How to reset your UAN password and change your EPFO mobile number

Four different problems all present as "my UAN login is not working", and they have four different fixes. Spending two minutes identifying yours saves you from grinding through a flow that was never going to succeed.

The first is a plain forgotten password on a live account. Your UAN is activated, your Aadhaar is seeded, and the mobile number EPFO holds is still in your hand. This is the easy case and it takes about four minutes end to end.

The second is the one this page exists for: the password is gone and so is the number. You can reach the Forgot Password screen, the portal shows you a masked mobile number you no longer recognise, and every OTP it offers to send goes into the void. The fix runs through Aadhaar and, before that, quite possibly through an Aadhaar enrolment centre.

The third is a UAN that was allotted but never activated. Activation is a separate act from allotment — an employer generating a UAN for you does not switch it on. An unactivated UAN has no password to forget, so Forgot Password will not help; you need the activation flow instead, which EPFO now routes primarily through the UMANG app using Aadhaar face authentication.

The fourth is not knowing your UAN at all. You have an old PF number on a payslip, or nothing but the employer's name. The login page carries a Know Your UAN option for precisely this, and it too finishes with an OTP, which loops you back to the mobile number question.

Notice the pattern. Three of the four end at the same place — a working mobile number tied to your Aadhaar. If you are not sure whether the number in your pocket is the one UIDAI holds, check that before you touch the EPFO portal. UIDAI publishes a verify email and mobile service among its resident services, which confirms whether a given number is the one registered against your Aadhaar without revealing what the registered number is.

Open the EPFO member portal at unifiedportal-mem.epfindia.gov.in and look under the sign-in box. The page carries a Forgot Password link alongside Activate UAN, Know Your UAN and UAN for Existing PF. Use Forgot Password.

Enter your twelve-digit UAN and the captcha shown, and submit. The portal then displays the mobile number it holds for you in masked form. If the visible digits match the phone you are holding, answer yes and ask for the OTP.

Enter the OTP when it arrives. Treat the SMS as a password in transit: it is not to be read out to anyone, whatever they say their job title is. EPFO's own passbook site warns members never to respond to any call asking for Aadhaar, PAN, bank details or an OTP, and states that EPFO does not call members or pensioners asking them to deposit money.

Set the new password on the screen that follows, typing it twice. The portal enforces its own complexity rule and displays it next to the field — read what is on screen rather than assuming, because the rule has been tightened over the years and a password that met the old rule will be rejected.

Sign in again at the member portal with the UAN and the new password to confirm it took. If the portal is slow or times out, that is worth knowing about rather than panicking over: EPFO has been running a migration and posts a notice on the login page asking members to avoid peak hours and not to fire off repeated requests, which only lengthen the queue.

Then try the passbook site separately. The member passbook lives at passbook.epfindia.gov.in and takes the same UAN and password plus a captcha, but it is a different application, and a password changed on the member portal does not always work there instantly. If it refuses, wait and retry later in the day before assuming the reset failed.

This is the part most write-ups skip. On the screen where the portal shows you the masked mobile number, you are not forced to accept it. Answer that you do not have access to that number, and the flow changes shape entirely.

Having lost the SMS channel, the portal falls back to identity evidence. It asks you to confirm your name, date of birth and gender exactly as they appear in EPFO's record, and then to prove that record is yours by producing a matching identifier — your Aadhaar number, or in some flows your PAN. Type it precisely, including the exact spelling and initials EPFO holds, not the version you prefer. A mismatch here is not a security wall you can talk your way past; it is a data problem, and it is fixed by correcting the record, which is a separate process covered further down.

Once the identifier validates, the portal offers you the field you came for: a new mobile number. Enter the number you actually hold now, and ask for the OTP.

Here is the failure everyone hits. The OTP is not sent because you typed the number; it is sent because UIDAI recognises that number as the one registered against the Aadhaar you just quoted. If the new number is not in your Aadhaar record, no OTP will arrive, no error will explain why, and you will conclude the portal is broken. It is not. You are being asked to prove control of a number that Aadhaar has never heard of, and there is no way to satisfy that proof from a keyboard.

If the OTP does arrive, enter it, set the new password, and you are through — with the new number now sitting against your UAN for every future OTP, claim authentication and portal login.

One caution about what this branch does and does not change. It updates the number EPFO uses to reach you. It does not touch your Aadhaar record, it does not touch your employer's payroll record, and it does not by itself fix a name or date of birth that is wrong in EPFO's database. Those are separate corrections, and if your details did not match at the verification step, the reset was never the real problem.

If the OTP did not arrive, the work moves to UIDAI, and it moves offline. UIDAI is explicit that a mobile number cannot be updated through the myAadhaar portal: its update guidance states that you update your mobile number by visiting an Aadhaar enrolment centre. Address and other demographic data can be changed online; the mobile number cannot, because the number is the very thing the online channel authenticates you with.

Find a centre using the Bhuvan Aadhaar portal, which ISRO's National Remote Sensing Centre runs for UIDAI. You can search within a radius of your location, by PIN code, by state, district and sub-district, or by the name of a specific centre, and you can filter by the type of update the centre handles. Results can be exported and mapped. The portal carries a disclaimer that the database is indicative and for visualisation only, so ring ahead rather than making a long trip on faith.

You can also book an appointment rather than queueing, and UIDAI lists appointment booking alongside its other resident services. Availability varies sharply by city, and in smaller towns the walk-in banking-correspondent or post-office centres are often the practical option.

Take the Aadhaar number, the new SIM, and the phone itself. A mobile number update is done in person with biometric authentication, so the point of going is that your fingerprint or iris replaces the OTP you cannot receive. UIDAI publishes a schedule of enrolment and update charges, so expect to pay the published fee for the update at the counter and to be given an acknowledgement slip with a request number.

The update is not instant. Treat the acknowledgement slip as the receipt for a request, not a completed change, and use UIDAI's verify email and mobile service after a few days to confirm the new number is now the registered one. Only then is it worth going back to the EPFO Forgot Password flow, because until UIDAI's record changes, EPFO's request for an OTP will keep failing in exactly the same silent way.

If something goes wrong — the update is rejected, the status never moves, the centre gave you nothing in writing — UIDAI runs a toll-free helpline on 1947 and an email address at [email protected], and publishes online grievance and complaint channels through its myAadhaar service. Use the request number from the slip; a complaint without it is very hard for anyone to act on.

Allotment and activation are two different events, and conflating them wastes a lot of people's afternoons. Your employer, or EPFO itself, allots the UAN. Activation is the member's own act, and until it happens there is no password, no portal access and nothing for Forgot Password to reset. If the portal tells you the UAN is not activated, stop trying to reset a password that does not exist.

EPFO has moved this route onto the UMANG app. The member portal login page now states that UAN activation for existing UANs, and the generation of new UANs, can be done through UMANG, and directs members to download the app and use Aadhaar-based face authentication rather than completing the process on the website.

Face authentication is the important detail for anyone reading this page, because it does not depend on an SMS. The scan proves you are the holder of the Aadhaar record. That makes it the one EPFO route that can work when the registered mobile number is dead — though the credentials it generates are still delivered to a number, so a number that reaches you is still needed to receive them.

Practically, that means the sequence for a member with a stale number is usually: fix the Aadhaar mobile number at an enrolment centre first, then activate through UMANG, then log in to the member portal and change the password to something you choose. Doing it in the other order tends to leave you activated on paper with the credentials sent somewhere you cannot read.

Once activated, go straight to the member portal and check the profile. Activation gets you in the door; it does not confirm that your Aadhaar, PAN and bank account are seeded and approved against the UAN, and unapproved KYC is what causes claims to be rejected later. Sorting it now, while you have the portal open, is cheaper than discovering it during a withdrawal.

If the activation itself fails — the Aadhaar is already linked to a different UAN, the face scan will not validate, the app loops — that is a case for the EPFO helpdesk on 14470, whose number the member portal publishes, and then for a written grievance. A UAN that cannot be activated is not a problem you can solve by trying harder on the app.

Plenty of people cannot reset a password because they do not know the number the password belongs to. The member portal handles this with a Know Your UAN option on the login page, sitting beside Forgot Password and Activate UAN.

The flow works from a mobile number and a captcha, then asks for identifying details — typically name, date of birth and an identifier such as Aadhaar, PAN or an existing member ID — and returns the UAN by SMS. As with everything else here, the delivery mechanism is an OTP and an SMS, so it works cleanly if the number is your Aadhaar-registered one and not at all if it is not.

If you have an old PF account number from a payslip — the long alphanumeric member ID in the form of a regional office code, an establishment code and an account number — that is a strong input, because it identifies a specific account rather than relying on name matching. Old salary slips, Form 16, an offer letter or an appointment letter are all worth digging out before you start.

There is also a UAN for Existing PF option on the login page, for members with an active provident fund account who need a UAN generated against it. This is the route for older accounts created before UAN became universal, where money exists but no universal number was ever issued.

Your employer's HR or payroll team is the fastest source of a UAN and the associated member ID, and they hold it whether or not they are still your employer. The employer side of the system runs on a separate portal, where establishments file electronic contribution returns; EPFO has moved that return format to be UAN-based rather than built around the old member ID, so a current employer has your UAN in front of them by necessity.

One thing to check while you are digging: whether you have accidentally acquired two UANs. It happens when a new employer generates a fresh number instead of using the one you already had. Two UANs will block transfers between them and confuse every recovery flow, and merging them is a grievance, not a self-service action.

Some cases cannot be resolved from a browser. The name EPFO holds is spelt differently from your Aadhaar. The date of birth in the provident fund record is the wrong one an employer typed a decade ago. The Aadhaar is seeded against a different UAN. In each of those, the Forgot Password flow will keep failing at the verification step, and the failure is a data mismatch rather than an access problem.

The instrument for correcting EPFO's record is the joint declaration, filed by the member and the employer together. It is the standing mechanism for correcting member profile parameters — name, date of birth, gender, parents' names, dates of joining and leaving and similar fields — and it is why fixing these things is dramatically easier while you are still on an employer's payroll than after you leave. EPFO has progressively allowed members with Aadhaar-validated UANs to self-correct more of these fields online, so check what the portal offers you before assuming you need the employer.

Where the employer will not act, or has closed down, the route is the regional or sub-regional EPFO office that holds the account. The office is identified by the first part of your member ID, and it is the office you name in any grievance. Written correspondence with an office, quoting the UAN and member ID, is slow but it creates a record, which the phone does not.

For anything unresolved, EPFO runs its own online grievance system, EPFiGMS, where a grievance is registered against a specific EPFO office and tracked by a registration number. File against the office that holds the account, describe the exact screen and the exact failure, and attach the acknowledgement numbers you have collected along the way. Vague grievances get vague replies.

Above that sits CPGRAMS, the central grievance portal run by the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, which connects to every ministry and department of the Government of India and to state governments. Citizens can lodge a grievance online, track it by a unique registration number, and — this is the part people miss — rate the resolution afterwards, where a rating of poor unlocks the right to appeal. CPGRAMS excludes matters that are sub judice, RTI matters and religious matters, so keep the complaint to service delivery.

Two warnings. First, ignore anyone who offers to fix your UAN access for a fee; the services described here are the member's own and the intermediaries who advertise them are, at best, charging you for typing. Second, keep the fraud line clear in your head: EPFO's passbook site warns that it never asks members to share Aadhaar, PAN, bank details or an OTP over the phone, and never asks a member or pensioner to deposit money. Any call that does either is not EPFO.

Getting back into the account is not the end of the job. The reason you were locked out will lock you out again unless you clear the underlying state while the portal is open in front of you.

Check the mobile number and email now held against the UAN and confirm they are ones you will still control in five years. A personal number and a personal email address, not a work one — a work email dies with the job, and that is exactly how people end up here twice.

Check the KYC block. Aadhaar, PAN and bank account should each be present, correctly numbered, and approved rather than merely seeded. Approved KYC is what lets claims and transfers process; seeded-but-unapproved looks identical on screen and behaves completely differently in the back office.

Check the nomination. An e-nomination filed against the UAN is what determines who receives the provident fund and pension benefits if you die, and an account that has never had one leaves a family arguing with an office. It takes a few minutes and it is the highest-value thing on this list.

Open the passbook and look at every member ID, not the headline balance. Each employment sits as its own member ID under the UAN, and an old one that was never linked simply will not appear. If an employer you remember is missing, that is a transfer or linkage problem to deal with next, and this site has separate guides on transferring and withdrawing an EPF balance.

Finally, store the credentials properly. Write the UAN down somewhere permanent, keep the password in a password manager rather than in a note on the phone you are about to replace, and record which mobile number the account is tied to. The provident fund is a record you will need across four decades and several phones, and the whole of this guide exists because that record is usually kept on the one device most likely to be lost.