How to Change a Nominee on a Bank Account in India, Step by Step

Most people set a nominee once, when they open an account, and never look again. Life then moves on — a marriage, a child, a death, a fallout — and the form does not. An out-of-date nomination is one of the most common reasons a family's claim gets tangled, because the institution pays the person named on the form, not the person you would name today if you filled it out fresh.

The good news is that changing a nominee is usually quick and free, and increasingly can be done online without a branch visit. The catch is that every kind of account has its own form, its own regulator and, for some products, its own idea of what a nominee is even entitled to. 'Updating my nominees' is really a short checklist of small tasks, not one form to fill in once — the sections below go through each type of account in turn, so treat this guide as that checklist rather than reading it once and hoping it sticks.

For a savings or current account, nomination runs under the RBI's framework and is one of the easier ones to keep current: you can add a nominee when opening the account or at any point afterwards, and change it through your branch or, at most banks, through net banking or the mobile app without visiting anyone.

Since 1 November 2025, the Banking Laws (Amendment) Act, 2025 also lets you name up to four nominees on a deposit — either simultaneously, with a percentage share for each that adds up to a hundred, or successively, so the next person on the list only takes over if the one before them has already died. Decide which model actually matches your intent before submitting the form, because the two behave very differently in a real claim.

A fixed deposit is nominated separately from your savings account, even at the same bank — the same RBI framework applies, and the same up-to-four-nominee choice is available, but the form is its own document tied to that specific deposit's account number.

This is the one people miss most often: they update the nominee on their savings account after a life change and assume it carries over to every fixed deposit they hold at the same branch. It does not. Go through each deposit receipt separately, including any recurring deposit, since it too carries its own nomination distinct from a fixed deposit.

For demat holdings, nomination follows SEBI's rules and is made through your depository participant, generally online through the participant's own portal, using an OTP-based authentication step rather than a physical signature in most cases now. SEBI has been actively standardising how a nominee later hands securities to the legal heirs — most recently in its September 2025 circular on transmission, which also raised the value thresholds for the simplified route — so a current, correctly filed nomination is what makes that eventual handover run on the easier path rather than the fuller one.

If you hold demat accounts with more than one depository participant — one for a trading account opened years ago and another for a newer one, say — each carries its own nomination and needs its own update. A nomination made through one broker's platform does not carry over to an account you opened through a different broker, even if both ultimately sit with the same depository.

A life insurance nomination is made directly with the insurer, usually through its own policy-servicing portal or a form at the branch, and it is worth special attention because it behaves differently from a bank nomination: when the nominee is the policyholder's spouse, parent or child, they may count as a 'beneficial nominee' entitled to keep the payout rather than hold it for the wider legal heirs. Getting this nomination right, and current, matters more here than almost anywhere else, because it can be the difference between a fast payout to the person you intended and a slower one that ends up divided among heirs you did not specifically choose.

If you hold more than one policy — a term policy, an endowment policy, a group cover through an employer — each has its own nomination on its own policy document, and a change made on one does not update the others.

For the Employees' Provident Fund, nomination is done through the EPFO's e-nomination facility on the member portal (using your UAN and Aadhaar-based e-sign), and the same nomination also governs who receives the family pension under EPS and the lump-sum EDLI insurance if you die while employed — one form, three benefits, which is exactly why completing it properly matters more than it looks like it should. The National Pension System has its own separate nomination, set through your NPS account provider or the central recordkeeping agency's portal, and it does not inherit whatever you set for EPF, because the two are entirely different retirement schemes with different regulators.

Because EPF, EPS and EDLI are covered together by one nomination and NPS is entirely separate, treat them as two distinct updates rather than one, and revisit both whenever your family circumstances change rather than assuming updating one covers the other.

A mutual fund nomination is set per folio, either directly with the fund house or through the registrar and transfer agent — CAMS or KFintech handle the paperwork for most Indian funds — and, again, follows SEBI's rules. If your holdings are spread across several fund houses, each folio's nomination is a separate update, and a folio consolidation done for convenience does not automatically merge or update the nominations behind it. Investing through a single online platform that aggregates several fund houses does not change this either — the underlying folio and its nomination still sit with the fund house itself.

The most important thing to carry away from all of the above is that naming a nominee is not the same as deciding who inherits. For most accounts — bank deposits, demat holdings, mutual funds, EPF — a nominee receives the money as a trustee for the legal heirs, and who ultimately keeps it is settled by a will or by succession law, not by the nomination form. Life insurance's beneficial-nominee rule is the one real exception to that pattern.

So do two things together, not one: keep your nominations current across every account on this checklist, and make sure they tell the same story as your will. When the nominee and the intended heir are different people, families end up in exactly the dispute the nomination was meant to prevent — the nominee legally holding money that a court later says belongs, in whole or in part, to someone else, with the two sides working out the difference between themselves rather than the institution having to referee it.

A practical way to actually get through the checklist above without losing track is to work from your own list of accounts rather than trying to remember them from memory: go product by product — each bank account, each fixed deposit, each demat account, each insurance policy, EPF, NPS, each mutual fund folio — tick off the ones where the nominee is current, and treat every unticked one as unfinished business rather than something to come back to eventually.