Is your EPF enough for retirement? Why you need more than PF as a salaried worker

For most salaried Indians, the EPF balance is the one number they look at and feel vaguely reassured about. The national EPF corpus has grown to around Rs 24.76 lakh crore as of 2024, almost five times what it was a decade earlier. That sounds huge. But retirement is not paid out of the national corpus. It is paid out of your own account, and that is where the gap quietly shows up.

A monthly PF deduction of 12 percent looks healthy in your salary slip, but retirement is fighting three strong forces at once: rising prices, rising medical costs and longer lives. Headline inflation may be near 3–4 percent, but hospital bills, diagnostics and long-term care often climb at a much faster rate. A surgery that costs Rs 3 lakh today could easily be Rs 7–8 lakh when you are in your seventies. A cor