SNILS: definition of the concept, procedure for obtaining

Why is SNILS necessary?

What purpose does having an insurance number serve?

Firstly, it is into this account that all incoming data regarding insurance premiums accrued and paid by the employer are constantly entered.
Secondly, SNILS also takes into account the insurance experience accumulated throughout the entire working life of a particular citizen. It is this length of service that is subsequently taken into account when assigning a pension or when recalculating it.
Thirdly, the number also reflects information about all voluntary contributions a citizen has paid towards his own pension in the future.
Fourthly, the insurance number is characterized by another important function: SNILS acts as the only personal data identifier today.

It is this number that is used in information exchange between all kinds of departments of the Russian Federation, regardless of their level.

SNILS is also an identifier for insurance cards, which ensures the receipt of various government services, including, for example, medical care or discounted travel on transport.

It should also be noted that identification during registration on the Unified Government Services Portal is carried out on the basis of the insurance number.

Why is it needed?

SNILS is, first of all, insurance for an employed citizen, which includes a number of convenient functions necessary not only for its owner, but also for the employer:

The account involves the accumulation of information about accrued and paid insurance premiums. That is, using this number you can check your pension accruals .
SNILS takes into account the length of insurance coverage throughout a person’s entire working life. That is, this information is necessary when assigning, calculating and changing the size of a pension.
The number reflects not only mandatory payments by the employer, but also voluntary transfers by the card holder towards the accumulation of a future pension.
SNILS simplifies the interaction of Russian Federation departments at various levels. That is, using your personal number you can receive various benefits and subsidies and have access to the government services portal.

What’s important is that SNILS now serves as a kind of identifier for receiving government services electronically. For example, through the government services portal. That is, it allows you to reduce the number of necessary documents when applying for services from government agencies.

In the future, it is planned to improve the insurance certificate by expanding its functionality, that is, combining documents such as TIN, student ID and travel document.

How to obtain an insurance certificate?

On one's own.
A citizen can obtain an insurance certificate independently by contacting his (i.e., located at the place of registration) Pension Fund body.
Self-collection is carried out by those persons who pay insurance premiums themselves.
To do this, such persons must appear at the above-mentioned Fund body, submit the necessary document (this will be discussed in more detail below) and fill out a form.
Parents who want to issue a certificate for their child do the same.
Through the employer.
Working citizens obtain certificates through their employer.

This happens as follows:

a person who does not have an insurance certificate upon employment fills out an insured person’s questionnaire at the place of work.
The content of the questionnaire consists of such information as the full name of the insured person, information about his gender and date of birth, indication of citizenship, address (both the registration address and the address where the person actually lives are indicated), contact telephone number, information about the identity document (to for example, series, number and date of issue of the passport);
this questionnaire is submitted directly to the Pension Fund by the employer within two weeks from the day the employment contract was concluded;
The fund opens SNILS and issues an insurance certificate (this takes about three weeks), after which it transfers the issued certificates to the employer;
Having received the certificates, the employer must hand over all of them personally to the employees within a week.

How to apply for SNILS

Now citizens of the Russian Federation receive an insurance certificate almost immediately after birth. To do this, the mother or father with their passport and birth certificate must visit the branch of the Pension Fund or MFC at the place of residence or actual residence (in regions where MFCs provide such services).

When applying to the Pension Fund, the insurance certificate should, according to the official website of the Pension Fund, be issued immediately if the application form has already been filled out.

Through the MFC, registration of SNILS takes 5 days. This procedure applies to all children under 14 years of age. Teenagers over this age have the right to independently apply to the Pension Fund with their passport.

Adult citizens, as well as foreigners officially employed in Russia, can obtain SNILS in two ways:

1 Upon employment.

If an employment or civil contract is concluded with you for the provision of services/performance of work, the employer is obliged to send your data to the Pension Fund of the Russian Federation no later than 14 days later. There, within 5 days, they will assign an identification number, issue an insurance certificate, send it to the employer, and he will give it to you.

2 Independently in the territorial body of the Pension Fund of the Russian Federation or in the MFC

Here the algorithm is the same as in the case of children (only you apply with one passport). After filling out the forms, you will receive SNILS from the Pension Fund immediately, and through the MFC - within 5 days. The application form can be downloaded here.

Another way to obtain SNILS is to issue a notarized power of attorney and provide it to your representative, who will submit documents on your behalf and receive an insurance certificate.

What documents are required to obtain SNILS?

The main document required to obtain SNILS is a passport.

However, it is possible to present another identification document. This could be, for example, a military ID, a sailor’s passport, or a temporary identity card.

We also note that when issuing an insurance certificate for a child if he has not reached the age of 14, a birth certificate is required along with an identification document of the parent (or other legal representative).

What information is included in the insurance certificate?

The document contains the following mandatory information:

date of issue of SNILS, that is, date of registration / registration with the Pension Fund of Russia;
date of birth of the insured person;
personal data – last name, first name and patronymic;
gender of the citizen;
place of birth of the insured person;
insurance number of an individual personal account.

If you notice that there is no registration date on SNILS, or an error in your full name, date or place of birth, do not rush to panic, you just need to come to the Pension Fund office for an appointment, the employees will enter the correct information into the unified personalized accounting database and issue a new card. But you shouldn’t delay the exchange.

Perhaps there are those who do not yet know where the number and series of the SNILS document are written. Immediately under the inscription “Insurance certificate of compulsory pension insurance” there is a number; the document does not have a series; a digital code is used to identify it. But this code, as mentioned above, means not only the document number, but also the account number through which pension contributions are made by the employer.

Earlier it was said how many digits are in the SNILS number of an individual, as well as the fact that it is individual and unchanged throughout the life of the insured. The numbers in the insurance number are exactly 11, the first 9 can be any number, but the last 2 are the control number. Using special algorithms, the authenticity of the document is determined using the first 9 digits and a check number. Special resources have been created for this, which will be discussed later.

How to get SNILS for a military personnel?

Military personnel usually do not have a certificate of insurance. This is explained by the fact that their pension is issued separately, not according to the compulsory pension insurance system.

At the same time, having a SNILS can be useful for a military personnel.

First of all, this will make it possible to take into account all the pension rights of a person, since, along with service, he can engage in other activities that do not interfere with service (teaching, for example, or research).

Also, due to the presence of a certificate, it is possible to take into account the length of service for the assignment of a “regular” labor pension.

Moreover, we have already noted that SNILS is an identifier on the Government Services Portal. Therefore, having an insurance number will allow the serviceman to use the Portal.

Registration is carried out as follows: the serviceman independently contacts the Fund body, where he presents the document and fills out the form.

You will probably be interested in looking at the “Conscription for Military Service” mental map, which tells in detail who is being drafted into the army and who can be given a deferment
Or find out HERE what to do if you lose your passport

Example of SNILS number

The way the pension insurance number is constructed makes it possible to assign a unique code to all citizens of the Russian Federation.

Please note that any insurance certificate code is issued only once and is valid for a lifetime.

Let's get acquainted with the features of constructing the number and tell you how many digits are contained in the SNILS number:

The cipher consists of nine numbers, zeros may be present.
There are no policies that contain 3 or more repeating numbers.
To make it easier to read, the numbers on the certificate are divided into 3 parts of 3 digits each. After them there is a control digit.

Interesting fact

This number construction system contains about 930 million combinations. Considering that about 150,000,000 citizens live in Russia, and the average birth rate is 2,000,000 babies per year, the codes for compulsory pension insurance should be enough for another ~380 years.

How long does it take to issue SNILS?

As noted above, the Fund itself issues a certificate and opens an individual account within 3 weeks.

Accordingly, this is the period you need to focus on when applying for registration on your own.

If we are talking about registration through the employer, then two more weeks should be added to the three weeks, during which the employer will transfer the questionnaires to the Fund, and one during which the employer will issue certificates.

Thus, the maximum period will be six weeks, i.e. about one and a half months.

However, in practice, registration is often faster.

How long does it take to make SNILS?

When visiting a Pension Fund branch in person, SNILS is issued in the

in real time. You can get it almost immediately upon your first visit. A delay can only arise due to whether it will be possible to get an appointment with a specialist right away. Therefore, it is recommended to make an appointment in advance. When contacting the MFC, the procedure takes about 5 days (depending on workload, there may be minor delays, up to 10 days).

In case of employment, the HR department is obliged to submit documents to the Pension Fund within 2 weeks, but this period is not specified by law anywhere and does not entail any sanctions. Whereas the mandatory issuance of SNILS by the employer is provided for by the Labor Code and failure to comply with it entails administrative liability under Art. 5.27 Code of Administrative Offences. Registration through an employer currently takes about 20-30 days.

Actions in case of changes in personal data specified when receiving SNILS

Of course, cases cannot be ruled out when the information about a person specified when filling out the questionnaire changes. What is the procedure in such a situation?

If we are talking about an employed person, then the employer is responsible for transmitting new information to the Fund (within a two-week period).

This is formalized as an application for the exchange of a certificate.

The same persons who issued the certificate themselves must submit a corresponding application to the Fund themselves.

Upon receipt of the application, the relevant body of the Fund makes all necessary changes to the individual personal account, after which it issues a new certificate. SNILS remains the same.

What does it look like

Now let's take a closer look at what is hidden behind the acronym SNILS, what kind of document it is and what it looks like. This abbreviation stands for: Insurance Number of a citizen’s Individual Personal Account in the compulsory pension insurance system, to which the employer transfers insurance contributions. All information about potential and current pensioners, as well as their pension contributions and work experience, is stored in the database of the Russian Pension Fund, and the citizen has a certificate in which these figures are indicated.

It is worth amending the statement that the pension certificate and SNILS are one and the same.

The pension certificate, or more precisely, the insurance certificate of compulsory pension insurance (CISOPS), is a light green laminated card measuring 11.5×8 cm, which confirms registration in the unified database of Compulsory Pension Insurance (OPI) and which contains elements of protection against counterfeiting and some personal information about its owner.

The certificate is often mistakenly called SNILS, although the latter is only a digital code and not the document itself.

Those who believe that the SNILS number is indicated in the pension book are also mistaken. Since 2015, forms of this document, which contained information about the date of appointment, amount and type of pension, were no longer published, since it played an insignificant role in the social life of pensioners, and the costs of its production were covered by funds from the state budget. Instead of a pension certificate, when assigning a pension, Pension Fund employees issue a certificate of receipt of a pension, or, as they say in everyday life, a SNILS certificate. This certificate is issued on a regular A4 sheet and, in addition to the digital code of the individual account, it contains the following information:

personal data of the pensioner – full name, date of birth;
type of pension (old age, survivor, disability);
pension amount;
the period during which the pension is paid;
which authorities issue the certificate (PFR).

If you are interested in how the concept of SNILS of an individual is correctly deciphered, then there is nothing new here; its decoding has already been given above: the insurance number of an individual personal account. The main document containing this information is the insurance certificate of compulsory pension insurance. It can be replaced if the surname is changed or lost, but the personal account number itself remains unchanged, since it is issued to a person once and is assigned to him for life.

Very rarely, but still found on the Internet, something like the following request is found: “SNILS number of a legal entity, what is it and where to get it,” users most likely confused SNILS and TIN. It is worth saying that SNILS does not exist as such for legal entities, since it identifies only the individual in whose name it is issued.

What does the digital code mean?

Anyone who has received a pension insurance certificate has probably at least once wondered what the 12 digits of the SNILS code mean. The numbers on the pension insurance certificate are the personal account number itself to which the employer transfers contributions for pension savings. For some reason, many people mistakenly believe that the insurance account code has 12 digits, although in fact there are 11.

Some particularly meticulous citizens are trying to figure out what size and font format the SNILS card is. It is difficult to answer this question, since information about the technical requirements for issuing a certificate is not indicated anywhere. Only professionals who understand fonts can say this. One thing can be said: probably to avoid errors, all data is typed in capital letters.

What to do if you lose SNILS? (application to the Pension Fund, when?)

Such a nuisance as the loss of an insurance certificate may also occur. What should you do in such a situation?

Apply to:

to the HR department of your employer, from where the application will be sent to the Fund;
individual entrepreneurs submit a corresponding application directly to the territorial body of the Fund;
non-working citizens also submit an application to the Pension Fund at the place of their registration.

As for the timing, the consideration of applications and the issuance of certificates to replace the lost ones is carried out by the Fund’s bodies within a month.

What to do if you have lost your policy

If lost, you will need to reissue the certificate. To do this, fill out an application for a duplicate SNILS and submit it to your employer. If you do not work, then take the paper to the nearest branch of the Pension Fund.

You will also need to obtain a new SNILS when replacing your passport. This is done due to the fact that the data in both documents must be identical. Receiving an updated policy is the same as issuing a duplicate, the only difference is that you will receive a new document with the same numbers and updated information.

Now you know how to correctly decipher the SNILS number and what it means. Finally, we will propose some rules.

The pension certificate policy must be kept only by the insured individual. Attempts to seize are illegal.
When making a duplicate or making changes, carefully check all the information provided. A typo or error may lead to a repeated application to the Pension Fund of the Russian Federation to obtain another copy.

In the article, we explained what SNILS is, how it stands for, gave advice on how to replace it, and told you what you will need to apply for a policy for your child. If you follow the proposed rules, you will avoid many problems.

Let's summarize:

Each citizen who is registered in the pension insurance system has his own unique insurance number;
This number is used primarily to receive all information related to the payment of insurance premiums and the insurance period. Moreover, SNILS is a method of identification on the Government Services Portal;
The insurance certificate, in addition to the individual account number, contains other information: full name, date of birth (together with place), gender, date of registration in the insurance system;
The insurance number is assigned to the person for life. Even changing some data does not entail changes in the number itself;
You can issue an insurance certificate either independently (i.e., submit a corresponding application to the Pension Fund yourself) or through your employer;
the period for reviewing the application and issuing a certificate based on it is three weeks;
military personnel are also recommended to obtain an insurance certificate;
It is important to know that if you change the information specified in the application form for obtaining a certificate, you should submit an application to the Fund (or through your employer) so that all changes are reflected. In this case, the previous insurance number is retained.

sample of filling out the insured person's questionnaire ADV 1
Insured person's questionnaire ADV 1

What it is

The compulsory insurance certificate is a document on the basis of which the subject is registered as a participant in the compulsory pension insurance program.

A plastic card serves as a sample certificate. It is issued by the Pension Fund of Russia to all persons who are personally registered with this non-budgetary organization.

The card contains the following data:

individual personal account insurance number (SNILS);
initials;
date and place of birth;
floor;
date of registration in the compulsory social insurance system.

The document is issued to the insured person and remains in his custody. The certificate is valid only when presented together with a passport.

This document is issued to all citizens of the Russian Federation who participate in the pension insurance system, as well as to foreigners living in the country.

Residence does not matter in this case. Participants in programs for all types of compulsory insurance (medical, unemployment, etc.) receive similar certificates.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this document in the system of modern labor relations. For employees whose activities began before 2000, the main document confirming their length of service is a work book.

But for those who do not have experience before 2000, its relevance loses its significance. The OPS certificate provides sufficient information for calculating a pension and calculating the duration of the career.

In a couple of decades, work books will no longer be used, but for now this document remains no less important than a certificate when calculating an old-age pension and taking into account other reasons.

What can you find out from your insurance certificate number?

Using the certificate number, you can find out the status of your personal account, as well as your work experience. To do this, you need to contact the Pension Fund office in person or register on the State Services portal.

We recommend that you read the information on how to find out pension savings using SNILS.

As for the time of registration with the Pension Fund of Russia, the date of registration by SNILS number is indicated at the bottom of the card.

Find out in more detail about what you can find out using SNILS.

All information for each insured person/number is stored in an electronic database and is confidential, so it is impossible to find out any specific information about anyone other than yourself. We hope that we have dispelled your doubts about whether SNILS is personal data, and you will treat this document more carefully.

We recommend reading in more detail about how to find out your debt according to SNILS.

What information is contained in SNILS and to whom is it issued?

The SNILS number is only one of the elements contained in the pension certificate; in addition to it, the following information is indicated:

Initials of the insured person (indicated in full);
Gender;
Date and place of birth;
Date of receipt of the certificate.

It is issued to absolutely all persons registered in the PFRF system, including the unemployed, military personnel and children from birth.

Where and how to apply

You can register in the system only through the Pension Fund itself, or more precisely, in its division located at the citizen’s place of residence or at the location of the employer.

How to issue a certificate:

In case of official employment, the employer is responsible for registering SNILS;
Unemployed citizens should go to the Pension Fund department on their own. You must have a passport with you;
Individual entrepreneurs who are engaged in private practice (lawyers, notaries and others) and pay insurance premiums on their own are registered in the compulsory pension insurance system in parallel with registering themselves as an insurer;

How to get SNILS for a child is described in detail in this video:

For children under 14 years of age, parents or a legal representative/guardian receive an insurance number. The presence of the child is not mandatory;
Teenagers 14 years of age and older obtain a certificate independently;
When a child attends a kindergarten or general education institution, the administration takes upon itself the issuance of an insurance certificate;
In some regions there is a “pilot” project under which a newborn is automatically registered in the pension insurance system. When registering a child at the Civil Registry Office, the information is entered into the Pension Fund of the Russian Federation database.

How long does it take to obtain a certificate?

According to the rules, the registration period is no more than one month.

If you submit an application to the Pension Fund unit yourself, the processing time will be no more than 2 weeks;
When applying through an employer or the administration of an educational institution, the period may be extended by another week.

Who has the right to request a document

This document includes confidential information, so it can only be used for pension purposes and for obtaining health insurance.

A citizen must provide a certificate upon request:

When receiving services in PFRF branches, both state and non-state;
When serving in medical institutions;
When applying for a job.

Only the relevant services of the Pension Fund and the citizen personally have the right to receive classified information about the state of an individual personal account.

Receiving SNILS when changing your last name.