Ayushman Bharat Eligibility

How it works

PM-JAY uses the Socio-Economic Caste Census 2011 (SECC-2011) database. Rural families qualify on any one of seven deprivation criteria — kachcha walls and roof, no adult member 16-59, female-headed without male 16-59, disabled member with no able-bodied adult, SC/ST household, no literate adult above 25, landless household earning by manual casual labour. Urban families qualify by 11 occupational categories such as rag-pickers, construction workers, street vendors and domestic help. We map your inputs to those rules; final confirmation is on pmjay.gov.in.

Worked example

A rural Bihar household with a kachcha home and one adult male labourer earning from daily-wage construction qualifies on two SECC criteria — automatically eligible. An urban Delhi domestic-help family qualifies via the occupational route. The ₹5 lakh per family per year cover is cashless at any of the ~30,000+ empanelled hospitals including AIIMS, Safdarjung, Apollo and Max for listed packages — covering pre- and post-hospitalisation expenses for 1,949 procedures.

When to use this

• Before visiting a Common Service Centre for Ayushman card enrolment
• To pre-check eligibility of elderly parents (70+ are now universally eligible from 2024)
• While comparing PM-JAY against a private mediclaim top-up for a low-income family

If ineligible, look at our 80D calculator for tax-saving on a private health policy.