Left on their own, many people will spend most of what they earn. Whatever gets saved also gets utilised for short-term needs and goals. Retirement seems so long away that for most people it does not even come up as a goal till they are in their mid-forties! While contributing the sums into their EPF accounts, they don't even realise it. But, it accumulates unobtrusively and compounds over a long period. The interest earned are tax-free and hence the compounding is even better. At the end of the tenure when one gets the corpus back, it is again tax-free making it a very unique vehicle where the contributions are exempt from tax, interest earned are exempt from tax and the final corpus is also tax-free.