Pre-2016 Pensioners: Checking Revision Through the Concordance Tables

How your pension was revised from 1 January 2016

The 7th Pay Commission gave pre-2016 pensioners two possible routes to a new pension, and the government accepted both. The Department of Pension and Pensioners' Welfare (DoPPW) issued its first order on 4 August 2016. Under that order, the basic pension you were drawing on 31 December 2015 was multiplied by 2.57, subject to a new minimum of Rs 9,000 a month. Banks applied this almost automatically, and most pensioners saw their pension rise within a few months.

The second route needed more work. A committee examined whether the government could rebuild each pensioner's pay through every pay commission since retirement and land it in the new pay matrix. It reported in December 2016 that this could be done. DoPPW then issued the OM of 12 May 2017, which said the pay at retirement would be fixed notionally at each intervening pay commission and finally in the 7th CPC matrix, with half of that notional pay as revised pension. The pensioner gets whichever of the two figures is higher, from 1 January 2016.

To make this workable, DoPPW circulated ready-made concordance tables on 6 July 2017, and in August 2017 they were loaded into the Bhavishya software so offices could revise cases on screen. On 12 November 2020 DoPPW issued a consolidated order pulling together all these instructions. That consolidated OM is the most useful single document to keep beside you when you check your own case.

One point catches many people. The second route gives no arrears for any period before 1 January 2016. It corrects the base from that date, not your pension history before it.

What a concordance table pension figure actually means

A concordance table is a ready reckoner. For a given pre-revised pay scale (or pay band and grade pay) and a given stage of pay at retirement, it shows what your pay would have become after each later pay commission, ending with a level and cell in the 7th CPC pay matrix. The concordance table pension is simply 50 per cent of that final notional pay. For family pension it is 30 per cent.

The tables were built from the official fitment tables used when serving employees moved from the 4th to the 5th, the 5th to the 6th and the 6th to the 7th pay commission. In effect, the government asked: had this person stayed at the same stage in the same post, where would the pay have landed in 2016? That is why notional pay fixation pensioners often gain more than the flat 2.57 multiplier gave them, especially those who retired near the top of a scale.

The tables are numbered by scale. Some tables deal with special situations, for example Group D scales that were later upgraded and the grade pay of Rs 1800 given in place of old Group D scales. The DoPPW order itself says that if a table conflicts with the rules or instructions of an intervening pay commission, the rules prevail and pay must be fixed by them. So a table is a strong guide, not the last word.

In practice the revision also depends on the exact pre-revised pay you drew on your last day, including any increment that fell due and was granted before you retired. Get that one number right and the rest of the concordance table pension exercise becomes arithmetic.

Reading one line of a revised pension table

Checking your own revision in an evening

You do not need an accountant for a first check. Keep a pencil, your papers and the consolidated DoPPW order handy.

1. Pull out the last pay record

   Find the last pay slip, the last pay certificate or the pension papers your office prepared. Note the scale (or pay band and grade pay) and the basic pay on the last day. If you took an ACP or MACP upgradation, note the upgraded scale, because that is what counts.

2. Find your 2.57 figure

   Take the basic pension you drew on 31 December 2015, before commutation was deducted, and multiply by 2.57. Your bank passbook or the revision letter of 2016 will show this. This is the floor below which your pension cannot fall.

3. Locate the right table

   Use the table for your pre-revised scale. If you retired before 2006 or before 1986, read the special notes for those periods, because a different starting pay is used. If your scale was later upgraded or merged, check whether a separate table applies.

4. Read across to the 7th CPC cell

   Find the row matching your stage of pay and read across to the notional pay as on 1 January 2016. If your exact stage is not printed, the rule of the intervening commission decides where you sit; do not just pick the nearest row.

5. Halve it and compare

   Divide the notional pay by two for pension, or take 30 per cent for family pension. Compare this with the 2.57 figure. The higher one should be your basic pension from 1 January 2016.

6. Match it against what the bank pays

   Look at a recent pension slip or bank statement. Strip out dearness relief and any additional pension for age, and compare the basic. A gap of even a few hundred rupees a month adds up over ten years, and it also carries into the next revision.

If your figure and the bank's figure match, keep your working with your papers and stop there. If they do not, the next step is a written request to the office that sanctioned your pension, not an argument at the bank counter.

Retired before 2006, or even before 1986

Older pensioners have one extra layer. For anyone who retired or died before 1 January 1986, the tables start from the notional pay as on 1 January 1986 that was fixed under a DoPPW order of 10 February 1998. If your earlier revisions never used that notional 1986 pay, the 2016 figure built on top of it will also be wrong. Widows of pre-1986 pensioners are the people most likely to be caught by this, simply because nobody alive in the family has the old papers.

Pensioners who retired between 1996 and 2006 under the 5th CPC deal with scales that were later merged in the 6th CPC. The clearest example is the old Rs 6500-10500 scale. The first concordance tables for this scale treated it as carrying a grade pay of Rs 4200. After litigation and a policy decision, DoPPW issued OM No. 38/33/2012-P&PW(A) on 9 July 2019 treating Rs 4600 as the corresponding grade pay for these pensioners and revised the relevant tables. If you retired in that scale and your pension was revised before mid-2019, check whether the office redid your case under the revised tables.

Similar merger questions arise for some Group D scales and certain technical and ministerial scales. The question to ask in every such case is simple: which scale did I actually draw on my last day, and has the office used the table for that scale, or the table for the scale it was later merged into?

Where pre-2016 pension revision usually goes wrong

The first common error is the wrong scale. A pensioner who got an ACP or MACP upgradation shortly before retirement, or a promotion in the last year, is sometimes revised on the older, lower scale because the PPO was prepared from an outdated record. The fix needs the order granting the upgradation or promotion and the last pay slip after it.

The second error is the wrong stage. Offices sometimes take the minimum of the scale, or the pay of the last-but-one month, when an increment had already been granted. If you retired on 30 June and became entitled to an increment the next day, the separate issue of the notional increment may also affect your figure; that question is covered on our page on the 30 June retiree increment.

The third error is simply that the second route was never run. Some cases were left at the 2.57 figure because the office did not have the papers or did not process older files. A file that was never opened in Bhavishya will not correct itself.

There are also cases where the tables do not apply at all. The consolidated order keeps pensioners on compulsory retirement pension or compassionate allowance on the 2.57 method. Medical officers have their non-practising allowance factored in, and extraordinary (disability) pensions have their own method. If you fall in one of these groups, check the specific paragraph before raising a claim.

Advocate B.K. Singh's first tip: rebuild the last pay before you touch a table

Advocate B.K. Singh's practice in these files is to settle one figure before anything else: the basic pay on the last day of service. He asks the client to put three documents side by side, the last pay slip, the pension papers sent by the office, and the PPO. If the three do not show the same scale and the same basic pay, the revision error is almost always hiding there.

Where the pay slip is lost, the service book is the next source, and after that the pay bill register of the office for that month. Pensioners can ask the office for a copy of the relevant pages of the service book; the pensioners' portal and the office's own pension cell usually have the last pay certificate on file. Do not start comparing tables with a guessed figure, because the office will reject the claim as soon as it finds one rupee of difference.

Once the last pay is fixed, write it at the top of your representation in one line: scale, basic pay, date of retirement. Everything that follows is checking whether the office applied the right table to that line.

Widows and family pensioners: the same tables, a harder paper trail

Family pension for a pre-2016 death or retirement is revised on the same notional pay, at 30 per cent instead of 50. Where the family pension is still at the enhanced rate (for the limited period after a death that the rules allow), the enhanced percentage applies to the same notional figure. So the question for a widow is the same: what was the last pay of the deceased?

The difficulty is practical. Many widows were never shown the pension papers, and the deceased's office may have been closed, merged or moved. The chain to follow is: the PPO (which names the pension sanctioning authority and the accounts office), then that authority, then the accounts office that holds the pension file. For civil pensioners the Central Pension Accounting Office (CPAO) keeps a copy of every PPO it issues. Railway, postal, telecom and defence civilian pensions have their own accounts offices, and defence civilian pensions are now largely handled through SPARSH.

If no record of the last pay can be found at all, the representation should say so and ask the office to fix the pay from whatever record survives, such as the pay recorded in the original PPO or the 2006 revision letter. A family should not lose a revision because the department misplaced its own file.

Who actually revises it: the office, the accounts office and the bank

Revision under the concordance tables starts with the Head of Office or Head of Department of the office you retired from, or its successor office. That office works out the revised pension, usually in Bhavishya, and sends a revision authority to the Pay and Accounts Office. The PAO forwards it through CPAO to the bank's Centralised Pension Processing Centre, which then pays the new figure and any arrears.

This chain matters because each link can stall. A bank cannot change your basic pension without an authority. CPAO cannot issue an authority without the office's revision. When pensioners write only to the bank, the letter goes nowhere. Your representation should go to the pension sanctioning authority, with a copy to the PAO.

Railway pensioners route their revision through the railway accounts offices, and the railway pension rules have themselves been replaced in 2026, so cite the current railway instructions when you write. Postal pensioners go through the postal accounts offices, and telecom pensioners through the DoT controller of communication accounts. Defence civilians write to the office that sanctioned the pension and check the figure on SPARSH.

Advocate B.K. Singh's second tip: ask for the working sheet, not just the new figure

When a pensioner writes in, offices often reply with a single line: your pension has been revised correctly to Rs so much. Advocate B.K. Singh advises asking for the revision working sheet in the very first letter. That sheet shows the scale taken, the basic pay taken, the table used and the notional pay arrived at. Once you have it, the mistake usually becomes obvious within minutes.

If the office does not send the sheet within a month, an RTI application to the same office asking for a copy of the pension revision calculation and the table applied is a sensible second step. Your own pension calculation is your own information, so the personal information exemption should not stand in the way.

Keep every reply. If the dispute reaches the Tribunal, the working sheet becomes the most useful document in the file, because it shows exactly what the department did and why.

Time and cost at each stage

Papers to gather before you compare figures

• PPO and any revised PPOs or corrigenda issued after 2006 and 2016
• Last pay slip or last pay certificate, showing scale and basic pay on the last day
• Orders of ACP, MACP or promotion granted in the last years of service
• The 2016 revision letter or bank intimation showing the 2.57 figure
• A recent bank pension slip or passbook entries showing the current basic pension
• For pre-1986 retirees: any letter fixing notional pay as on 1 January 1986
• For family pensioners: death certificate, the deceased's PPO and your family pension authority
• Copies of earlier representations, replies and RTI answers, in date order
• The consolidated DoPPW order of 12 November 2020 and the table you relied on

How far back can arrears go?

A wrong pension is a continuing wrong: each month's short payment is a fresh grievance. That is why a pre-2016 pensioner can raise a revision claim in 2026 even though the revision itself was due in 2017. The harder question is how much of the arrears the Tribunal will order.

For years the department relied on Union of India v. Tarsem Singh (2008) to limit arrears to about three years before the claim was filed. In 2026 the Supreme Court took a different line in pension cases. In Maya Banerjee v. Union of India (September 2026) it ordered family pension in full from the date of death with interest, and in Union of India v. Sgt Girish Kumar it refused to cut disability pension arrears to three years. The law on this point is moving, so check the current position before you assume old arrears are lost. Our guide on the three-year limit on pension arrears explains the competing views.

None of this helps if you keep waiting. Even where arrears are not cut, a delay in raising the claim can affect interest and costs. Write now and keep proof of the date.

Where the case goes if the office will not correct it

First, give the department a fair chance. Send a reasoned representation to the pension sanctioning authority through the proper channel. Under Section 20 of the Administrative Tribunals Act, 1985, you ordinarily wait for that remedy, and if it is not decided within six months you may approach the Tribunal. Our page on exhausting remedies under Section 20 explains how to frame that letter so it counts.

Central civil pensioners, including railway, postal, telecom and defence civilian pensioners, go to the Central Administrative Tribunal. A retired person may ordinarily file before the CAT bench within whose area he or she now lives, which spares an elderly pensioner a trip to the city where he last served. Ask the registry of that bench if you have any doubt.

These tables are not for everyone. Retired soldiers, sailors and airmen take pension disputes to the Armed Forces Tribunal; retired CAPF personnel and PSU or bank pensioners usually need the High Court; and a state government pensioner's revision comes from the state's own pay commission orders. Our PPO correction and pension revision page explains how a Tribunal case on a wrong PPO is framed.

Why the 2016 figure matters again with the 8th Pay Commission

The 8th Central Pay Commission was set up on 3 November 2025, and its report is expected roughly eighteen months later. Whatever method it adopts for old pensioners, the starting point will be the basic pension you are drawing now. If your 7th CPC pension figure is understated, the error will be carried forward and multiplied.

That makes this a good time to put your 2016 base right. A corrected base also changes dearness relief, the additional pension that starts at age 80, and family pension later. We have set out what pensioners can reasonably expect in our guide to 8th CPC pension revision.

If you have recently received a fresh or corrected PPO, run through the points in twelve checks on a new PPO before you file it away. An error spotted now is far cheaper to fix than one found after the next revision.

What to do this week

Find the last pay slip and the PPO, and write your scale and basic pay on one sheet. Work out the 2.57 figure and the table figure. If the table figure is higher and the bank is paying less, send a short representation to the pension sanctioning authority by speed post, attach the papers and ask for the revision working sheet. Note the date; the six-month clock under Section 20 runs from there.

If the reply is a refusal or there is no reply, look at whether the error is in the scale, the stage or the table, because the Tribunal will want to see exactly that. Our central government pension page covers the wider set of pension disputes, and the pension revision service page sets out how a correction case proceeds.

If you would like your last pay slip, PPO and revision letter looked at by someone who reads such files every week, get in touch with Advocate B.K. Singh for advice on your papers or news of later pension orders.