NSER Survey & PMT Score Explained: How Your Eligibility Is Calculated

What the NSER survey actually measures

The National Socio-Economic Registry (NSER) is the household database BISP uses to decide who qualifies for its programmes, including Kafaalat payments. An authorized enumerator records details about household composition, housing conditions, assets (like land, livestock, or vehicles), income sources, and dependents. None of this is guesswork on your side — accuracy matters because it directly feeds the score calculation.

How the PMT score works

PMT stands for Proxy Means Test. Instead of asking households to self-report income (which is hard to verify), the PMT formula estimates household welfare using the recorded indicators — housing quality, asset ownership, education, employment type, and household size among them. The result is a single score. Households below the poverty cut-off score set by BISP are classified as eligible for Kafaalat and related support.

• The score is calculated centrally after the survey, not by the enumerator on the spot.
• Cut-off thresholds are set and periodically reviewed by BISP, not by this website.
• Two households with similar income can have different scores if their recorded assets or housing differ.

Checking whether you have a survey record

The 8171 portal is the fastest way to see whether your household has an NSER record and what its current status is. If the portal indicates no record, or that a re-survey is needed, that instruction — not a forwarded message — is what to act on.

If you believe your score is wrong

Households sometimes believe their circumstances have changed since their last survey, or that details were recorded incorrectly. The correct route is a re-survey or update request at your BISP tehsil office, explaining specifically what changed (income loss, an asset sold, a household split, and so on) rather than disputing the number itself, since the score is a calculated output of the recorded data.