Pension sanction process and timeline

How a central government pension is sanctioned: the case starts a year before retirement, runs through Bhavishya, and the PPO is ready before retirement.

Updated 22 July 2026 · Reviewed by Salary-Calculator.in

The pension sanction process is the sequence of steps by which the entitlement of a retiring central government employee is turned into a Pension Payment Order and a monthly pension, and its timeline is the schedule of due dates the CCS (Pension) Rules, 2021 set for each step. The case does not begin at retirement; it begins a year before, when the Head of Office starts the pension papers, and it is designed so that the Pension Payment Order is ready before the date of retirement and the first pension is paid from the day following. The whole process is now run online through the Bhavishya portal, which has been the mandatory system for central civil cases since 1 January 2017.

The timeline matters because a pension that is not sanctioned in time leaves a retiree without income at exactly the moment their salary stops. To prevent that, the rules place a specific due date on each actor, the Head of Office, the Pay and Accounts Officer, the Central Pension Accounting Office, and the disbursing bank, working back from the date of retirement, and they provide a fallback, the provisional pension , for the cases that still slip. Understanding the process is useful to a retiring employee, who has one main duty of their own, to submit the pension application on time, and who otherwise needs to know what should be happening and by when.

This article sets out the full timeline from the verification of qualifying service years before retirement to the first pension payment, the role of each actor, the forms and the single Form 6-A introduced in 2024, the Bhavishya workflow, the Central Pension Accounting Office and the bank, the no-demand and last-pay certificates and the assessment of dues, the provisional and anticipatory pension that bridge a delay, the interest payable on a delayed payment, and the sanction of a family pension on a death case. Every rule number and time-marker is that of the CCS (Pension) Rules, 2021 and the Department of Pension and Pensioners’ Welfare instructions.

The timeline at a glance

The pension case is worked backwards from the date of retirement, with each stage due a set number of months before. The table sets out the sequence for a normal superannuation case.

Time before retirement	Action	Actor	Rule
On 18 years of service, and again 5 years before	Verify and determine qualifying service; intimate the employee	Head of Office with the Accounts Officer	Rule 30
Monthly, by the 15th	List everyone retiring within the next 15 months	Head of Department	Rule 55
1 year before	Begin preparing the pension case	Head of Office	Rule 56
8 months before	Complete the first stage: qualifying service, emoluments, average emoluments; assess dues	Head of Office	Rules 57, 68
6 months before	Submit the pension application (Form 6-A, online)	Retiring employee	Rule 57
4 months before	Forward the completed case to the Pay and Accounts Officer	Head of Office	Rule 60
2 months before	Authorise the pension and gratuity; issue the Pension Payment Order; send to the Central Pension Accounting Office	Pay and Accounts Officer	Rule 63
Before the retirement date	Examine the order; issue the Special Seal Authority to the bank	Central Pension Accounting Office	CPAO scheme
Day following retirement	Credit the first month’s pension	Disbursing bank	Rule 63

Where any stage slips and the Pension Payment Order is not ready by the date of retirement, a provisional pension is sanctioned under Rule 62. The rest of this article works through each stage.

Long before retirement: verifying qualifying service

The groundwork is laid years before retirement. Under Rule 30 of the CCS (Pension) Rules, 2021, the qualifying service of a government servant is verified and determined by the Head of Office, in consultation with the Accounts Officer, on the employee’s completion of 18 years of service and again when five years of service remain before retirement, and the determination is communicated to the employee. The purpose is to catch and settle any dispute about a break in service, a spell on deputation, or a period whose reckoning is uncertain, while the records and the witnesses still exist, rather than at retirement when it is too late.

This early verification is the single most important protection against a delayed pension, because most delays trace to an unresolved question about service, and Rule 30 forces those questions to be answered years in advance. The Department of Pension and Pensioners’ Welfare has reinforced it with instructions requiring periodic verification and monitoring at a senior level, so that the qualifying service is settled and communicated well before the pension case proper begins. An employee who receives the Rule 30 intimation should check it against their own record, because the qualifying service it records will drive the pension amount.

One year before: the case begins

Two rules set the case in motion in the final year. Under Rule 55, every Head of Department prepares, by the fifteenth of each month, a list of all government servants due to retire within the next 15 months, so that no retirement is missed. Then, under Rule 56, the Head of Office undertakes the work of preparing the pension case one year before the date of retirement, or on the date the employee proceeds on leave preparatory to retirement, whichever is earlier. The one-year lead is the frame within which every later due date sits.

The reduction to a one-year lead is itself a feature of the 2021 Rules. Under the earlier 1972 Rules the preparatory work began two years before retirement; the 2021 Rules compressed it to one year, on the basis that the digital Bhavishya workflow makes the shorter window workable. So a retiring employee should expect the pension case to open about a year before their retirement date, and should be ready to play their part, the submission of the application, when it is called for a few months later.

Eight months before: the first stage and the dues

By eight months before retirement, under Rule 57, the Head of Office completes the first stage of the case: the qualifying service is finalised, the emoluments and the average emoluments of the last ten months are determined, and the resulting entitlement is intimated to the employee. In parallel, under Rule 68, the government dues recoverable from the employee, an outstanding advance, a licence fee for government accommodation, or another assessed due, are worked out, because those dues may be adjusted against the retirement gratuity.

This stage fixes the numbers on which the pension and the gratuity will be computed, so it is where a retiring employee should confirm that the emoluments and the qualifying service are right. The assessment of dues at this point, rather than at retirement, is deliberate: it lets the employee clear a due in time, and it confines any adjustment against the gratuity to dues that have been properly assessed, so the gratuity is not held up indefinitely for an unquantified claim. The death gratuity and the retirement gratuity are computed on the same emoluments settled here.

Six months before: the employee’s application

The retiring employee has one principal duty in the process, and it falls due about six months before retirement: to submit the pension application. Since 16 November 2024, this is done through a single pension application, Form 6-A, filed online through the Bhavishya portal or the e-HRMS 2.0 system. Form 6-A replaced a set of separate forms, the old Form 6 application, the nomination, and the undertakings, merging them into one online form, so the employee now completes a single application rather than several paper forms.

The application carries the particulars the sanction needs: the employee’s details, the family details for the family pension , the nomination for the gratuity, the bank account for the pension, and the options, such as commutation. Submitting it on time is the one step within the employee’s control that most affects whether the pension is ready by retirement, because the Head of Office cannot forward the case to the accounts office until the application is in. An employee who delays the application is the one case where the rules do not pay interest for a resulting delay, so the six-month submission is worth meeting.

Four months before: forwarding to the accounts office

Under Rule 60, the Head of Office forwards the completed pension case to the Pay and Accounts Officer not later than four months before the date of retirement. The case includes the Head of Office’s own calculation and the covering documents, the service book, and the employee’s application, so that the accounts office has everything it needs to check the entitlement and authorise the pension. The Pay and Accounts Office is the paying authority, distinct from the Head of Office, and its check is the independent verification of the case.

The four-month forwarding date is the hinge of the timeline: it leaves the accounts office two months to do its work before the Pension Payment Order is due, and it is the point at which the case passes out of the retiring employee’s own department. A retiring employee tracking their case on Bhavishya should see it reach the accounts office by this point; a case still sitting with the Head of Office four months before retirement is behind schedule.

Two months before: the Pension Payment Order

Under Rule 63, the Pay and Accounts Officer applies its checks, authorises the pension and the gratuity, and issues the Pension Payment Order, the PPO, about two months before the date of retirement, and forwards it to the Central Pension Accounting Office. For a non-superannuation case, such as a voluntary retirement , the corresponding period is 45 days. The two-month lead is set so that the PPO reaches the disbursing bank and is ready before the retirement date, and the intent throughout is that the pension is payable from the day following the date of retirement without a gap.

The PPO is the operative authority for the pension, and it is now issued as an electronic PPO through Bhavishya, with a copy available to the pensioner, including through DigiLocker. The same order authorises the family pension in favour of the spouse, so that on the pensioner’s later death the family pension can begin without a fresh sanction, on the strength of the PPO and the death certificate. The PPO number stays with the pensioner for life and is the reference for every later action, including a revision of pension at a pay commission.

The Central Pension Accounting Office and the bank

Once the Pay and Accounts Officer issues the PPO, it does not go straight to the bank. It goes first to the Central Pension Accounting Office , the office under the Controller General of Accounts that administers the payment of central civil pensions. The Central Pension Accounting Office examines the PPO and issues a Special Seal Authority to the Centralised Pension Processing Centre of the pensioner’s authorised bank, which is the instrument on which the bank pays. The bank’s processing centre then credits the pension to the pensioner’s account, the first month from the day following retirement.

This three-stage chain, the Pay and Accounts Officer as the paying authority, the Central Pension Accounting Office as the central authority, and the bank as the disburser, is specific to central civil pensioners; the Railways, the Department of Posts, and the Defence services have their own parallel channels. For the pensioners of the Department of Telecommunications , the SAMPANN system runs the sanction and payment end to end without the bank intermediary. For the central civil pensioner, though, the Central Pension Accounting Office is the office that turns the Pay and Accounts Officer’s PPO into an authority the bank can pay against.

The certificates and the dues

Two certificates and an assessment of dues sit within the process. The Last Pay Certificate, issued by the drawing and disbursing officer, records the pay the employee last drew and any recoveries outstanding, and the pension office needs it to finalise the case; the last pay certificate is a routine but essential document. The No Demand Certificate, from the Directorate of Estates, confirms that no licence fee or damage is outstanding for government accommodation, and the retirement gratuity may be withheld pending it; where the employee never held government accommodation, the Head of Office can itself issue the no demand certificate on the employee’s declaration.

The assessment of government dues under Rule 68 is what allows the gratuity to be adjusted for an outstanding amount, but only for dues that have been properly assessed. This is an important protection: the gratuity cannot be held indefinitely against an unquantified or disputed claim, only against an assessed due, and the pension itself is never withheld for dues. So a retiring employee with a small outstanding advance sees it adjusted from the gratuity, while the pension flows unaffected. The interplay of the certificates, the dues, and the gratuity is where a case most often stalls, which is why the rules push the dues assessment back to eight months before retirement.

When the timeline slips: provisional and anticipatory pension

Despite the schedule, a case can miss the retirement date, most often because a question of service or a due is unresolved. For that, Rule 62 provides the provisional pension : where the regular PPO is delayed, the Head of Office sanctions a provisional pension, and the gratuity where it can be released, so the retiree draws an income from retirement. The provisional pension runs for up to six months, by which time the final pension must be authorised; if it is not, the accounts office treats the provisional pension as final and issues the PPO, and in exceptional cases the period can be extended to a year. The pension is never discontinued.

Where the delay is not a departmental one but a proceeding, a departmental inquiry or a court case pending at retirement, the pension is provisional for a different reason, and the final pension and gratuity wait until the proceeding concludes. The anticipatory pension is the related device that releases an income where the final figure cannot yet be settled. In every case the design is the same: the retiree is not left without a pension while the sanction is completed, and the fallback is built into the timeline rather than being an exception to it.

Interest on a delayed payment

The timeline is backed by a sanction for failing it. Under Rule 65, where the sanction or authorisation of the pension, the family pension, or the gratuity, including the provisional payment, is delayed and the delay is clearly attributable to administrative reasons or a lapse, interest is payable on the arrears at the rate and in the manner applicable to the General Provident Fund. The interest on delayed pension is sanctioned at a senior level, and the responsibility for the lapse is fixed on the defaulting official, so the interest is not a cost the system absorbs quietly but one that is traced to its cause.

There is one exception that returns to the employee’s own duty: no interest is payable where the delay was due to the employee’s own failure to follow the procedure, such as a late or incomplete application. This is the counterpart of the six-month submission date, and it is why a retiring employee should meet their own step even though the rest of the timeline is the administration’s responsibility. The interest rule gives the timeline teeth, turning the due dates from targets into obligations whose breach has a cost.

Family pension and death cases

The timeline described so far is for a retirement on superannuation. Where a government servant dies in service, the sanction runs on a compressed and parallel track: the Head of Office initiates the family pension and the death gratuity together, on the family’s application, without the year-long lead, because the death is unforeseen. The aim is the same, to get an income to the family quickly, and a provisional family pension can be sanctioned to bridge the interval while the final family pension is settled.

For a death after retirement, the family pension is already authorised in the pensioner’s own PPO, so the family pension begins on the strength of the death certificate and the PPO, without a fresh sanction, and the disbursing bank starts it directly. This is why the co-authorisation of the family pension in the PPO at the sanction stage matters: it removes the need for a family, at the worst moment, to run the sanction process afresh. The death case is the clearest illustration of why the process is built to have the authority in place before it is needed.

What the retiring employee should do

Most of the timeline is the administration’s responsibility, but the employee has a few points at which to act, and meeting them is what keeps the case on schedule. When the Rule 30 intimation of qualifying service arrives, on 18 years of service and again five years before retirement, the employee should check the service recorded against their own record and raise any discrepancy at once, while it can still be settled. As the one-year mark approaches, the employee should confirm the case has been opened on Bhavishya, and should keep the documents the application needs ready: the family details, the nomination for the gratuity, the bank account, and the commutation option.

The one hard deadline that is the employee’s own is the pension application, the single Form 6-A, due about six months before retirement and filed online. Submitting it complete and on time is the step that most affects whether the pension is ready by the retirement date, and it is the one case where a resulting delay carries no interest. After that, the employee can track the case through the accounts office at four months and the Pension Payment Order at two months on Bhavishya, and raise a grievance through the Department of Pension and Pensioners’ Welfare portal if a stage is overdue. Doing these few things turns the retiree from a bystander into a check on their own timeline.

The process and the 8th Central Pay Commission

The pension sanction process and its timeline are set by the CCS (Pension) Rules, 2021 and run on the Bhavishya and Central Pension Accounting Office machinery, none of which is tied to a pay commission. A pay commission changes the amount of a pension, through the pay it is computed on and the revision of pension of existing pensioners, but it does not change the process by which a pension is sanctioned or the timeline it follows. So the 8th Central Pay Commission , constituted in November 2025, will change what a pension is worth, not how it is sanctioned.

A retiring employee should therefore treat the process and its due dates as stable across pay commissions: the case begins a year before, the application is due six months before, the PPO issues about two months before, and the pension is payable from the day following retirement, whatever the pension amount the current pay rules produce. Any change to the process itself would come through an amendment to the CCS (Pension) Rules or a Department of Pension and Pensioners’ Welfare instruction, not through a pay commission.

In force today

The pension case begins one year before retirement (Rule 56), after qualifying service is verified on 18 years of service and 5 years before retirement (Rule 30). The Head of Office completes the first stage 8 months before and assesses dues (Rules 57, 68); the employee submits the single Form 6-A online 6 months before; the Head of Office forwards the case to the Pay and Accounts Officer 4 months before (Rule 60); the Pay and Accounts Officer issues the PPO about 2 months before (Rule 63), which the Central Pension Accounting Office authorises to the bank. The first pension is paid from the day following retirement. If delayed, a provisional pension is sanctioned for up to 6 months (Rule 62), and interest at the GPF rate is payable for an administrative delay (Rule 65). The process runs on Bhavishya, mandatory for central civil cases since 1 January 2017.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

When does the pension sanction process start?

The formal preparation of the pension case begins one year before the date of retirement, when the Head of Office starts the pension papers under Rule 56 of the CCS (Pension) Rules, 2021. Before that, the qualifying service is verified on completion of 18 years of service and again when five years remain, and the Head of Department keeps a monthly list of everyone retiring within the next 15 months, so the case is on the radar well ahead of the one-year mark.

When is the Pension Payment Order issued?

The Pay and Accounts Officer issues the Pension Payment Order about two months before the date of retirement, under Rule 63, after the Head of Office has forwarded the completed case four months before retirement. It is then sent to the Central Pension Accounting Office and on to the pensioner’s bank, so that the first month’s pension is paid from the day following the date of retirement.

What form does a retiring employee submit for pension?

Since 16 November 2024, a retiring central government employee submits a single pension application, Form 6-A, online through the Bhavishya portal or e-HRMS 2.0. Form 6-A replaced the earlier separate forms, including the old Form 6 application and the nomination and undertaking forms, merging them into one online form.

What happens if the pension is not ready by the retirement date?

Where the regular Pension Payment Order is delayed, the Head of Office sanctions a provisional pension under Rule 62, so the retiree is not left without income. The provisional pension runs for up to six months, by which time the final pension must be authorised; if it is not, the provisional pension is treated as final. The retirement gratuity may be withheld pending clearance of dues, but the pension is never stopped.

Is interest paid if the pension is delayed?

Yes, where the delay in sanctioning or authorising the pension, family pension, or gratuity is attributable to administrative reasons or lapses, interest is payable on the arrears at the rate applicable to the General Provident Fund, under Rule 65 of the CCS (Pension) Rules, 2021. No interest is payable where the delay was due to the employee’s own failure to follow the procedure, and the responsibility for a lapse is fixed on the defaulting official.

What is Bhavishya?

Bhavishya is the online pension sanction and tracking system operated by the Department of Pension and Pensioners’ Welfare, mandatory for processing central civil retirement cases since 1 January 2017. It carries the case through every stage, from the initiation of the pension papers to the issue of the electronic Pension Payment Order, and lets the retiring employee track progress and receive alerts at each step.

External references

References

Central Civil Services (Pension) Rules, 2021, Rule 30 (verification of qualifying service on completion of 18 years of service and 5 years before retirement) and Rule 55 (monthly list of employees retiring within 15 months).
Central Civil Services (Pension) Rules, 2021, Rule 56 (preparation of the pension case one year before retirement), Rule 57 (completion of the first stage and intimation), and Rule 60 (forwarding the case to the Pay and Accounts Officer four months before retirement).
Central Civil Services (Pension) Rules, 2021, Rule 63 (authorisation and issue of the Pension Payment Order about two months before retirement) and Rule 68 (assessment and recovery of government dues from the gratuity).
Central Civil Services (Pension) Rules, 2021, Rule 62 (provisional pension for up to six months where the regular sanction is delayed) and Rule 65 (interest at the General Provident Fund rate on payments delayed by administrative reasons).
Department of Pension and Pensioners’ Welfare Office Memorandum dated 29 November 2016, making Bhavishya mandatory for processing central civil pension cases with effect from 1 January 2017, and subsequent instructions introducing the single pension application Form 6-A with effect from 16 November 2024.
Central Pension Accounting Office scheme for the authorisation of central civil pensions through a Special Seal Authority to the Centralised Pension Processing Centre of the authorised bank.
Ministry of Finance, Department of Expenditure, Resolution F. No. 01-01/2025-E.III(A), dated 3 November 2025, constituting the 8th Central Pay Commission.