If you have a formal job in Nepal, you have probably seen “SSF” cut from your payslip. Around 11% of your basic salary, gone, every month.

Most people I talk to know that much and no more. They do not know where it goes. They do not know what they get back. They are not sure if they will ever see it again.

I am a contributor myself, through Trip Turbo. I check my balance on the portal and the app. So this guide is written the way I wish someone had written it for me — plain language, real numbers, and honest about the parts that are annoying.

One thing before we start. I am not a lawyer or a tax advisor. For anything involving your own claim or your own company’s compliance, confirm with SSF directly. Rules and limits do get revised.

What Is SSF, in One Paragraph

SSF stands for Social Security Fund. In Nepali, it is Samajik Suraksha Kosh. It is a government fund that collects money from you and your employer every month, and then pays you back later — as medical cover, accident cover, support for your family if you die, and a pension after you turn 60.

Think of it as forced savings with insurance built in. You do not get to opt out. If your employer is registered, you are in it.

Everything in this guide is about formal employment — you have an employer, a basic salary, and a payslip. SSF also runs separate schemes for self-employed and informal workers and for migrant workers, and those have different rates and rules. The 31% below does not apply to them.

The fund runs under the Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security. It was set up in 2011, but it only became serious in 2018 when the Contribution Based Social Security Act came into force.

The 31% — Where Your Money Actually Goes

This is the part almost nobody explains properly.

Every month, 31% of your basic salary goes into SSF. Not 31% of your total pay — 31% of basic only. That distinction matters, and I will come back to it.

The 31% splits like this:

Who pays How much What it is made of
You (employee) 11% of basic 10% to the pension pot, 1% social security tax
Your employer 20% of basic 10% pension, 8.33% gratuity, 1.67% for the insurance schemes
Total 31% of basic

So you personally pay 11%. Your employer pays the other 20% on top of your salary. That 20% is real money being spent on you, even though you never see it on your payslip.

Now, where does that 31% actually sit once it is collected? It goes into four schemes:

Scheme Share of the 31% What it covers
Old age (pension + gratuity) 28.33% Your retirement money
Accident and disability 1.40% Injuries, at work or outside
Medical, health and maternity 1.00% Treatment costs and childbirth
Dependent family protection 0.27% Your family if you die

Add those up and you get 31%. The maths is clean.

Here is the first thing worth noticing. Only 28.33% is your money in any real sense. The other 2.67% behaves like an insurance premium. You pay it, you get covered, and you never get it back as cash. That is not a scam — that is just how insurance works. But a lot of people assume the whole 31% is savings, and it is not.

The Two Pots — The Bit That Confuses Everyone

This is the single most misunderstood thing about SSF, and it causes more angry Facebook comments than anything else.

That 28.33% retirement money is not one pot. It is two.

The Retirement Fund — 8.33%. This is the old gratuity money. You can take this out when you leave a job. It is yours, in cash, without waiting for retirement.

The Pension Fund — 20%. This is locked. It stays locked until you are 60. Leaving your job does not unlock it. Changing companies does not unlock it. Quitting and sitting at home does not unlock it.

So when someone leaves a job, withdraws what they can, and says “I only got a small amount, where is the rest?” — this is the answer. They got the 8.33%. The 20% is still sitting there waiting for their sixtieth birthday.

Whether that is good or bad depends on your view. It is genuinely good for people who would otherwise spend their retirement savings at 32. It is genuinely frustrating if you need that money now.

If you joined SSF after mid-July 2021, your contributions are split between these two pots automatically.

What SSF Means for You as an Employee

Let me go through what you actually get, scheme by scheme. I have used the current published limits, but check the official figures before you rely on them for a claim.

Medical, health and maternity

You need 3 months of contributions before you can claim anything here.

After that, the medical scheme covers you up to Rs 1,00,000 a year in total. Within that overall cap, outpatient treatment — the visits where you are not admitted — has its own lower sub-limit of around Rs 25,000. You pay 20% of the bill yourself and SSF covers the rest.

It is worth being precise here, because most guides get this wrong. It is not Rs 1 lakh for hospital treatment plus a separate Rs 25,000 for outpatient. It is Rs 1 lakh combined, with outpatient capped inside it. If you do not use up the outpatient allowance, it can go toward hospitalisation costs instead.

For bigger bills, SSF pays half of anything between Rs 1 lakh and Rs 10 lakh, and pays it directly to the hospital.

There is separate cover for serious illnesses like cancer and kidney failure, up to Rs 10 lakh across your lifetime. That splits roughly into Rs 1 lakh for diagnosis, Rs 7 lakh for treatment including treatment abroad, and Rs 2 lakh for follow-up care.

One thing that has quietly improved and that almost nobody knows about: medical cover now extends to your spouse and children under 18, not just you. If you have been treating this as cover for yourself alone, find out what your family is entitled to.

Maternity is the part I would treat most carefully. The scheme covers pregnancy tests, delivery costs, and the baby’s treatment for the first three months, and there is a cash benefit attached to a new birth.

But the conditions here have been amended more than once, and published sources genuinely contradict each other — on the waiting period, on the cash amount, and on how the SSF benefit sits alongside the 98 days of maternity leave your employer separately owes you under the Labour Act. Those are two different entitlements and they get mixed up constantly.

If you are planning a pregnancy, do not rely on any blog for this, mine included. Call SSF on 1116 and get the current rules for your own situation.

Accident and disability

This one starts working immediately. No waiting period.

If you are injured at work, SSF covers 100% of your treatment. If you are injured outside work — a bike accident on the way home, a fall at a relative’s house — you are covered up to Rs 7 lakh.

If you cannot work for a while, you get 60% of your basic salary until you recover. If the disability is permanent, that 60% becomes a monthly pension for life, scaled to how severe the disability is.

One practical detail people miss: the accident has to be reported to SSF within 7 days. Do not sit on it.

Dependent family protection

This is the one nobody wants to think about, and the one worth 0.27% of a rounding error.

If you die, your spouse gets 60% of your last basic salary as a monthly pension, for life. Two children get 40% between them — and that support runs to age 21 if they are still studying, not a flat cut-off at 18. Dependent parents can also qualify. There is Rs 25,000 for funeral costs.

Most sources say you need 12 months of contributions for this, with work-related deaths covered from day one. That 12-month figure is less well documented than the rest, so treat it as indicative rather than settled.

Old age pension

To get a lifetime monthly pension, you need to reach 60 and have contributed for 180 months. That is 15 years.

The monthly pension is calculated by taking everything in your pension fund, adding the investment returns, and dividing by 160.

Those two numbers are not a typo, and they trip people up constantly. 180 months is how long you have to contribute to qualify. 160 is what you divide by to work out the monthly amount. The divisor used to be 180 as well, but it was changed to 160 in early 2021, which lifted everyone’s monthly pension slightly. If you find a source quoting 180 as the divisor, that source is out of date.

If you hit 60 without 15 years of contributions, you do not lose the money. You choose between taking it as a lump sum or converting it to a smaller monthly pension.

Loans

Not many people know SSF does loans at all. Home and land purchase, education, social functions, and a special contribution loan.

The ceiling was raised sharply in 2026. It now goes up to Rs 1.5 crore — not the Rs 1 crore still quoted on most Nepali websites, which are working from older rules. Interest has been running at roughly 6%. The minimum contribution period depends on which loan you want; land purchase has been set at 18 months, while others ask for longer.

These terms have changed recently and will probably change again, so check the current numbers with SSF rather than trusting any blog on this one.

What SSF Means for You as an Employer

If you run a company in Nepal with employees, this is not optional. Registering is a legal requirement, and enforcement has tightened considerably. Company renewal is now being tied to proof that you have been contributing, with monitoring largely automated. The years when you could quietly not bother are over.

The process is straightforward on paper:

  1. Register the company on the SSF portal with your PAN, registration certificate, address, and authorised signatory
  2. Get your employer registration number
  3. Enrol each employee individually with their ID, date of birth, designation, basic salary, and joining date
  4. Set up a company bank account for the monthly SSF debit
  5. Deposit each month’s contribution by the 15th of the following month

Miss the deadline and you pay 10% annual interest on the late amount. Do not register at all and you are liable for back contributions, plus penalties.

What do you get for the 20%? Honestly, the pitch is mostly about risk moving off your books.

Before SSF, gratuity was a growing liability sitting in your accounts, recalculated every time someone got a raise. Now it is a fixed monthly percentage. Your accident liability also shifts to the fund. If an employee is seriously hurt, SSF pays, not you.

There is a retention argument too, though I would not oversell it. Most Nepali employees do not choose jobs based on SSF. But not being registered is now a visible red flag to good candidates.

One thing to be careful about. Because SSF is calculated on basic salary only, some companies keep basic low and load the rest into allowances. It lowers the bill. It also lowers what your staff eventually get, and people do notice. If you are going to do it, at least be honest with your team about it.

The Honest Downsides

Most SSF guides online skip this part entirely. I looked at the biggest ones before writing this, and several of them are 20-minute reads that never mention a single drawback. That is not a guide, that is a brochure.

Here is the other side.

Your money is locked until 60. The 20% pension portion is not accessible, no matter what happens in your life. Medical emergency, business opportunity, buying land — it does not matter. This is the complaint I hear most often.

You need 15 years for a pension. Contribute for 12 years and switch to freelancing or move abroad, and you do not get a lifetime pension. You get a lump sum instead.

2.67% never comes back. The medical, accident, and family schemes are insurance, not savings. If you never claim, that money is gone. Fair, but worth knowing.

It is calculated on basic salary only. If your basic is a small slice of your total package, your SSF is small too — and so is your eventual pension. Check your payslip. A lot of people are surprised.

The medical caps are modest. Rs 1 lakh a year sounds fine until you actually get admitted to a private hospital in Kathmandu. You will likely still need your own insurance on top.

Leaving Nepal is messy. If you move abroad, you can take the Retirement Fund portion. The pension portion generally stays locked until 60. There is an early-withdrawal route tied to changing nationality, but it is written clearly for foreign nationals who worked in Nepal — for Nepalis who move abroad, the position is much less clear. For a country that exports as much labour as Nepal does, that is a real design gap.

You lose flexibility compared to CIT and PF. Those older schemes allowed easier loans and withdrawals against your own balance. SSF is stricter, and every loan type carries its own minimum contribution period before you can borrow at all.

Adoption is still incomplete. Many employers dragged their feet for years, and some still have not registered. Bank employees in particular pushed back hard, arguing their existing welfare schemes were better than what SSF offered. That fight was public and it was not unreasonable.

None of this means SSF is bad. For a worker with no savings, no insurance, and no pension, it is a clear improvement over nothing. But it is not the complete safety net it is sometimes sold as, and you should plan around the gaps rather than assume they are not there.

The App and the Website — and One Thing That Will Trip You Up

SSF has both a web portal and a mobile app.

The portal is at sosys.ssf.gov.np. That is where you log in as a contributor, see your contribution history, check your balance, and file medical claims online.

The app is called Social Security Fund (SSF) on the Play Store and SSF - Nepal on iOS. It sits at around 4.4 stars with over 100,000 downloads, and it is still being updated — the last Android release was August 2026.

Now, the thing that caught me out.

Your website login does not work on the app. I tried it. It does not matter that the credentials are correct for the portal — the app will not accept them.

What you have to do is register separately inside the app, using the same phone number you have on file with SSF. You can set the same password or a new one. Either works. But you do have to go through the registration flow in the app itself rather than just logging in.

Nobody tells you this. There is no message explaining it. You just get rejected and assume you have forgotten your password. I lost a good twenty minutes to it before working it out.

This is a small thing, but it is a good example of the wider problem. As one Play Store reviewer put it, half the functionality is on the site and the other half is on the app. If SSF fixed nothing else this year, making one login work in both places would save a lot of people a lot of irritation.

A few other things worth knowing about the app: it wants location permission, and the Play Store data safety section notes that the data it collects is not encrypted in transit. Decide for yourself how much that bothers you.

SSF vs CIT vs Provident Fund

People mix these up constantly, so here is the short version.

Who it is for Flexibility What it gives you
SSF Private sector employees whose employer is registered Low — 20% locked until 60 Pension, medical, accident, family cover
CIT Voluntary, open to most salaried people Higher — easier loans and withdrawals Retirement savings with returns
EPF / Provident Fund Mainly government and public sector Moderate — loans allowed Retirement savings with returns

The big difference is that SSF bundles insurance with savings. CIT and PF are savings only. That is why SSF is less flexible — part of your contribution is buying cover, not building a balance.

If your employer moved you from CIT or PF to SSF, they had three choices for the old balance: transfer it in, pay it out to you, or leave it where it is. Ask which one they picked. A lot of people never found out.

You can also keep contributing to CIT voluntarily alongside SSF. Given the medical caps and the 60-year lock, that is worth considering if you can afford it.

How to Check What You Actually Have

Three ways:

On the portal. Log in at sosys.ssf.gov.np with your SSF ID. Your contribution history shows every monthly deposit your employer has made.

On the app. Register in the app first using your registered phone number, as described above. Then your balance and contribution history are there.

Through your employer. Your HR or accounts team can pull your statement. This is often the fastest route if you are stuck on login.

One habit worth building: check that your employer is actually depositing. The contribution should appear every month. If there are gaps, raise it early. Chasing missing contributions from two years ago is much harder than catching it in month two.

Everything above is my own summary. These are the sources that actually count, and they are worth bookmarking:

  • Social Security Fund official website — the main site, with employer and contributor login, official notices, and the scheme directives themselves
  • Contributor and employer login portal — where you check your contribution history, download statements, and file claims online
  • Toll-free helpline: 1116 — free from a Nepali number, and the fastest way to settle anything in this guide that may have changed
  • Call centre: 01-5970016
  • Email: [email protected] for claims, [email protected] for retirement and pension questions
  • Offices: Kathmandu, Biratnagar and Simara

If anything here conflicts with what SSF tells you directly, believe SSF.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I withdraw my SSF money if I leave my job?

Partly. You can withdraw the Retirement Fund portion, which is 8.33% of your basic salary for the period you contributed. The Pension Fund portion, which is 20%, stays locked until you turn 60. This is the most common misunderstanding about SSF.

What happens to my SSF if I go abroad?

You can withdraw the Retirement Fund portion. The pension portion generally stays in the fund until you turn 60. There is an early-withdrawal route linked to changing nationality, but it is written clearly for foreign nationals who worked in Nepal rather than for Nepalis moving abroad, so do not assume it covers you. If you are planning to migrate, check your own position with SSF first.

How much pension will I actually get from SSF?

Your monthly pension is the total in your pension fund, plus investment returns, divided by 160. You need to be 60 years old and have contributed for at least 180 months, which is 15 years. Because it is based on your basic salary, a low basic means a low pension.

Is SSF calculated on my gross salary or basic salary?

Basic salary only. This is why two people earning the same total package can have very different SSF contributions. If your salary structure is mostly allowances with a small basic, your SSF contribution and your eventual pension will both be lower.

Why does my website password not work on the SSF app?

Because the app needs its own separate registration. Register inside the app using the same phone number that SSF has on file for you. You can use the same password or set a new one. This is not documented anywhere obvious and it catches a lot of people out.

Can I take a loan against my SSF balance?

Yes. SSF offers loans for home and land purchase, education, social functions, and special contribution. The ceiling was raised in 2026 to Rs 1.5 crore, so the Rs 1 crore figure still quoted on many Nepali sites is out of date. Interest has been around 6%. Each loan type has its own minimum contribution period before you qualify — land purchase has been set at 18 months, others ask for longer. Confirm current terms with SSF on 1116.

Is SSF mandatory for employers in Nepal?

Yes. Employers in the formal sector are legally required to register and enrol their employees. Late deposits attract 10% annual interest, and employers who never registered can be liable for back contributions and penalties.

Should I keep my CIT if I am already in SSF?

You are not required to, but many people do. SSF has real limits — medical cover caps out at Rs 1 lakh a year and most of your retirement money is locked until 60. Keeping a CIT account gives you a more flexible pot alongside it. That is a personal financial decision, so think it through or talk to someone qualified.

My Honest Take

SSF is a good idea that is still rough around the edges.

The concept is right. Nepal needed a proper safety net for private sector workers, and 31% a month genuinely builds one. For someone who would otherwise retire with nothing, this changes their life.

The execution still has gaps. The 60-year lock is too rigid for a country where so many people work abroad. The medical caps have not kept pace with what private hospitals actually charge. And the digital experience — two systems, two logins, no explanation — is the kind of thing that quietly erodes trust in an otherwise sound scheme.

My advice, as a contributor rather than an advisor: treat SSF as your floor, not your plan. Know your basic salary. Check your contributions every few months. Keep something flexible alongside it. And do not assume the pension alone will be enough.

If you found this useful, I write about salaries and careers in Nepal too, and there is a salary and tax calculator on the site that helps you work out your take-home once SSF and tax come out.

Found something in here that is out of date, or had a different experience with a claim? Tell me and I will update the post. I would rather this stayed accurate than stayed as written.