On May 29, 2026, India's Ministry of Labour and Employment issued two gazette notifications, S.O. 2701(E) and S.O. 2702(E), that fix three operational numbers under the Code on Social Security, 2020: the wage ceiling for provident fund contributions, the interest rate on late employer payments, and the inspection charge paid by companies that run their own PF trusts. The notifications apply retroactively to November 21, 2025, the date the code itself took effect, which means employers now owe interest on any arrears sitting on their books since that date.
The wage ceiling stays where it was
S.O. 2701(E) sets the EPF wage ceiling at 15,000 rupees a month under Section 2(89) of the code. That is the same figure EPFO has used since 2014. The Supreme Court had directed the government to revisit the ceiling, and industry groups had pushed for an increase given twelve years of wage inflation, but the notification carries the old number forward unchanged. For payroll teams, this closes an open question that had been sitting unresolved since the code's rules were finalized on May 8, 2026: contribution calculations do not need to be rebuilt around a new threshold, because there isn't one.
Interest on arrears runs from November, not May
The same notification sets interest on delayed EPF payments at 12 percent a year. The detail that matters for compliance teams is the retroactive date. Employment law practitioners note that the interest applies from November 21, 2025 onward, meaning any employer with unresolved arrears from the intervening six months is now liable for interest calculated from the original due date, not from the date the rate was published. That resolves an argument some employers had been making, that interest could not accrue during a period when no rate had been formally notified. It also means payroll and HR compliance systems need to recompute arrears interest going back roughly seven months, not forward from the notification date.
Exempted trusts pay more to stay exempted
S.O. 2702(E) raises the inspection charge paid by "exempted establishments," companies that run their own private PF trusts instead of remitting to EPFO directly, to 0.35 percent of wages with a minimum of 8,750 rupees, while leaving the EDLI-linked inspection charge unchanged. The notification supersedes inspection-charge rules dating to January and July 1998. Roughly 1,200 to 1,375 large employers, including firms such as TCS, Wipro, Hindustan Unilever and Reliance, operate under this exempted-trust model, covering an estimated 50 lakh employees between them. Each of those trusts now needs its administration cost recalculated under the new rate, and the same notification names EPF officials as inspectors-cum-facilitators with authority to inspect records and levy damages, which raises the compliance stakes for any trust that has been treating the charge as a formality.
Why this lands on payroll systems specifically
None of these three numbers required new legislation. They are implementing detail under a code that had already taken effect six months earlier, which is exactly why they matter to HR technology buyers rather than to policy watchers. Payroll platforms and PF trust administrators that build contribution and arrears logic into their compliance modules now have a fixed set of parameters to code against, after operating for half a year on a code with rules but no confirmed rates. The retroactive interest date is the detail most likely to surface a gap: any system that calculated arrears interest starting from a notification date rather than the code's November 2025 effective date will need correcting, and any employer relying on that system will need to check its own numbers.
What to watch next
The EPF Scheme, 2026, which replaces the EPF Scheme, 1952 outright, is set to take effect on June 29, 2026, a month after these notifications. That is the point at which the operational detail set on May 29 gets folded into a fully replaced scheme document, and the next test of whether payroll and HCM systems have actually absorbed the new numbers rather than just patched around them.
Sources: KPMG GMS Flash Alert · JSA Prism · Praans Consultech · Legality Simplified · Scripbox · Simpliance · Deccan Chronicle