Transgender persons make up a tiny fraction of subscribers to the Employee’s Provident Fund of India, and their numbers have barely grown across a seven-year-long period between 2018-19 and 2024-25.
The Employee’s Provident Fund of India is a government-backed social-security scheme to provide a retirement corpus for the country’s formal workforce. This initiative is administered by the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), which falls under the Ministry of Labour and Employment. A business organisation that employs 20 or more people is required to register with the EPFO.
A person’s provident fund consists of their own contributions and their employer’s contributions. Employees who subscribe to this scheme contribute 12 percent of their basic salary—their salary before any bonuses or deductions—and their dearness allowance, which is a cost-of-living adjustment typically given to government or public sector employees. The employer matches the employee’s contribution, and this amount is usually split across their employee’s provident fund, pension scheme, and a deposit-linked insurance. Until recently, employees who earned less than 15,000 rupees per month were covered mandatorily. This wage ceiling was revised in September 2026 to those who earn less than Rs 25,000. Those who earn higher can choose to opt in or out.
Nearly 1.3 crore Indians subscribed to the Employee’s Provident Fund of India during the financial year 2024-25, government data shows. This is a net number. It has been calculated by adding first time subscribers to those who rejoined the fund after an earlier exit, and then subtracting those who left the fund that year. Of these 1.3 crore net subscribers, only 126 were transgender persons. For context, according to the 2011 Census, there were 4,87,803 transgender people in India— this figure is likely an undercount.
Earlier, the EPFO released payroll data about its subscribers only as annual cumulative figures. In April 2018, it released monthly payroll data about its subscribers from the previous year—starting from September 2017. Since then, monthly data has been available for every year until 2024-25. The data for 2025-26 is available only from April to July. As a result, the financial years 2017-18 (which only has seven months of data), and 2024-25 (which has only four months of data), have been excluded from most of this analysis.
Often, data from the Employee’s Provident Fund is used to understand the scale of formal jobs in India. However, since this fund is applicable only to organisations with twenty or more employees, and is mandatory only for those who earn less than 25,000 rupees, it presents an incomplete picture of the country’s total workforce.
Nevertheless, the dataset can reveal important patterns among those employed in the formal sector. It shows, for instance, that most subscribers to the provident fund tend to be male. Across the financial years between 2018-19 and 2024-25, men comprised about eight of every ten of the net additions to the fund subscribers.
The data also shows that the net additions for both male and female subscribers to the provident fund nearly doubled across this seven-year-long period. At the same time, the net additions of trans persons to the fund have been negligible.
In fact, 2017-18 saw the highest net increase of trans subscribers to the provident fund—1,054 —even though the data for that year accounted for only seven months. In 2018-19, 639 trans persons exited the fund, while only 558 subscribers either joined for the first time, or rejoined after having exited the fund. This means that the fund saw a net decline of 81 trans subscribers that year. (By contrast, both male and female net subscribers rose sharply in that year’s data.)
While there was a net increase of trans subscribers in the years that followed, this trajectory was extremely inconsistent. In 2019-20, the net increase was 166; in 2020-21, it was 168; in 2021-22, it was 166; in 2022-23, it was 170; in 2023-24, it was 146; and in 2024-25, it was 126.
The low number of transgender people who subscribe to the provident fund could be an indicator of their limited access to formal jobs.
However, workforce exclusion alone may not be the only reason behind the low transgender enrollment reflected in the data, said Kanmani Ray, a trans rights activist and financial lawyer. Even when trans people are employed within the formal workforce and have subscribed to a provident fund, their official identification could simply reflect male or female, without noting whether they are trans or cis, Kanmani pointed out. “Furthermore, a lot of people are closeted, they identify by their dead name and gender at their places of work in order to retain employment,” she added.
Those who are transitioning could also face changes in their employment status because of workplace discrimination against their gender identities. This could, in turn, affect their provident fund. Take the case of Yash, a 37-year-old trans man who worked as a restaurant host at a hotel chain in Pune. He had subscribed to a provident fund before he transitioned. However, when he started taking hormones in early 2025 and appeared more visibly masculine, his bosses at the hotel said that he could either wash dishes in the kitchen or quit. He stopped working there later that year. Yash now helps his mother run a Vada Pav stall. Since he is no longer formally employed, he cannot add any money to his provident fund, for which he is still identified as a woman.
“Of course it was nice to have a proper job and an EPF. It’s a safety net. I don’t think I’ll be able to have that again because it’s not like I have a fancy degree, and at my level, nobody wants to employ trans people,” Yash told queerbeat. “Any place that asks for an ID, you automatically know you’re not going to get that job,” he added. Although Yash’s PAN card and voter identity cards still identify him as female, he was able to update his gender on his Aadhaar card to transgender, earlier in 2026. No matter which identity card he uses, he encounters prejudice from potential employers, he said.
In January 2026, the government amended the rules around the state-owned provident fund so that trans people could update their name and gender if they had a Transgender identity card, which is issued under the 2020 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Rules. Yash does not have one. He had applied for one in December 2025, just before the new Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act was passed. But the district officials responsible for issuing this card are now unsure about whether the amendments will lead to changes in existing regulations, Yash said.
The data points to a two-fold problem in trans persons’ access to financial provisions, said Kanmani. One, the data may not accurately reflect how many trans persons subscribe to the provident fund. Two, the government needs to undertake more measures to incentivise and facilitate the enrollments of trans persons to such schemes. “But the basic point that this data brings up, that of low employability of trans folks in the formal sector, definitely holds true,” she added.