The supreme court recently ruled that allowances that are ordinarily paid to all employes should be considered for deciding the EPF contribution and not just the basic pay as usually done. This means normal allowances like house rent, dearness transport, fall under the definition of “basic wages”. A look at how much your EPF corpus is likely to increase if the EPFO agrees to this ruling. You can also download the calculator linked below to calculate for your own case.
Higher EPF contribution on basic + allowances
The judgement can be downloaded from the supreme court of India website. The court ruled that any allowance that is variable from employee to employee depending on their work output (e.g. over time allowance) will not be used for the PF contribution. Only those allowances normally paid to all employees will be used to compute PF contribution.
Impact on EPF corpus: Basic + allowance is 25% higher than basic
First let us consider a simple case where the basic is Rs. 10,000 and bscis + allowance is 25% higher than the basic or Rs. 12,500. Assuming a constant interest rate of 8%, all other rules being the same, we get the following:
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EPF corpus with PF contribution = 12% of basic (employee contribution) + 3.67% of basic (employer contribution) = Rs. 6.56 lakh.
EPF corpus with PF contribution = 12% of basic + allowance (employee contribution) + 3.67% of basic + allowance (employer contribution) = Rs. 8.41 lakh. That is 28% higher.
However the EPF contribution will be 25% higher for initial few years and a bit higher later (basic pay is assumed to increase at 3%)
Impact on EPF corpus: Basic + allowance is 50% higher than basic
Next let us consider a basic of Rs. 25,000 (above the threshold of Rs. 15000, meaning the EPS contribution will change as explained here) and a basic + allowance of Rs. 37,500 (50% higher) After 15 years:
EPF corpus with only basic used for contribution = Rs. 20.71 lakh
EPF corpus basic + allowances used for contribution = Rs. 33.26 lakh (or 60.6% higher!). However, the PF contribution will also be 60% higher reducing the take home pay.
Here is a snapshot of the inputs and outputs in the calculator linked below:
Schedule with only basic used for deciding PF contribution
Schedule with basic and allowances used for PF contribution
