, which is why it is worth quoting rather than paraphrasing.
The insurance Act addresses this directly in the section that makes the principal employer pay in the first instance and allows him to recover the worker’s share by deduction from wages. Having allowed the deduction, it then characterises what he is holding.
Section 40(4): any sum deducted by the principal employer from wages is deemed to have been entrusted to him by the employee for the purpose of paying the contribution in respect of which it was deducted. Entrusted. For that purpose. Both parts of that are doing work.
Unpack the two limbs, because together they describe the position precisely.
Entrusted means the money is in your hands and is not yours. For that purpose means there is exactly one lawful destination for it, named in advance by the statute. There is no second permitted use, not even a temporary one, and not even one you fully intend to reverse next week.
Which is why using it to meet a payroll shortfall, a supplier, a rent or a tax demand is not a cash-flow decision. It may be an understandable decision taken by a decent person in a bad month. It is not one the statute has left open, and the sub-section says so in advance rather than afterwards.
And the general criminal law adopts the same idea, in terms specific to these two schemes.
The definition of criminal breach of trust in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 carries two Explanations aimed at employers. The first deals with a contribution deducted towards a provident fund or a family pension fund; the second with a contribution deducted towards the Employees’ State Insurance Fund.
Both deem the employer to have been entrusted with the amount deducted, and deem a failure to pay it over to be a dishonest use of it contrary to a legal direction. So the word in the insurance Act and the word in the criminal law are the same word, applied to the same rupee, by two statutes that were drafted seventy-five years apart.
Limits, stated carefully, because an accurate limit is more useful to an employer than a warning.
The deeming provisions reach the deducted share. They do not reach the employer’s own contribution, which remains a liability of a different and ordinary kind no matter how long it goes unpaid.
That is a real distinction and worth holding onto, because an employer in arrears on both halves is in two different positions at once, and the two positions are not cleared in the same order or with the same urgency.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
And here we stop, deliberately, in the middle of an interesting subject.
How that offence is made out, what has to be shown, what the punishment is and how such matters actually proceed are not questions for a page about monthly filings. They are the subject of their own page on this site, and we have not written a second version of it here.
What belongs on this page is the consequence for the order of your payments, and that is all we have taken from it: the deducted share is the first thing to clear, in both schemes, oldest month first. A reader who wants the provision itself is better served by the page that deals with it than by a summary squeezed in here.
Compress this whole part and it is one line, and it is not a line about compliance.
Your own share is money you owe. The deducted share is money you are carrying.
Owing and carrying are different relationships to the same rupee, and every employer knows the difference instinctively in every other part of life. Nobody confuses a loan they have taken with a parcel they have been asked to deliver. The only reason it gets confused here is that both halves leave the same bank account on the same day.
Which brings us to price, and to the one part of this subject where the Acts themselves give figures that can safely be printed.
Two things can follow a late contribution, and they are separate things that can both apply to the same default. Interest is one. Damages are the other. An employer who assumes that paying one disposes of the other has misread both.
Interest compensates for the delay. Damages penalise the default. Different purposes, different sections, different mechanisms for arriving at the amount — and nothing in either statute suggests that one is an alternative to the other.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
The interest position is one of the few places in Indian compliance where two separate Acts give an almost identical answer.
Section 7Q of the provident fund Act: the employer shall be liable to pay simple interest at the rate of twelve per cent per annum, or at such higher rate as may be specified in the Scheme, on any amount due from him under the Act, from the date on which the amount has become so due till the date of its actual payment — with a proviso that the higher rate specified in the Scheme shall not exceed the lending rate of interest charged by any scheduled bank.
Section 39(5)(a) of the insurance Act does the same work in substantially the same terms for a principal employer who does not pay by the due date, with the higher rate left to the regulations and capped the same way. And section 39(5)(b) adds something an employer should notice: such interest may be recovered as an arrear of land revenue, or under the Act’s own recovery provisions.
A short observation, because noticing it tells you something about how to think about both schemes.
Two Acts, four years apart in origin, both settle on twelve per cent, both allow a higher rate to be fixed by subordinate legislation, and both cap that higher rate by reference to what a scheduled bank would charge to lend.
The common design says what the interest is for. It is priced as the cost of money, not as a punishment — the ceiling is a lending rate, which is the clearest possible signal. The punishing is done somewhere else, by a section written for that purpose.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
That somewhere else is the next provision, and it is the one employers actually fear.
Section 14B of the provident fund Act: where an employer makes default in the payment of any contribution, the authorised officer may recover from the employer by way of penalty such damages, not exceeding the amount of arrears, as may be specified in the Scheme. And the first proviso: before levying and recovering such damages, the employer shall be given a reasonable opportunity of being heard.
Read the proviso as carefully as the main limb. Damages are not automatic, not generated by a portal and not payable because a system has computed them. They are levied through a process in which the employer is entitled to be heard, and whatever he has to say about why the default happened belongs in that process.
Now the most reassuring fact available on this subject, which is almost never told to the employers who most need to hear it.
Damages cannot exceed the amount of the arrears. The ceiling is in the Act itself, which means it cannot be raised by a notification, a circular or a view taken in an office.
So the worst case is bounded, and bounded by reference to something the employer can calculate for himself. Employers imagine something unbounded, because a daily or percentage figure sounds unbounded when it is quoted at them. It is not. There is a roof, and the roof is the arrears.
There is also one named route out, and it is narrow. The second proviso to section 14B permits the Central Board to reduce or waive damages in relation to an establishment which is a sick industrial company in respect of which a rehabilitation scheme has been sanctioned, on the terms the Scheme specifies. That is a defined situation, not a general discretion to be pleaded by an employer who simply had a difficult year.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
And here is the dividing line that governs every figure on this page, and that we apply on every compliance guide we write.
Look at what the Acts fix and what they hand downwards. The Acts fix the section numbers, the twelve per cent, the ceiling at a bank’s lending rate, and the ceiling on damages at the amount of arrears. The Schemes and the Rules fix the contribution percentages, the wage ceilings, the exemption limits, the headcount at which each law begins to apply, and the rate of damages within the statutory cap.
The first column changes only when Parliament changes it. The second changes by notification, without any amendment to either Act. Which is why a percentage typed confidently onto a web page ages badly, while the section it sits beside does not.
One date does belong in the first column, and it is the date the whole monthly rhythm hangs on.
Paragraph 38 of the Employees’ Provident Funds Scheme, 1952 requires the employer to pay the contribution within fifteen days of the close of every month. Fifteen days from the end of the month in which the wages were paid.
Which is why a monthly arrangement is built around one week rather than one day. The statement has to be prepared from a closed roll, reconciled, lodged, and the challan paid, all inside a fortnight that includes whatever else the business is doing. Employers who treat the fifteenth as the start of the work rather than the end of it are the ones who are late.
And now the single most repeated piece of outdated advice in this entire subject, which is worth meeting head-on.
Employers once had five days of grace after the fifteen, making twenty in practice. That grace period was withdrawn by the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation’s circular No. WSU/9(1)2013/Settlement/35631 dated 8 January 2016, with effect from the February 2016 remittance.
It has been gone for the better part of a decade and it is still printed, repeated and relied on all over the internet. An employer working to twenty days is working to a position that ended two Parliaments ago, and is paying interest from the sixteenth day without knowing why.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Which generalises into the most useful habit this page can leave an employer with, and it applies to this page as much as to any other.
The grace period is a perfect illustration, because it was not amended quietly or subtly. It was withdrawn by a circular with a number and a date, years ago, and it is still being quoted with confidence by people who are not lying and have simply not checked.
So treat every rate, ceiling, threshold and due date you read anywhere — here included — as something to confirm against the rule as it stands before you act on it. Section numbers are stable. Figures are not, and the ones that are repeated most confidently are often the ones that moved longest ago.
Which is also why the rest of this page prints no percentage of any kind, and why the last part of it, about our own work, says plainly what we will and will not compute for an employer. If you want a quick view on where your own filings stand before deciding anything, an online legal consultation is the cheapest way to have the question looked at properly.
The rest of this page is about our side of the work, written plainly so that nobody has to ask what is included.
Four kinds of employer write to us about monthly returns. A small firm that crossed the headcount last year and has been filing late ever since. A proprietor whose accountant handled it until the accountant stopped answering. A company whose own finance team files the TDS return and the GST return comfortably and finds this one different. And an employer who has just discovered a gap of several months and wants to know how bad it is.
The fourth is the one we take most seriously, because the question underneath it is usually not about forms. It is a person wanting to know whether something has gone past the point of being fixable. Almost always it has not.
Short list, and it is the same list every month, which is the point of a monthly arrangement.
The wage figures for the month for every person on the roll, their identification numbers, the dates of anybody who joined or left, and the days each person was actually paid for. That is the input. Where the numbers come from is yours; where they go is ours.
What we do not ask for and do not want: cash payment details kept outside the wage record, a second set of figures, or a list of people you would prefer not to show. A return built on a selected roll is a return that will not match your own books later, and the mismatch surfaces at the worst possible moment.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Stated as a deliverable rather than as a promise.
The monthly statement for the provident fund side, prepared from your roll and uploaded in the form the portal accepts, with the challan generated for payment. The monthly contribution statement for the insurance side, prepared the same way, with its own challan. Both reconciled against the figures you sent before anything is submitted.
And both receipts come back to you in the same month, not at the end of the year. An employer who has the acknowledgement and the paid challan for each month is an employer who can answer any question about any month in about a minute, which is a position worth more than it sounds.
A boundary that has to be clear before the first month, because confusing it causes real harm.
What is deducted from an employee’s wages is decided by the rate the rules fix and the wage you pay. It is not decided by us, it is not negotiable between you and us, and it is not something we can adjust to make a month easier.
If an employer asks us to file a lower figure than the roll supports, we will not do it, and we will say why in one sentence rather than several. The deducted share is money the statute treats as entrusted. Understating it does not reduce an obligation; it adds a false statement to an unpaid one.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
The checks are unglamorous and they are where the value of having somebody else do this actually sits.
That every person on the roll has an identification number and that the number belongs to that person rather than to somebody with a similar name. That a person who left is shown as having left, with the date, in the month it happened. That a new joiner’s first month is complete rather than partial by accident. That the total on the statement equals the total on the challan.
The name-and-number check is the one that saves the most grief, and it is the reason an EPF name correction is sometimes the first job rather than a later one. A contribution credited against a wrong number is harder to move than a contribution not yet paid.
Worth isolating, because an employer who thinks of this as one payment eventually makes one payment.
There are two separate remittances to two separate authorities, each with its own statement and its own receipt. They happen in the same week of the month and they are not interchangeable in any respect.
So the month is closed when there are two acknowledgements and two paid challans in the folder, and not before. An employer who has one of each has done half of the month, and the half that is missing will be the half that matters when somebody asks.
The refusals on this page are about figures rather than about services, and each one has a reason that is not caution for its own sake.
We do not compute interest. We do not compute damages. We do not produce a total of what a backlog will cost, and we do not give an employer a number to budget against before the authority has worked one out.
The reason is that both amounts are determined by the authority on its own calculation, after a notice and an opportunity to be heard, and our arithmetic has no standing in that process. A figure from us would be a guess wearing the clothes of an assessment, and an employer who relies on it has been given something worse than nothing.
Said properly, because most employers who write to us already have somebody and are worried that we are asking them to choose.
We are not. The person who runs your bookkeeping or your accounting owns the wage record, and the wage record is the foundation of every one of these returns. Nothing we do replaces that, and where an employer has a competent accountant the sensible arrangement is that the figures come from them and the filing comes from us.
Where the two sides disagree about a figure, the accountant wins, and we file what the record supports. We are not auditors and we do not sit above anybody; we are the people who carry a prepared figure to the place it has to go, on the day it has to be there.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
And the honest limit of a monthly filing arrangement, because it is sold as though it were a solution to more than it is.
Filing this month does nothing about last year. A monthly return corrects nothing retrospectively, settles no interest already accrued, and closes no period already in default. It stops the gap growing, which is the most useful thing available and is not the same as repair.
Nor does a filed return answer a dispute about whether somebody was an employee at all, or whether a particular allowance forms part of wages. Those are questions of law and of fact, and they are decided somewhere other than on a portal. A monthly filing arrangement is the discipline, not the adjudication.
And it does not reach the other end of an employment, where a different set of documents does the work: a HR policy that says what the establishment actually does, a POSH policy and internal committee that the law requires of employers above a size, a gratuity and bonus computation when somebody has completed enough service to be owed one, and termination and full-final documentation when an employment ends. The business return itself, the ITR filing, sits beside all of them and is not covered by anything on this page.
Some of these matters stop being filings and become proceedings, and an employer should know in advance where the handover is.
An inquiry into arrears, a notice proposing damages, an inspection that turns into a demand, a claim raised by an employee about a period of non-credit, a matter that reaches the labour court — all of those are representation, and representation is not what a filing service is.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.
What we can do at that point is hand over a clean record: every month filed, every challan paid, every acknowledgement in order and in sequence. An advocate given that record spends the first meeting on the case. An advocate given a shoebox spends it on arithmetic, at a cost you are paying either way.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
A small habit, recommended on every page where documents accumulate month after month, because this is the category where it pays most.
One folder for each financial year, twelve pairs inside it, each pair being a statement acknowledgement and its paid challan, named by month. Nothing else in the folder. It takes about a minute a month and it survives staff changes, which is what makes it worth describing at all.
An employer who keeps it that way can prove four years of compliance in the time it takes to open a drawer. An employer who does not will eventually be asked to prove a month from three years ago to somebody who is not inclined to wait, and a legal file management arrangement exists for employers who would rather not be the one holding the drawer.
Printed here rather than quoted on a call, so that it can be compared against anybody else before you write to us.
Our charge for preparing and lodging both monthly statements is ₹999, and it is a charge for each month we file. The time shown against this service on our list is Monthly, which is the honest description of it: this is not a job with a delivery date, it is a cycle that repeats for as long as you have people on the roll.
The figure covers the work, not the money that flows through it. Contributions are yours to pay and they go to the authorities, not to us. Nothing on our invoice is a contribution, and nothing we charge reduces one.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
This page has been written without a single contribution percentage, wage ceiling or threshold figure in it, and the omission is deliberate rather than lazy.
Every one of those numbers is fixed by rules and notifications rather than by the Acts, and every one of them has been changed at least once. The percentages, the ceiling above which an employee falls outside the insurance scheme, the daily wage below which an employee pays nothing, the headcount at which each law applies — all of them live in the column that changes by notification.
And a rate printed on a general page is not read as information, it is relied on. An employer who deducts at a percentage he found here, files on that basis, and only later learns he was a notification behind has been given a liability by this page instead of an answer. The provisions cited above can be printed without that risk, because moving any of them would take an amending Act. The rates are not, and we would rather send you to the current rule than be the reason you were wrong.
Immediately next to the figure, because a price quoted without its edges is a price that will be argued about later.
It excludes the contributions themselves, both halves. It excludes any interest or damages the authority levies for a past period. It excludes the first-time registrations, which are separate pieces of work — PF registration and ESI registration each have their own page and their own charge. It excludes bookkeeping. It excludes representation anywhere.
It also excludes anything that is really a different job wearing a monthly label: reconstructing a wage record that was never maintained, correcting identification numbers across a whole roll, or filing several past years at once. Those are quoted after we have seen what is actually there, because quoting them before would mean guessing at your expense.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Written for the reader who arrived here after an email from a portal, and who has been putting off opening it.
Start by finding out exactly what is unfiled rather than estimating it, because the estimate is almost always worse than the fact. Then file the oldest open month first and work forward, pairing each statement with its payment as you go. Do not file the current month first because it is the easiest.
And deal with the deducted share before anything else, in both schemes. Of everything on this page, the amount withheld from somebody’s wages and not carried across is the one with a character the rest does not have. The employer’s own share in arrears is a debt with interest attached. The employee’s share in arrears is money the law says you were holding for them.
One line to carry out of this page, and it is not about forms or portals.
The money stopped being yours on the day you deducted it. Everything after that — the statement, the challan, the date, the receipt — is only the question of whether you carried it to where it was supposed to go.
Which is why the monthly rhythm matters more than any single month in it. A month filed on time is unremarkable and costs nothing extra. A month missed becomes a number somebody else calculates, and the calculation is not the part that should worry an employer most.
Send us last month’s wage figures and your registration numbers for both schemes. We will prepare and lodge both monthly statements, generate both challans for you to pay, and return both acknowledgements to you in the same month. If there are earlier months unfiled, we will tell you what is open before we quote anything for clearing them, because a backlog quoted without being seen is a guess at your expense.
What was read before this page was written. Nothing here was written from recollection of what these laws are generally said to contain. On the provident fund side we have worked from the Employees’ Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952: section 7Q, under which an employer is liable to pay simple interest at twelve per cent per annum, or at such higher rate as may be specified in the Scheme, on any amount due from him from the date it became due until the date of actual payment, with a proviso that the higher rate shall not exceed the lending rate of interest charged by any scheduled bank; and section 14B, under which damages may be recovered from a defaulting employer by way of penalty, not exceeding the amount of arrears and as specified in the Scheme, with the first proviso requiring that the employer be given a reasonable opportunity of being heard, and the second permitting the Central Board to reduce or waive damages for a sick industrial company under a sanctioned rehabilitation scheme. The fifteen-day position comes from paragraph 38 of the Employees’ Provident Funds Scheme, 1952, read together with the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation’s circular No. WSU/9(1)2013/Settlement/35631 dated 8 January 2016, by which the five-day grace period that employers had previously enjoyed was withdrawn with effect from the February 2016 remittance.
On the insurance side we have worked from the Employees’ State Insurance Act, 1948: section 38, requiring that all employees in factories or establishments to which the Act applies shall be insured; section 39, under which contribution comprises the employer’s contribution and the employee’s contribution, the rates are prescribed by the Central Government, the wage period is the unit in respect of which contribution is payable, and section 39(5)(a), under which a principal employer who does not pay by the due date is liable to pay simple interest at twelve per cent per annum or at such higher rate as may be specified in the regulations, not exceeding the lending rate of any scheduled bank; section 40, under which the principal employer pays both contributions in the first instance, may recover the employee’s share only by deduction from wages, is forbidden by section 40(3) from deducting or otherwise recovering his own contribution from the employee notwithstanding any contract, and under section 40(4) is deemed to have been entrusted with any sum so deducted for the purpose of paying it over; and section 41, on recovery from an immediate employer and the register that immediate employer must maintain. The contribution periods and the benefit periods that follow them are fixed by the Employees’ State Insurance (General) Regulations, 1950.
On the criminal limb we have gone no further than the two Explanations to the definition of criminal breach of trust in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, which deem an employer who deducts an employee’s contribution to a provident fund or family pension fund, or to the Employees’ State Insurance Fund, to have been entrusted with the amount deducted, and deem a failure to pay it over to be dishonest use contrary to a legal direction. The deeming reaches the deducted share and not the employer’s own contribution. We have deliberately not written the offence up at length here, because that provision has its own page on this site and it belongs there rather than in a second copy.
What we have not printed, and why. No contribution rate, no wage ceiling, no exemption limit and no headcount threshold appears anywhere on this page. Those are rule-made and notification-made figures, they have each moved more than once, and an employer relying on a stale percentage found on a web page has been given a liability rather than an answer. We have also not calculated interest or damages for any reader, not predicted what an authority will levy, not advised whether a particular worker is an employee or a particular allowance is wages, and taken no view on whether any employer should regularise a past period in one step or several. Those are determinations, and determinations are made by the authority or on advice taken with the record in front of the adviser.
Related work on this site. This page is about the monthly cycle only. The argument about whose money these contributions are, and the headcount at which the obligation first attaches, is made on our PF registration page and is not repeated here. The criminal provision summarised above is set out on our criminal breach of trust page. For the other monthly and annual filings an employer of people carries, see professional tax, TDS return and ITR filing; for the documents that create the employment these returns report on, employment agreement and appointment letter; and for what happens at the other end of an employment, gratuity and bonus computation.
Two doors, both free. Clients search a factual directory of enrolled advocates. Advocates apply to be listed on it — no fee, no commission, nothing paid in either direction.
Search Bar Council enrolled advocates by what your matter is about, by court, or by city. Searching and sending a request are both free.
Enrolled advocates anywhere in India can apply to be listed. Your entry is published only after we verify your enrolment number with your State Bar Council.
Would rather not pick anybody? Tell us the matter instead — one form goes to every advocate at once, and the first to take it up calls you.
This directory carries no ratings, no reviews, no rankings and no fees — only the factual particulars the Bar Council of India permits, published at each advocate's own request. Browse the network · Terms for Advocates