APY Calculator. Your guaranteed pension.

Any Indian citizen aged 18 to 40 with a savings bank account or post office savings account can join the Atal Pension Yojana. Aadhaar and a mobile number are needed, and the account is opened through your bank or post office. Because contributions run until age 60, the entry window closes at 40, giving every subscriber at least 20 years of paying in. One important change matters: from 1 October 2022, anyone who is or has ever been an income-tax payer is no longer allowed to open a new APY account. Existing subscribers who later start paying tax keep their accounts, but new taxpayer entrants are barred.

APY is a defined-benefit scheme, so the pension is fixed in advance and not tied to market returns. Once you turn 60 you receive your chosen level of ₹1,000, ₹2,000, ₹3,000, ₹4,000 or ₹5,000 every month for life, guaranteed by the Government of India. When you die, the same monthly pension passes to your spouse for their lifetime. After both of you have died, the accumulated pension corpus is returned to your nominee. That indicative corpus rises with the pension level, from about ₹1.7 lakh for the ₹1,000 pension up to ₹8.5 lakh for the ₹5,000 pension.

Yes. Atal Pension Yojana contributions qualify for a deduction under Section 80CCD(1B) of the Income Tax Act, the same additional ₹50,000 bucket used for NPS Tier I. This sits on top of the ₹1.5 lakh combined ceiling under Section 80C and 80CCD(1), so an APY subscriber can claim up to ₹50,000 of APY contributions here. In practice APY instalments are small, so most people will not fill the whole ₹50,000 from APY alone. The deduction is available only under the old tax regime. Remember too that from October 2022 income-tax payers can no longer join, which limits who this benefits.

If your bank account lacks enough balance on the due date, the instalment is treated as missed and a small overdue charge is added, roughly ₹1 for every ₹100 or part thereof per missed month, scaled to the instalment size. If default continues, the account is frozen after six months, deactivated after twelve months, and closed after twenty-four months, with the balance returned to you. The practical rule is to keep the auto-debit account funded. You can also change your contribution frequency, or step the pension level up or down once a year, to keep the account affordable rather than letting it lapse.

Both are PFRDA-run retirement products, but they work very differently. APY is defined-benefit: you pick a fixed monthly pension of ₹1,000 to ₹5,000, the small contribution needed is read from a government table by your entry age, and the pension is guaranteed by the Government of India regardless of markets. NPS is defined-contribution: you invest as much as you like into market-linked equity and debt funds, the corpus and eventual pension vary with returns, and at least 40% must buy an annuity at 60. APY suits low and moderate earners wanting a guaranteed floor; NPS suits those chasing a larger, market-driven corpus.