Dormant account

An NPS account is meant to keep receiving contributions year after year. If it stops, the system has a specific way of marking it as inactive.

That status is called dormant. It is not an automatic account closure — but if nothing changes, the account can eventually close itself.

If a subscriber does not contribute at least Rs 1,000 per year to the NPS account, the account becomes dormant. A dormant account is closed when the account value falls to zero — the invested corpus, if any, is left to run down through charges rather than being frozen instantly.

Under the charge structure applicable from January 2026, this status is explicitly built into the fee rules: dormant accounts are not charged, so a dormant account does not have its remaining value eaten away by PoP charges, even though other charges may still apply.

Mr Thomas opens an All Citizen Model NPS account and contributes Rs 5,000 in his first year. He then changes jobs and forgets about the account entirely for two years, contributing nothing further — well short of the Rs 1,000-a-year minimum. His account becomes dormant.

Because the account is dormant, the January 2026 charge structure exempts it from PoP charges — the corpus is not steadily reduced by fees while inactive. If Mr Thomas never resumes contributions and the account's residual value eventually falls to zero through other applicable costs, the account is closed. Had he instead contributed even a token Rs 1,000 in year two, the account would have stayed active and avoided dormant status altogether.

Chapter 4 covers dormant accounts as part of NPS contribution mechanics, alongside D-Remit and the same-day investment cut-off rules. Expect a direct recall question on the Rs 1,000 annual minimum and the fact that a dormant account is closed only when its value falls to zero, not immediately on becoming dormant.

• Rs 1,000 a year is the minimum to avoid dormancy — it is not a minimum per contribution. A subscriber can meet it with a single Rs 1,000 top-up any time in the year.
• Dormancy is not the same as closure. A dormant account can still hold value and can still be reactivated by resuming contributions; it closes only when the value hits zero.
• Dormant accounts are exempt from PoP charges under the January 2026 structure — a fact that is easy to overlook when the general charge structure is being tested.