Labour card (BOCW registration): how it works in your state

What a labour card actually is

Every building project in India pays a cess into a welfare fund for construction workers. The rate is set nationally at not less than one per cent and not more than two per cent of the cost of construction, and the cost of the land is excluded from that calculation. The money is collected from builders and paid to the welfare board of the state the project is in. It is already, in a real sense, your money. The labour card is simply the paperwork that lets you draw on it.

People call it a labour card, a BOCW card, a construction worker card, a shramik card, a nirman card or a karmika card depending on where they are standing. It is the same thing everywhere: your name in a state board's beneficiary register, with an identity card issued against it.

It is worth being clear about what it is not. It is not a work permit. It is not a job. It is not a minimum wage guarantee. No contractor will pay you more because you have one. Its value is entirely on the day something goes wrong — an accident on site, a hospital admission, a delivery, a daughter's wedding, the day you turn 60 and cannot lift a tray of bricks any more.

The one rule that is the same in every state

This is the part that does not change when you cross a state border, and it is worth knowing by heart. You qualify if you have completed 18 years of age, have not completed 60 years of age, and have been engaged in building or other construction work for not less than 90 days during the preceding 12 months. That test has been the law for nearly thirty years and it survived the 2025 rewrite of India's labour codes intact — it now sits in the Code on Social Security, 2020, which says such a worker shall be registered as a beneficiary.

Three details matter. The 90 days do not have to be continuous, and they do not have to be with one employer — a helper who worked four different sites for three weeks each still crosses 90 days. The work has to be construction work, which is defined broadly: building, repairs, demolition, roads, bridges, water works, electrical and plumbing work on a structure, and so on. And it is your own work that counts, not your household's.

Every trade on this site qualifies — mason, helper, carpenter, bar bender, painter, electrician, plumber, tile layer, plasterer, welder, shuttering carpenter, JCB operator. Migrant workers qualify too. You register with the board of the state where you do the work, not the state you are from: a Bihari mason on a Bengaluru site registers in Karnataka, and the same man on a Pune site registers in Maharashtra.

The law also says you get a physical identity card with your photograph on it, with space for employers to enter the construction work you have done and sign it off. Most workers never ask an employer to fill that in. It is the cheapest work record you will ever get, and it is the one the board itself designed.

Everything else is state business — and that is the whole difficulty

Below that one national rule, almost nothing is national. Your state government decides the application form, the portal, whether there is a fee, which documents count as proof of your 90 days, which schemes the board runs, how much each scheme pays, how long after an event you can claim, and what you have to do each year to stay registered. Two workers doing identical work on two sides of a state line have different paperwork and different benefits.

When the labour codes came into force on 21 November 2025 they did not sweep this away. The Code expressly saves everything already done under the old Acts — including notifications issued by the states, schemes, appointments and orders — and keeps them in force until a government replaces them. So your state's existing board, its existing schemes and its existing forms continue to operate. What changes over the next few years is that new rules get framed under the Code, state by state, at different speeds.

This is why you should be suspicious of any page — including a page like this one — that gives you a single national list of forms and amounts. It will be wrong for most of the country. The only reliable document is the one your own state board publishes. Our per-state pages link that document directly for the states we have checked ourselves; where we have not checked a state, we would rather send you to your board than print something we have not verified.

One thing you can generalise safely: registration is either free or costs a small published amount, and it is paid to the board, never to a person. Karnataka publishes both its application fee and its online service charge as zero. Wherever you are, the number is printed on the board's own page. Anything above that number is somebody's commission.

Karnataka, worked end to end

Use this as the shape of the process rather than as the process itself. Your state will have the same five moving parts under different names.

The board. The Karnataka Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board. It publishes its own registration page, a schemes page and a district office list, and it runs a helpline on 155214.

The documents. Four things: an employment certificate proving your 90 days, your Aadhaar card self-attested, proof of age such as a voter ID or Aadhaar, and a ration card — which the board itself lists as not mandatory, so do not delay your application over one.

The awkward document, and the escape route. The employment certificate is the piece that traps people, because it has to come from someone other than you. Karnataka accepts four versions and you need only one: Form V(A) signed by your employer, Form V(B) from a registered trade union, Form V(C) from a labour inspector, or Form V(D) from a grama panchayat. That last route exists precisely for workers whose contractors will not sign anything. Nearly every state has some equivalent of it — a union, an inspector or a local body empowered to certify your work when your employer will not. Ask for it by name.

The route in. Online through the board's portal or through Seva Sindhu, or in person at a district labour office or a Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Karmika Seva Kendra with originals and photocopies. In person is often faster if your documents are messy. The board publishes a delivery time of 15 days for registration.

The cost. Application fee, zero. Online service charge, zero.

What the card unlocks. The board's schemes page lists a pension after 60 for workers with continuous registration and a family pension for the spouse of a deceased pensioner; accident benefits for death, permanent total disablement and partial disablement; medical assistance towards hospitalisation; maternity benefit and a follow-on child support payment; marriage assistance; assistance for major ailments; a disability pension; funeral assistance; education assistance for children; and a concessional BMTC bus pass for workers in Bengaluru. Most state boards run a similar spread. None of them run exactly this spread.

Why we do not print the rupee amounts

You will notice that this page names schemes and never names amounts. That is deliberate, and it is the single most important editorial decision on the site.

Every scheme amount is set by state rule and revised from time to time. A figure copied onto a website goes stale silently — the page keeps looking confident while the number quietly stops being true. A worker who plans a hospital admission or a wedding around a stale figure gets hurt twice: once by the event and once by us.

So the instruction is always the same. Open your own board's schemes page, find the scheme, and read the amount the board itself publishes today. It takes five minutes and it is right. Every other route to a number — a YouTube video, a WhatsApp forward, an agent, a two-year-old blog post — is somebody's memory of what it used to be.

Two conditions come up in claims again and again, in almost every state, so plan for them now. Several schemes require a minimum period of continuous registration before you can claim anything, which means the card is worth taking out in your thirties rather than in the week you need it. And most claims are time-barred: there is a window after the event within which you must apply, and it is often short. Ask your board's office what the window is for the scheme you need on the day the event happens, not a year later.

Keeping the card alive

Registration is not once and forever, and this is where most labour cards quietly die. By law you cease to be a beneficiary when you turn 60, or when you are not engaged in building or other construction work for at least 90 days in a year. Most states put that into practice by asking you, once a year, to show the registering authority that you did your 90 days. A pay slip, a copy of the nominal muster roll, or a fresh employment certificate all work as proof.

There is one exception written into the law and almost nobody knows it. When your 90 days are being counted, any period you were away from construction work because of a personal injury caused by an accident arising out of and in the course of your employment must be left out of the calculation. In plain words: if you were off work because you were hurt on a site, those weeks cannot be used to say you failed the 90-day test. If a clerk tells you your card has lapsed because you did not work enough in a year you spent recovering from a site injury, that is the provision to point at — and take your hospital record with you.

The ordinary failure mode is much duller. A worker registers, never renews, and discovers at the hospital counter that the card lapsed three years ago. Set a reminder on your phone for the same month every year.

It also means keeping some record of your work as you go. If a contractor pays you by UPI, that trail is proof. If a site keeps an attendance register, ask for a photo of the page with your name on it before you leave the job. And get employers to fill in your identity card, which is what it is for. A worker with twelve months of evidence renews in one visit; a worker with none spends a month chasing signatures.

If you move to another state for work

Millions of construction workers do, and this is the question they ask most often. The answer has two halves and the second half is better news than most people expect.

The first half: the boards are separate, and the benefits do not follow you. Register with the board of the state you are now working in. Your old state's schemes are paid by your old state's board out of your old state's cess collections, and it will not pay a claim for something that happened in another state. If you have moved for a long stretch, register afresh where you are.

The second half: your years are not thrown away. One of the most valuable benefits — the entitlement that depends on having been a registered beneficiary for at least three years continuously immediately before you turn 60 — is calculated by adding the period you were registered with any other welfare board immediately before you registered with your current one. The law says so explicitly. So a mason who spends four years registered in Bihar and then registers in Karnataka does not restart at zero for that purpose.

Which makes one piece of housekeeping worth real money. Do not throw away your old card and do not lose your old registration number. Photograph both, and keep a note of the dates you were registered in each state. When you eventually claim, that photograph is the evidence that your years add up. Ask the new board, at the time you register, to record your previous registration — it is much easier to do on the day than to reconstruct at 59.

The e-Shram card is a different card

Workers often arrive at the labour office asking for "the labour card" and get handed information about e-Shram instead, or the other way round. They are two separate registrations and you can hold both.

e-Shram is the central government's database of unorganised workers. Registration is free, you need only your Aadhaar number and a mobile number linked to that Aadhaar, and the eligible age range is 16 to 59. Its stated condition is that you are an unorganised worker who is not a member of EPFO or ESIC and not an income tax payer. Registering gets you a Universal Account Number and puts you in the queue for central schemes aimed at unorganised workers. The national helpline is 14434.

Your state labour card is the one that pays out the construction cess schemes described above. If you have to do one, do that one. Do e-Shram as well — it costs nothing and takes ten minutes at a Common Service Centre — and note that unlike the labour card, e-Shram is a single national registration that does not need redoing when you change state.

Finding your own state board without getting robbed on the way

Search for the words "Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board" together with your state's name. Almost every state board's site sits on a gov.in or nic.in address — that is the single best test you have. A site that ends in .com, .in on its own, or .org, and that offers to "apply for labour card" while asking for a payment, is not your board however official the layout looks.

Ignore the paid results at the top of the search page. That space is bought, and in this category it is bought mostly by people selling a free service. The board's own site is usually a little further down and looks a little worse.

If you are not sure, go in person instead. Every state runs district labour offices, and most run some form of worker facilitation centre. Take your documents to one and ask them to check the application. The address list is published on your state labour department's website, and asking a labour office where to register is free.

Three warnings that hold everywhere. Nobody legitimate needs to keep your original Aadhaar or your original documents. Nobody legitimate needs your bank one-time password. And if the fee you are asked for is not the fee printed on the board's own page, you are not talking to the board.

If your application is stuck

Most rejections come down to one of four things, and they are the same four in every state: the employment certificate is missing or signed by someone not authorised to sign it, the name on Aadhaar does not match the name on the application, the age proof is inconsistent across documents, or the mobile number given is not with the worker any more.

Fix the name mismatch first — it blocks everything downstream, including the bank transfer for any scheme you eventually claim. Take one spelling and make Aadhaar, bank account and application agree with each other.

If the contractor will not sign your employment certificate, stop asking him and use the alternative route your state provides. In Karnataka that means a labour inspector on Form V(C) or a grama panchayat on Form V(D), with a registered trade union able to issue Form V(B). Other states word it differently but nearly all of them empower somebody other than your employer to certify your work, because the law anticipated exactly this problem. Ask your board's office which certificate they will accept in place of the employer's, and ask for it by its form number.

Note down or photograph your application reference number the moment you get it. That number is how you check status later, and reconstructing it afterwards is painful.

If you are still stuck, go in person to the district labour office with every document you have, and take a printout of the board's own document list with you. One visit with the full file beats five phone calls. If the office will not help, a registered construction workers' union will usually take it up. And if you are refused outright, ask on that same day whether there is an appeal and what the time limit is — most state rules provide one and the window is short, so a refusal you sit on for a month is often a refusal you cannot undo.