“This is for the first time in the history of EPFO that the interest has been credited by July 15. Last year, the interest crediting process was fully completed in September (2025), after having credited the interest for 80-90% of the member accounts till July-end. In the previous year, the process of interest credit disbursement went on till November. This time interest crediting has happened in one go,” the official said.

What set apart this year’s interest crediting process at the EPFO was the retirement fund body’s move towards a revamped portal with a centralised database by merging information across all regional offices. Earlier, every regional office had its own database which made the process of verification before crediting of the interest a challenging process. The official said the EPFO first merged “123 databases into one single national database”. “It involved migration of nearly 1,400 crore transactions and also of employer records. In total, 1,700 crore records were migrated as part of the exercise,” the official elaborated when asked about the transition process.

Since the centralised database meant merger of financial data, the EPFO carried out additional steps to ensure verification of accounts and their balances for a complete matching of details before and after the migration process. “We finished the migration on June 30. We did interest calculations and credit on July 1 and July 2. We wanted our field officers to verify whether the migration from the old legacy system to this was properly done. So, they had a view of the old member ledger and the new member ledger, and they compared the opening balance with the closing balance plus interest. They checked whether it was all matching. We wanted to carry out this exercise so that everyone is assured and there is confidence that the entire migration process went off smoothly,” the official said.

EPFO’s assets under management are estimated to be Rs 32 lakh crore of assets for around 35 crore accounts, out of which roughly 8 crore are active contributing accounts.

The EPFO has rolled out its new revamped portal that enables automated processes, including crediting of interest, claim verification and informing members about the amount they are eligible to withdraw, aimed at reducing claim rejection rates. The EPFO portal was shut from June 26-28. Now that the portal has resumed, the EPFO has settled nearly 11 lakh claims in one go amounting to Rs 3,000 crore, the official said, adding that all the backlog of claims and current cases of advances will be cleared shortly.

The Ministry of Labour and Employment has revamped the EPFO portal under the CITES (Centralised IT Enabled Services) project, an initiative to modernise EPFO’s service delivery through automation and rule-based processing.