Summary of this article
EPFO is set to launch the E-PRAAPTI portal to help members trace and reactivate old or inoperative EPF accounts.
As of March 2026, over Rs 9,330 crore is lying unclaimed in around 30.9 lakh inoperative EPF accounts across India.
The portal is expected to be launched in phases.
The Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) may soon launch the Employee Provident Fund Aadhaar-Based Access Portal (E-PRAAPTI). The portal is designed to help subscribers trace their unclaimed EPF balances, find account details, link them to their existing Universal Account Number (UAN), and claim the funds more easily.
EPFO may roll out the platform by the end of August 2026. Incidentally, other regulatory authorities, such as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) already have the UDGAM and MITRA portals, respectively, to help accountholders and investors recover unclaimed money.
The E-PRAAPTI platform was first announced in April 2026 by Union Labour and Employment Minister Mansukh Mandaviya, who described it as a measure to provide relief to subscribers struggling for years to find their fragmented retirement corpus with different employers. Once the software is ready with the national database, EPFO is likely to launch the portal that would provide financial transparency to millions of employees in India. According to government data, there is a staggering Rs 9,330 crore lying unclaimed currently in over 3.09 million inoperative EPF accounts.
EPF is a mandatory account for employees who work in organisations having 20 or more employees. However, many a time, while changing jobs, the account is not transferred and, after some time, forgotten. With technological advances, data integration, and the launch of UAN, it has become a little easier to transfer the account. However, older accounts often remain untraceable. The E-PRAAPTI portal can help subscribers get back their funds from the unclaimed and inoperative EPF accounts. An EPF account becomes inoperative when there is no contribution made in the account for three consecutive years.
Employee Provident Fund Aadhaar-Based Access Portal (E-PRAAPTI)
The portal would use an Aadhaar-based authentication mechanism to identify members. Subscribers will then be able to find their unclaimed fund-related information using their Aadhaar details. This would be especially useful for those who don’t have UAN or don’t remember it or their old member IDs (MIDs) either.
Under the new system, once a member is identified, the portal would enable them to link their old MID to their current UAN. In case a subscriber doesn’t have the UAN, the portal is expected to generate a new UAN.
Once UAN is in place, old MIDs would be linked with it, and members would be able to request reactivation of their old EPF accounts, along with updating their personal profile details directly through the portal. This is expected to reduce the manual intervention by the EPFO staff. Once linked, all the EPF accounts, including the unclaimed accounts of a member, would show on the UMANG portal, which have historically been difficult to trace.
EPFO is reportedly planning for a phased rollout, allowing only those subscribers who have their MIDs in the first phase. Later, it will be opened for all, including those who don’t have their MIDs, according to a report in The Hindu Business Line.
Any upgrade by EPFO would help its nearly 80 million active subscribers who contribute monthly to manage their funds, as well as those who are now out of the workforce, to get their earned money back.
It’s also important to note that EPFO's IT infrastructure has been a longstanding challenge that the organisation has yet to fully address. Recently, the EPF officer association raised concerns about a lack of in-house technical experts, and requested intervention by Mandaviya, who heads the Central Board of Trustees (CBT), the decision-making body of the EPFO.
