Your Indian pension years can count towards the Age Pension but only the ones after 2016

There is an agreement between Australia and India that lets your Indian working years count towards the Australian Age Pension. It has been in force for more than ten years. The pension side of it was covered by two SBS language services in January 2016 and by a Grant Thornton client alert in April 2016, and has had almost no substantive Australian coverage since.

It is real, it is worth money, and almost nobody it could help knows it exists.

It is also far narrower than the way it is usually described, in two ways that decide most cases. It counts only one specific Indian scheme, not your provident fund balance. And it counts only the years since 1 January 2016.

What the agreement is

The instrument is the Agreement between the Republic of India and Australia on Social Security. It was signed on 18 November 2014 and entered into force on 1 January 2016. In Australian law it sits as Schedule 31 to the Social Security (International Agreements) Act 1999.

It does two separate jobs, and confusing them is the most common error made about it.

The first job is the one governments talked about at the time. It stops employees seconded between the two countries paying compulsory retirement contributions twice. That side of the agreement is administered by the Commissioner of Taxation, and the then Assistant Treasurer Kelly O’Dwyer described the benefit in 2016 as temporarily seconded workers and their employers only having to contribute to their home country’s system rather than both.

The second job is the one this article is about. Article 2 of the agreement lists, on the Australian side, the law “in so far as the law provides for, applies to or affects age pension”. On the Indian side it lists old-age and survivors’ pension for employed persons and the permanent total disability pension.

So the coverage is exactly this. On the Australian side, the Age Pension and nothing else. Not the Disability Support Pension, not Carer Payment, not JobSeeker. The Department of Social Services guide states it plainly: the Australian benefit covered is age pension.

The residence rule the agreement gets you past

To qualify for the Australian Age Pension you must have been an Australian resident continuously for at least ten years, or for two or more periods totalling more than ten years with at least one of those periods lasting five years or more.

For a migrant who arrived in their forties or fifties, that ten years is the wall. Reach pension age with nine years of residence and you get nothing, no matter how much tax you paid in those nine years.

Article 13 of the agreement is what lets an Indian period be used to climb it. The operative wording is that a period of insurance completed under Indian legislation “shall be deemed to be a period in which that person was an Australian resident only for the purposes of meeting any minimum qualifying periods”.

Read the last clause carefully. The Indian period counts towards the ten years. It does not count towards the rate you are paid. Services Australia says customers in Australia under the agreement are generally paid a direct deduction rate, while a proportional rate based on actual Australian working life residence applies to customers outside Australia.

The three conditions, and where most people fail

Article 13 requires three things at once.

You must have less Australian residence than the Age Pension requires. You must have at least the minimum Australian working life residence, which is twelve months, of which at least six must be continuous. And you must have a period of insurance in the Employees’ Pension Scheme, 1995 of India.

That third condition is where the popular version of this story falls apart.

The Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation runs two different things. The provident fund is the accumulation account, the lump sum most people mean when they say PF. The Employees’ Pension Scheme 1995, usually written EPS-95, is the pension scheme sitting alongside it. The agreement counts EPS-95 periods. It does not count provident fund contributions.

And Article 13 adds four words that cut deeper than anything else in the document. The Indian insurance period must have “accrued after the date of commencement of this Agreement”. Services Australia says the same thing in plainer language: only periods of insurance in India after 1 January 2016 may be used.

As at the end of August 2026, that means the maximum Indian period anyone can bring across is about ten years and eight months. Twenty-five years in an Indian job before 2016 counts for nothing.

The Australian working life residence must also have accrued on or after 16 November 1995, and before you reach the retirement age specified in the Indian scheme, which both Services Australia and the Department of Social Services render as 58.

Claiming from inside Australia and from outside

One distinction is worth knowing, though it does not lower the threshold.

People claiming from inside Australia who use Indian periods after 1 January 2016 need at least twelve months of Australian working life residence, of which six months must be continuous, accrued between 16 November 1995 and age 58. People claiming from outside Australia need the same twelve months; the difference is that their period runs to Age Pension age rather than 58.

It works in the other direction too

For an Australian citizen who worked in India and is not eligible for an Indian pension, the practical route back to the money is reclaiming contributions through the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation using its Forms 19 and 10C.

The mismatch nobody has written about

Put the demography against the eligibility rule and the problem becomes obvious.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported in April 2026 that people born in India numbered 971,020, making them the largest overseas-born group in Australia for the first time on record, just ahead of England on 970,950. The India-born population grew by 522,000 in the decade to 2025, the largest increase of any birthplace.

But almost all India-born people now nearing Age Pension age arrived long before 2016. Their Indian EPS-95 service, if they had any, is overwhelmingly pre-commencement, and therefore counts for nothing.

The cohort this agreement actually helps is the one that arrived after 1 January 2016 with Indian pension scheme service behind them, and they are decades away from claiming anything. The agreement will do most of its work in the 2040s and 2050s.

That is not an argument against it. It is an argument for telling people about it now, while they can still make decisions, such as whether to maintain an EPS-95 record or how to document Indian employment, that will matter to them thirty years from now.

How many people have used it

Services Australia’s freedom of information release on the India agreement contains procedural guidance and no statistics. The Department of Social Services demographic data and payment trend reports carry no breakdown by international agreement or agreement country. Senate estimates and both agencies’ disclosure logs turn up nothing.

The contrast with the other half of the agreement is instructive. When it commenced, the government quantified the savings to Australian business at around $10 million a year. It has never quantified, or been asked to quantify, what the pension side has delivered to individuals.

What was said at the time, and what has been said since

Christian Porter, then Minister for Social Services, framed the agreement on commencement as giving people more freedom to move between Australia and India knowing their pension rights would be recognised and protected.

Thomas Isbell, head of global mobility services at Grant Thornton Australia, wrote in April 2016 that former Australian residents living in India would be able to claim the Australian Age Pension without having to return to Australia.

SBS Punjabi published a ten point explainer on 14 January 2016 by Shamsher Kainth, which correctly stated that Indian insurance periods must be accrued after 1 January 2016. SBS Hindi covered it on 11 January 2016.

And then nothing. Ten years, a population approaching a million, and no substantive Australian coverage of the pension side of the agreement since mid-2016.

What to check if this might apply to you

If you arrived in Australia after 1 January 2016 and worked in India before coming, find out whether you were a member of the Employees’ Pension Scheme 1995 rather than only the provident fund. Your Universal Account Number record will show it. Keep the documentation.

If you arrived before 2016, your Indian service almost certainly does not help you meet the residence test, and you should plan on the ten-year Australian rule alone.

If you are close to pension age and short of ten years, ask Services Australia’s international services team specifically about the India agreement and Article 13 totalisation, by name.

And if you are a temporary or recent arrival deciding whether to keep an Indian pension record alive, understand that from 2016 those years now have a second value they never had before. That is the part worth acting on, and the part that has gone unreported for a decade.