
India to Restore UPI Merchant Fees, PhonePe Gains Most
India's government plans to amend the Payment and Settlement Systems Act to restore UPI merchant discount rates, ending the zero-MDR regime in place since January 2020.
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June 27, 2026 · 3 min read · By Rishabh Bhardwaj
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The Employees' Provident Fund Organisation has taken its member portal, employer portal, and UMANG app offline from June 26 to June 30, 2026, for a planned system migration. The five-day window affects all digital services the organisation runs, meaning millions of PF account holders and employers cannot access online tools during this period.
The shutdown is scheduled, not an outage. EPFO is migrating its backend systems to improve service speed, reliability, and security. Migrations of this scale typically involve moving data and processes to upgraded infrastructure, which requires taking the live system down entirely to prevent errors or data mismatches during the transfer.
For the full duration, members cannot log into the EPFO member portal to check their PF balance, download passbooks, file claims, update KYC details, or transfer accounts. Employers are similarly locked out of the employer portal, blocking them from filing returns, making contributions, or processing new member registrations. The UMANG app, which is the government's unified mobile platform that hosts EPFO services, is also unavailable for PF-related tasks.
Anyone who had planned to submit a PF withdrawal claim, link their Aadhaar, or check claim status will need to wait until July 1, 2026, at the earliest, assuming the migration completes on schedule.
EPFO manages provident fund accounts for a large share of India's formal workforce. Even a brief service gap touches a wide base of users, from individual workers tracking retirement savings to payroll teams at companies processing monthly contributions. End-of-month timing adds pressure: employers typically file contribution challan payments around the last few days of the month, and that window now overlaps with the outage.
Employers who miss the June 30 contribution deadline because of the portal outage should document the disruption carefully. EPFO has not publicly announced any automatic grace period or penalty waiver tied to this maintenance window, so affected parties may need to follow up directly with the organisation once services resume.
For individual members, the more immediate inconvenience is claim processing. PF withdrawal requests, advance claims for medical emergencies or home loans, and transfer requests will all be paused. If you submitted a claim before June 26, its processing may also be delayed if it was still in the queue when the system went down.
The upgrade is framed as a long-term improvement. Faster portals and stronger security would reduce the friction that has historically made EPFO's digital services difficult to use, particularly during high-traffic periods like financial year-end. A more stable backend could also reduce claim-processing delays that members frequently report.
Services are expected to resume on July 1, 2026. Users should check the EPFO website or UMANG app at that point to confirm restoration before attempting transactions. If you have a time-sensitive need, offline EPFO regional offices remain an option during the outage, though service capacity there may be limited.

India's government plans to amend the Payment and Settlement Systems Act to restore UPI merchant discount rates, ending the zero-MDR regime in place since January 2020.
India's government has introduced the Taxation and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026, proposing changes to payments regulation, income tax, and the Finance Act to attract FDI and support Make in India. The Bill's final shape will depend on parliamentary debate and committee review.
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