Family Pension Entitlement Under Unified Pension Scheme Clarified by DoPPW

The Department of Pension and Pensioners’ Welfare (DoPPW) has issued a detailed clarification on family pension entitlements for Central Government employees who have opted for the Unified Pension Scheme (UPS) under the National Pension System (NPS). The Office Memorandum No. 57/03/2022-P&PW(B)/8361(7) outlines the benefits available to the family members in the event of the death of such employees.

Applicability of the Unified Pension Scheme Rules

The DoPPW has notified two key rule sets:

Central Civil Services (Implementation of Unified Pension Scheme under NPS) Rules, 2025, and
Central Civil Services (Payment of Gratuity under NPS) Rules, 2021.

These rules govern the service-related and gratuity entitlements of employees who have opted for UPS under NPS.

Entitlement on Death of a Subscriber

As per Rule 19 of the UPS Implementation Rules 2025:

If a subscriber dies after opting (or by default covered) under the CCS (Pension) Rules 2021 or CCS (Extraordinary Pension) Rules 2023, the Head of Office will process benefits in accordance with those rules.
In cases where death is attributable to government service, benefits will be disbursed under the Extraordinary Pension Rules 2023, provided all eligibility conditions are met.

When death benefits are payable under the Pension Rules or Extraordinary Pension Rules, the government’s contribution and its returns in the subscriber’s UPS corpus will be credited back to the Government account.
The remaining corpus will be paid in lump sum to the legally wedded spouse of the subscriber. If there is no spouse, it will go to the legal heir(s).

Death Under Unified Pension Scheme

If the deceased employee was covered under the Unified Pension Scheme at the time of death, benefits will be processed as per the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (Operationalisation of Unified Pension Scheme under NPS) Regulations, 2025.

Eligibility for Death Gratuity

The DoPPW has also confirmed that in all such cases, the family of the deceased employee will be eligible for death gratuity under Rule 22 of the CCS (Payment of Gratuity under NPS) Rules, 2021.
The rates of death gratuity are as follows:

S.No.	Length of Qualifying Service	Rate of Death Gratuity
(i)	Less than 1 year	Two times of emoluments
(ii)	1 year or more but less than 5 years	Six times of emoluments
(iii)	5 years or more but less than 11 years	Twelve times of emoluments
(iv)	11 years or more but less than 20 years	Twenty times of emoluments
(v)	20 years or more	Half of emoluments for every completed six-monthly period of qualifying service, subject to a maximum of 33 times of emoluments