Most NRIs build retirement savings in at least two countries. The first job in India leaves an EPF balance and perhaps an EPS entitlement, sometimes a PPF or NPS account opened before the move. Life abroad adds a workplace pension, a state pension record and often a second or third pot from changing jobs or countries. Each runs on its own rules: a different age to draw it, a different tax treatment in each country, a different currency.
The result is that few people know what they hold in total, or which pension opens first. The tracker below puts them in one list, converts them into one currency at today’s rates, works out from your birth year when each can usually be drawn, and shows the pots at that point at a growth rate you choose. It also lists pensions that are often left behind and the points that usually apply to each one where you live.
Keeping Indian pensions in order from abroad
An Indian EPF account doesn’t close when you leave India. It usually earns interest until you are 58, though interest for years after your last Indian job is usually taxable, and withdrawing needs current KYC on your UAN and a linked Indian bank account, which in practice means an NRO account. A PPF opened while resident can usually run to maturity but can’t be extended once you are non-resident, and NPS remains open to NRIs and OCI cardholders. If you hold Indian pensions while living in the US, they usually go on your FBAR and Form 8938; the FBAR and FATCA checker works through that.
Moving back to India with pensions abroad
Set the year you plan to move back and the tracker lists what usually happens to each pension held outside India. For a UK pension the answer is usually to leave it in the UK. India has no scheme on HMRC’s list of recognised overseas pension schemes, so moving a UK pension into EPF or NPS is usually taxed as an unauthorised payment, and a transfer to a QROPS in a third country usually carries a 25% charge when you don’t live there. Under the India–UK tax treaty a private pension paid to an Indian resident is usually taxed in India only, while the UK State Pension paid in India is frozen at the rate when you leave.
A 401(k) or IRA can usually stay in the US, and India lets residents defer tax on growth in retirement accounts in the US, UK and Canada until they withdraw. The first years back may be RNOR years, when income received abroad usually stays outside Indian tax; the RNOR tracker works out how many you may have, and our guide to moving back to India covers the rest of the move.
What the tracker leaves out
It does not work out whether your pensions are enough to retire on, which depends on what you will spend, in which currency, and for how long. The NRI pension calculator estimates yearly income across the UK, US and India, and the retire in India planner checks a corpus against Indian living costs. Neither the tracker nor those tools say what to do with a pension: for that, speak to an adviser regulated in the country where it is held.
