On 29 June 2026 the Employees’ Provident Funds Scheme 2026, the Employees’ Pension Scheme 2026 and the EDLI Scheme 2026 were notified, replacing the 1952, 1995 and 1976 schemes (eGazette, G.S.R. 525(E) and 526(E); EPS 2026 text).

Five weeks later, most payroll teams have changed nothing, largely because the headline number everyone checks did not move. That is the trap. The rate is the same. Almost everything around it is different.

First, the myth: the ceiling did not go to ₹21,000

The provident fund wage ceiling remains ₹15,000 a month. It was re-notified afresh under section 2(89) of the Code on Social Security by S.O. 2702(E) dated 29 May 2026 (labour.gov.in). It has stood at ₹15,000 since 1 September 2014 (EPFO’s ceiling history).

If your salary-structure planning for this financial year assumed ₹21,000 or ₹25,000, unwind it.

What actually changed

Contributions above the ceiling are now expressly voluntary. Mandatory 12% plus 12% continues, but only up to ₹15,000 — that is ₹1,800 a month from each side. Above that, either the employee or the employer may reduce or discontinue contributions, and employer matching above the ceiling is optional unless you have contractually promised it.

This is a bigger deal than it sounds. Any employee on a salary above ₹15,000 whose PF is currently computed on full basic can now ask you to stop. You need a documented consent and change-request process before the first such request arrives, not after.

The contribution base is “wages” under the Code, including the 50% deeming rule — not “basic wages” as you have historically read it. Under the new definition, effective 21 November 2025, only statutory components (employer PF, employer pension contribution and statutory bonus) count towards the 50% test; gratuity and ESI do not; annual performance incentives are excluded; and overtime allowance is included (Labour Ministry FAQs, 16 March 2026). Where excluded components exceed 50% of total remuneration, the excess is added back to wages.

Statutory and voluntary contributions must be separately identifiable in your remittances and in the new consolidated Form V return, filed within 15 days. If your payroll writes a single PF figure per employee, that is now a data-model problem, not a formatting one.

The numbers that did not change

Sources: EPFO contribution rates and the Labour Ministry’s Compliance Handbook for Employers.

EPS remittance mechanics were separately notified on 1 July 2026: 8.33% up to the notified ceiling, remitted within 15 days of the close of every month, with 9.49% applying for joint-option members on wages above ₹15,000 (S.O. 3580(E)).

VISHWAS 2026 closes in late December, and it is worth real money

If you have PF defaults from before 14 June 2024 sitting on your books, this is the paragraph that matters most.

VISHWAS 2026 was notified as part of the EPF Scheme 2026 and took effect on 29 June 2026, running for six months. It recalculates damages under section 14B / section 128 at (PIB, 29 July 2026):

• 0.25% per month for defaults up to two months
• 0.50% per month for defaults over two and under four months
• 1.00% per month for defaults of four months or more

… against a standard rate of up to 25% per annum. The mandatory condition is full remittance of section 7Q and section 127 interest. Damages already fully recovered, and fraud or misappropriation cases, are excluded.

Alongside it, AMNESTY 2026 offers one-time regularisation for establishments running PF trusts recognised under income tax law but without a formal section 17 exemption notification.

Six months from 29 June means the window closes at the end of December 2026. Reconciling a legacy default takes weeks, not days. If there is anything unresolved in your PF history, start the reconciliation this month.

Two adjacent changes that affect the same payroll run

Employee PF and ESI deductions are no longer lost to a one-day delay. From 1 April 2026 the deduction due date for employee PF and ESI contributions is aligned with the employer’s income-tax return filing due date, instead of the 15-day fund-law date (CBDT Budget 2026 FAQs). This reverses a long-standing trap where a single day’s delay in depositing the employee share meant permanent disallowance. It is a genuine relief and almost nobody has written about it.

ESI coverage may quietly expand. ESIC’s clarification letter of 4 June 2026 confirms the ₹21,000 threshold continues, but warns that certain allowances counted under the old 1948 Act definition are omitted from the new definition — which can pull employees you had excluded on gross-wage grounds back into coverage. Re-run your ESI eligibility test against the new wage definition before the next contribution period.

Your checklist before the next ECR

1. Confirm the PF wage base in your payroll is computed on Code wages with the 50% rule, not legacy basic.
2. Split statutory and voluntary contributions into separate fields so Form V can be filed correctly.
3. Build a consent and change-request flow for employees who want to stop above-ceiling contributions.
4. Re-test ESI eligibility for every employee near the ₹21,000 line under the new wage definition.
5. Pull your PF default history for anything before 14 June 2024 and evaluate VISHWAS 2026 now.
6. Verify UAN and Aadhaar authentication status — Aadhaar authentication under section 142 of the Code has been clarified as mandatory and self-executory, and PM-VBRY incentives are released only after face-authenticated UAN (PIB).
7. Keep the 15th-of-month ECR discipline. Nothing in the new scheme relaxes it.

Most of this is configuration work, and configuration work is where spreadsheet-driven payroll quietly fails. IntelloHRM computes the PF base on the current wage definition, keeps statutory and voluntary contributions separately identifiable, and flags ESI-eligibility changes before the contribution period closes rather than after.

If you want a second pair of eyes on your PF wage base before the next ECR, send us a sample salary structure and we will map it against the 2026 scheme.

Published 4 August 2026. Verified against eGazette, labour.gov.in, epfindia.gov.in, esic.gov.in and incometaxindia.gov.in on that date.

If you run payroll for a business in Ludhiana, Jalandhar or Amritsar, most of the compliance content you will find online was not written for you. It was written for a national audience, and in Punjab’s case a good part of it is wrong.

Here is the position as of August 2026, with the notification behind each number.

Punjab minimum wages changed on 1 May 2026

The Government of Punjab revised minimum wages for all scheduled employment with effect from 1 May 2026, under notification No. Labour-Lab0MIWA/1/2021-4L (260032)/166 (Punjab Gazette Extraordinary, 1 May 2026).

Two practical points trip up payroll teams every revision cycle.

First, the revision is effective from a date, not from when you noticed it. If you are still paying the old rates in August, you have arrears to settle, and a labour inspector reads the wage register, not your intentions.

Second, if your establishment falls in the central sphere — railways, mines, major ports, banking, telecom, central PSUs and similar — you are not on the Punjab schedule at all. You are on the Chief Labour Commissioner’s variable dearness allowance order, revised with effect from 1 April 2026, in which Ludhiana Municipal Corporation, Amritsar, Jalandhar and Jalandhar Cantt. are all classified Area B (CLC(C) VDA order). Unskilled construction work in Area B is ₹693 a day there. Getting the sphere wrong is the single most common minimum-wage error we see in Punjab payrolls.

Punjab professional tax is live. It was never suspended.

Several widely-read HRMS guides list Punjab as a state with no professional tax, or mark it “Limited/Suspended”. That is incorrect, and if you configured your payroll from those pages you are accruing a penalty of ₹50 a day.

The Punjab State Development Tax Act, 2018 is in force. From the Punjab Government’s own PSDT portal FAQ:

Note the wording on liability. Punjab does not publish a fixed salary slab. Liability follows income-tax payability, which means the correct test in your payroll engine is whether the employee is an income-tax payee, not whether gross salary crosses some round number. Guides that quote “above ₹25,000 a month” or “above ₹2,50,001 a year” are approximating a rule that is written differently, and the approximation breaks at the margins.

If you employ people across states, remember that professional tax follows the employee’s place of work, not your registered office — the Karnataka PT portal states this explicitly (ptax.karnataka.gov.in). A Ludhiana company with three engineers in Bengaluru owes Karnataka PT for those three, on Karnataka’s due date of the 20th.

The Shops Act change that cut compliance for small establishments

The Punjab Shops and Commercial Establishments (Amendment) Act, 2025 narrowed the Act’s applicability to establishments with 20 or more workers (Bill text via PRS India). Below 20 workers, an establishment only has to intimate commencement of business to the Inspector.

For those still covered, the operating limits moved:

• Daily working hours: 9 → 10 hours
• Spread-over: 10 → 12 hours
• Overtime per quarter: 50 → 144 hours
• General penalty: from ₹100/₹300 to ₹500–₹2,000 for a first offence and ₹3,000–₹30,000 thereafter

That is a large relaxation on hours paired with a twenty-fold increase in penalties. It rewards businesses that actually track hours and punishes those that guess.

One caution: the separate notification permitting registered establishments to open on all 365 days ran only up to 31 May 2026. If you run retail or a QSR and you are still rostering on that basis, confirm the renewal before your next weekly-off cycle.

Where the labour codes actually leave Punjab employers

All four labour codes have been in force since 21 November 2025 (PIB), and the Central Rules were notified on 8 May 2026. But the Central Rules mainly bind establishments where the Central Government is the appropriate government, plus multi-state establishments for social security purposes.

Punjab’s own draft rules under the Code on Wages, the Industrial Relations Code and the Code on Social Security were published on 29 December 2025 and remain draft. So a single-state Punjab manufacturer sits in an in-between state: the codes apply, the state machinery around them is not final.

What does apply today, from the Labour Ministry’s own Compliance Handbook for Employers:

• Attendance-cum-muster roll, wage register, overtime register and register of fines and deductions
• Register of employees and register of dangerous occurrences under the OSH Code
• Records preserved for five years
• Wage slips issued before payment
• Monthly wages paid by the 7th of the following month
• Full and final settlement within two working days of leaving
• Appointment letters mandatory for all workers
• Grievance Redressal Committee at 20+ workers

What this means for your payroll setup

Punjab compliance is not hard, but it is specific, and it changes on dates that no national vendor tracks for you. The setup that survives an inspection looks like this: wage floors mapped by category and effective date, PSDT deducted on the income-tax-payability test with PSDT-8 and PSDT-6 on the calendar, hours captured well inside the 10-hour and 144-hour limits, and the six statutory registers generated from the same attendance data you already collect rather than maintained separately in a drawer.

IntelloHRM is built in Ludhiana for exactly this. Attendance, leave, overtime and payroll run off one record, the Punjab wage categories and PSDT deduction are configured in, and the statutory registers come out of the system in inspection-ready form instead of being reconstructed the night before.

If you want the Punjab wage table and the PSDT filing calendar as a one-page reference for your finance team, ask us and we will send it across.

Published 4 August 2026. Positions verified against the Punjab Gazette, psdt.punjab.gov.in, clc.gov.in and labour.gov.in on that date.