Updating Aadhaar: what is online, what is capped, and what it does not do

What can be done online, and what cannot

The single most useful thing to know before you start, because it determines whether this is a ten-minute job or a morning.

The address can be updated without leaving the house, by either of two routes. On the myAadhaar portal you authenticate with a one-time password sent to the mobile registered with your Aadhaar and upload a supporting proof of address, which is verified against the requested data afterwards rather than at the moment of upload. In UIDAI’s Aadhaar app you log in with your six-digit PIN, upload the document, check the preview in English and in the local language, complete face authentication and pay. Where you hold no proof of address in your own name, both routes also offer the Head of Family method — a family member’s Aadhaar number, your relationship to them, and their approval from their own app.

The mobile number can now be updated in the Aadhaar app too, and this is the change most pages have not caught up with. UIDAI’s app FAQ sets out three cases. If the app is registered on the number already on your Aadhaar, you verify the new number by OTP, complete face authentication and pay the prescribed charge. If the app is registered on some other number, you verify both the old registered number and the new one by OTP, then face authentication and payment. Only in the third case — where you no longer have access to the old number, or never registered one — does UIDAI send you to an Aadhaar Seva Kendra. Registering a mobile number for the very first time is also a centre visit.

It is worth knowing that UIDAI’s older Enrolment & Update FAQ still says, in terms, that “Mobile update is not permitted through online mode”. The app FAQ and UIDAI’s published charges schedule both describe the in-app route, and both are more recent. Where UIDAI’s own pages disagree we say so rather than choosing silently — and if the app route fails for you, the centre route is still there. That same older FAQ adds that a mobile update can also be done through a postman.

Biometrics — fingerprints, iris and photograph — always require a centre, because the capture equipment is there and nowhere else. So, currently, do name, gender and date of birth: UIDAI says those “are not available through the Aadhaar app” and may be added in a phased manner later.

The practical consequence is a sequencing rule rather than a trap. If the number on your record is wrong but messages still reach it, fix it from the app before it lapses. If you have already lost it, one centre visit restores the whole set of online services at once — and, separately, an Aadhaar PVC card can be ordered even with no registered mobile at all, by giving any other number to receive the OTP.

Every field, and what it takes

Name is deliberately absent from this table. It is a different journey with different evidence and a different set of refusals, and it is covered in full elsewhere on this site — one sentence and a link rather than a second, thinner version of that page.

The lifetime limits, and what happens when you hit one

Three fields are capped for life, and the caps are the reason sequencing matters more here than in any other government process.

UIDAI states them plainly: name twice in a lifetime, gender once in a lifetime, date of birth once in a lifetime. There is no annual reset and no fee that buys you another. Address, mobile number and email carry no stated lifetime cap.

What the date of birth carries instead of a second numerical limit is a rule about evidence, and it is worth reading before you go. UIDAI’s standing operating procedure of 24 December 2025 — which supersedes every earlier UIDAI communication on the subject, including the older guidance a lot of pages still repeat — turns on what your Aadhaar already holds. If the recorded date is “declared” or “approximate”, an adult may update it on any accepted proof of date of birth, but anyone under 18 must produce a birth certificate. If it is already recorded as “verified” on a birth certificate, the only document that will move it is a corrected birth certificate bearing the same registration number from the same registrar, with an affidavit. If it was verified on something else — a mark sheet, a passport — the route is a corrected version of that same document or a birth certificate, again with an affidavit. And where the mismatch is the operator’s, and the earlier document said the right thing all along, that is handled as operator error on a self-declaration.

What happens when you hit a cap is not "nothing". UIDAI operates an exception-handling process through its Regional Offices for name, gender and date-of-birth updates beyond the prescribed limit. It stops being a portal transaction and becomes a case: you call 1947 or write to UIDAI quoting the enrolment ID, and it is dealt with at a Regional Office with supporting documents. It is slower and it is not guaranteed, which is exactly why the limit is worth respecting before you spend one.

One thing this page will not tell you, because no current UIDAI source says it: that a rejected attempt uses up one of your allowed updates. UIDAI publishes the limits, and publishes “exceeding the permissible update limit” as one of the reasons a request is rejected, but nowhere states that a rejection itself consumes the allowance. Where a request comes back rejected, get the reason from 1947 before resubmitting — not because the attempt is presumed spent, but because a resubmission repeating the same defect achieves nothing.

The practical rule that follows: decide the exact final value before you submit anything. For a name that means the expansion of initials, the spacing, the order of the parts, and the regional-language rendering as well as the English one. For a date of birth it means establishing which of the SOP’s cases you are in, and finding the document that case requires, rather than working from memory.

What actually happens to an update request

The lifecycle diagram above shows the states. This is what each one means in practice, because the vocabulary is confusing and UIDAI uses more than one term for the same thing.

When you submit, a request number is generated — an SRN for an online service request, a URN for an update request, an EID on an enrolment or centre visit. UIDAI sends it by SMS and shows it on screen. Capture it, because it is the only handle you have on the request, and it is what the status page, the chatbot and the helpline all ask for.

The request then goes to a quality and processing team, which is where the supporting document is actually checked against what you asked for. This is the step people do not expect: uploading a document does not mean the document has been accepted. It means it has been received.

UIDAI states that updating Aadhaar details typically takes 30 to 90 days depending on the type of update, and that normally 90 per cent of update requests are completed within 30. For a mobile or address update made in the Aadhaar app it gives up to 30 days. The 30 is what you should expect; past it, UIDAI’s own answer to “my Aadhaar update has been pending for more than 30 days” is to raise it with the helpline on 1947 or through the grievance route.

A rejection comes back with a reason, though not always a clear one — UIDAI lists document mismatches, discrepancies in the information provided, operator errors, invalid documents, exceeding the permissible update limit and policy non-compliance among them. Get the reason from 1947 before resubmitting. UIDAI’s own advice after a rejection is to re-apply with the correct documents while remaining within the permissible update limits.

An Aadhaar update propagates to nothing. Here is what you now have to do

This is the most useful section on the page and no competitor page has it.

There is a widespread and entirely reasonable assumption that Aadhaar is the master record — that it sits at the centre of things and that updating it updates everything downstream. It does not. Aadhaar is one record among many, and every other record holds its own copy of your details, refreshed only when somebody tells it to.

So an address change on Aadhaar does not change your address at your bank. A date-of-birth correction does not correct your PAN. Neither of them touches the NPCI mapper that decides which bank account receives a direct benefit transfer, or the ration card that governs your entitlement under the public distribution system, or your provident fund record, or your insurer.

The fan-out diagram sets out every record that has to be separately updated, what each one actually needs, and who does it. The two worth pulling forward are the NPCI mapping, because a subsidy that stops arriving is discovered late and painfully, and the bank, because almost everything else eventually routes through it.

One boundary worth naming here, because it is the confusion this whole area turns on: having your Aadhaar linked to a bank account for KYC purposes and having that account seeded in the NPCI mapper for receiving a subsidy are two different states, achieved by two different processes, with two different failure modes. Only one of them determines whether money reaches you. How the seeding is actually done varies — NPCI runs a Bharat Aadhaar Seeding Enabler portal and individual banks offer their own digital channels alongside the branch — so check what your own bank currently supports rather than assuming a counter is the only way in.

The document question, answered honestly

UIDAI publishes what it accepts as a list rather than as a principle, and the list changes. That is not a criticism; it is a fact about how the scheme works, and it has a consequence for how this page can honestly be written.

A page that reproduces the list is a page that will be wrong within a year, and wrong in the worst possible way — a reader assembles documents, travels to a centre, and finds that the document they brought is not on the current list.

So this page tells you what kind of evidence each field needs, which does not change, and sends you to UIDAI’s own list for the specific documents, which does.

Two things about the list are worth knowing in advance, though. The first is that a document that seems obviously good proof may simply not be on it — the list is not a test of persuasiveness. The second is that the same document can serve as proof of identity and proof of address in some combinations and not others, so bringing a single document and hoping is a poor plan.

Worked examples