Employee provident fund organization has over 3.54 crore subscribers, 49.22 lakh pensioners and 6.1 lakh employers (as per government’s official source). In order to ease the pain of its subscribers from transferring EPF account from one employer to another, EPFO had launched Universal Account Number (UAN) which is a unique 12 digit number allocated to the member by the employer. EPFO provides this number to the employer which they provide to their employees who opt for EPF contribution. After this, employee has to activate their UAN number.

Till now, to activate the UAN number and get provident fund details, EPF subscriber had to visit http://uanmembers.epfoservices.in/ and activate the same. But what if the member does not have access to computer and they want to activate UAN and/or get their provident fund details? Considering this, EPFO has moved to being a tech savvy organization by launching three new mobile based services which can be used by employers, employees and pensioners.

The organization now offers following two ways to activate UAN number using mobile phone:

1. Official mobile app
2. SMS
3. Apart from this missed call service was also launched to get PF details over phone.

Here’s how it will benefit following users:

• Employee: Get details of EPF account such as PF balance, credit alerts etc.
• Pensioners: This app will be useful for accessing the pension disbursement details
• Employer: To track provident fund remittances

Let’s explore these in detail:

UAN activation using Mobile App: This was launched on 15th Sep, 2015. This mobile application should be downloaded from the official website of EPFO only. You can download the app from the official link: “http://search.epfoservices.org:81/EPFOMobileApp/mobileApp_en.php”
After downloading the app, user needs to enter UAN number and registered mobile number. By doing this, they can get details of EPF account.

(Note): There are many apps available online in the name of EPF which may not be safe for the users.

SMS Based UAN activation: In order to activate UAN using SMS, member has to send SMS to 7738299899. This service is an extension to the already existing short code SMS service used for accessing details such as PF contribution amount, PF balance and others. This service can be used using the same number as mentioned above i.e. 7738299899. But it can be used by the members who already have already activated UAN number.

Here’s how to do get the details:

1. Enter the number 7738299899
2. Type “EPFOHO UAN <LAN>” (do not use quotation sign while smsing). LAN means language and member has to enter 3 initial letters. The languages available are:
   English: ENG, Hindi: HIN, Telugu: TEL, Punjabi: PUN, Gujrathi: GUJ, Marathi: MAR, Kannada: KAN, Malyalam: MAL, Tamil: TAM, Bengali: BEN.

Missed Call Service: This method is free of cost and the member has to give a missed call on the number 011-22901406 to get all the details related to his/her PF account.

Check out how to get UAN number and other details.

As per the government data (http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=126952), 1.8 crore UAN are activated and with the launch of new service, this number is expected to increase, speeding up the activation process.

What else you can do after UAN activation?

Apart from activating UAN, EPFO members can also avail following facilities such as:

• They can download their UAN card. This would be a PDF version and you can take print as well.
• Upload/update their KYC documents. However your employer will first authenticate the documents and till then the KYC status would be shown as “Pending”. Once your employer verifies the KYC documents, the updated status would be automatically changed.
• Download PDF version of the passbook
• Change mobile number and E-mail ID

Apart from these important facilities, there are many others as well. You can read it on the official website of EPFO.