HEC eportal and eServices: Which Portal Runs Degree Attestation and Equivalence, and Why Logins Fail

Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission (HEC) does not run one online portal. It runs several, on different hostnames, with separate registrations, and the service most people are looking for — degree attestation — has moved off the portal that the phrase “HEC eportal” still points at. That single fact accounts for a large share of what gets reported as an HEC login problem. This page maps the portal estate onto HEC’s actual service catalogue: which service lives where, what identity or prior record each one requires, and which access failures are structural rather than a browser problem.

Every portal state, fee and requirement below was checked directly against HEC’s own pages and login screens on 26 August 2026, and the source is named at each point. Third-party guides to this ecosystem age badly, because HEC has reorganised it; where HEC does not document something publicly, this page says so rather than filling the gap.

The portal estate: which HEC service runs where

HEC’s own service index at hec.gov.pk/english/services lists its services by audience — students, faculty, universities — not by portal. The portals themselves are separate systems. As checked on 26 August 2026:

The practical consequence: an account on one of these is not an account on another. Registering on the legacy eportal does not create an eServices account, and vice versa. If you registered somewhere and then could not find “Degree Attestation” in the menu, you are almost certainly signed in to the wrong system rather than looking at a broken one.

Degree attestation: the four-step chain and where it stalls

HEC’s Degree Attestation page describes a fully online, paperless system that replaced the older counter-based process: applicants no longer visit HEC offices or submit original hard-copy documents, and applications can be submitted at any time. HEC states the system operates in four steps:

1. Submission of the online application by the applicant.
2. Scrutiny of the application by HEC.
3. Verification of the academic documents by the awarding university or higher-education institution.
4. Issuance of the e-Attestation Certificate by HEC.

Only step 1 is under the applicant’s control. Steps 2 and 3 are where applications sit, and the reasons they sit there are mostly recorded in HEC’s own guidance.

What HEC will and will not attest

• Attestable document types: the degree; the transcript (result card, result intimation card, or detailed marks certificate); a provisional certificate, but only one issued by the university’s examination office; and an HEC equivalence letter.
• Photocopies are no longer attested at all. HEC removed that service with the move to the online system.
• Documents with overwriting, erasures or alterations are not attested. HEC’s instruction is to obtain a corrected, unaltered document from the awarding university — not to explain the alteration.
• An incomplete transcript can still be attested even where the final degree has not been issued, provided the university states the academic status clearly (degree in progress, incomplete programme, incomplete transcript) and the applicant selects the matching option in the application.
• Foreign degrees are not attested by HEC. This is the single most consequential rule on the page. HEC issues an equivalence letter against a foreign qualification, and only that equivalence letter is then attested through the portal. There is no route by which HEC stamps a foreign university’s degree directly.

Programme-specific prerequisites that block attestation

Three requirements in HEC’s guidance are records that must already exist elsewhere before an attestation application can succeed:

• MS, MPhil or equivalent programmes launched after 7 November 2013 require an HEC-issued No Objection Certificate for the programme. Without it the degree is not attestable, and this is a property of the programme, not of the applicant.
• PhD degrees require the holder’s name to appear in the PhD Country Directory. HEC checks this during scrutiny.
• Medical and nursing qualifications require the applicant to upload their professional registration card or certificate from the relevant council — HEC names PMDC and PNMC — under the “Other Documents” heading at the time of applying.

Fee, payment, and the status that looks like a bug

HEC’s Degree Attestation page states the attestation fee as Rs. 3,000 per document — per degree, transcript, provisional certificate, or HEC equivalence letter — and states that an incorrect selection is neither refunded, adjusted, nor transferred. (Verified against hec.gov.pk on 26 August 2026. Fees are set by HEC and change by notification; re-check before relying on the figure.)

Payment runs through 1-Link’s 1-Bill rails: clicking Proceed for Payment generates a Consumer Number, which is paid through any online banking channel, after which the applicant must click Verify Payment in the account. This is the mechanism behind the most common “my application disappeared” report: HEC states plainly that the application remains in saved / pending-payment mode until the fee is verified. Paying the bill is not submission. Verifying the payment is what moves the application to submitted status, and applicants are told to confirm that status themselves.

Scrutiny: what HEC checks, and how a deficiency reaches you

HEC’s initial review verifies personal details against NADRA, checks that all required documents are present, and checks consistency of information across the CNIC and the academic documents. HEC’s instruction is explicit: personal details on the CNIC and on every educational document must be identical, and where they are not, the attestation process will not be initiated. Name-spelling and father’s-name variants between a CNIC and a degree are therefore not a cosmetic issue; they stop the case before it starts.

Where the review finds a deficiency, the application is returned with remarks and a task appears in the Task Assigned to Me section of the applicant’s account. HEC also directs applicants to the Track Application option in the left sidebar, to read remarks under Revision Requested, and to resubmit through View/Edit. Notifications go out by SMS and email as well as in-system — which matters if the registered mobile number is not receiving messages (see below).

One further trap HEC documents itself: the same degree programme can appear as multiple separate entries in DAS — HEC gives the example of MBA, M.B.A. and Master of Business Administration existing side by side. Applicants are told to select all relevant degree titles and to check the college, campus or department shown under each entry, rather than picking the first plausible match.

Equivalence: three separate services, and a prerequisite chain

Equivalence is a different service from attestation, with a different fee schedule and a different application path, and HEC treats it as three services rather than one. HEC grounds them in Section 10(1)(o) of the HEC Ordinance and states that equivalence is granted on an individual, case-by-case basis on application with supporting documents and fee:

• Recognition / equivalence of foreign degrees — the route for any qualification awarded outside Pakistan.
• Equivalence of Pakistani degrees — local qualifications needing an equivalence determination.
• Equivalence of Deeni Asnad — qualifications from approved Deeni (religious) institutions.

Equivalence fees

Source: HEC’s “Fee for Equivalence” page, read 26 August 2026. HEC’s own note on that page records that the local-degree and Deeni Asnad rates were revised with effect from 1 August 2019. Treat any fee as re-checkable; HEC revises them by notification.

The prerequisite chain — the part that surprises applicants

HEC’s foreign-equivalence procedure requires that every prior qualification in the applicant’s ladder already be attested or equivalenced before the current one can be processed. This is a sequential dependency, not a document checklist, and it is why a single equivalence case can turn into three:

• Foreign bachelor’s degree: requires the degree and transcript, plus grade-12 (Intermediate/HSSC/FSc) and grade-10 (Matric/SSC) certificates.
• Foreign master’s degree: requires all of the above, plus a bachelor’s degree duly attested by HEC. Where the bachelor’s is itself foreign, HEC states the applicant must obtain equivalence of the bachelor’s first.
• Foreign PhD: requires the master’s and bachelor’s already attested by HEC, with the same rule applying again where either is foreign.

And the branch most often missed: foreign school-level qualifications do not go to HEC at all. HEC’s procedure specifies that grade-10 and grade-12 equivalence for foreign qualifications is issued by the IBCC (Inter Board Coordination Commission), and the IBCC certificate is then submitted as supporting evidence in the HEC application. An applicant who starts at HEC with a foreign high-school certificate is at the wrong authority — the same shape of problem as the Philippines’ CHED not being the issuing body for every credential, covered in our CHED eCAV guide.

HEC states the foreign-equivalence process is paperless: applicants are not required to submit hard copies to HEC Islamabad or to any regional centre. The application sequence HEC publishes is sign-up, log in, Equivalence Services, Foreign Degree Recognition/Equivalence, then personal details, degree details, equivalence details, document upload, verify, submit — and then pay the fee through 1Link from the Task Assigned area and verify the payment, exactly as with attestation.

Which identity or record each service actually requires

Most HEC access failures resolve to a mismatch between the credential a person has and the credential a given service expects. The four are genuinely different:

The plagiarism row is worth stating plainly because it is a recurring dead end: HEC’s Plagiarism Policy page publishes the policy, the Turnitin SOPs and guidelines, instructor/student/administrator training material and a checklist for a university’s Plagiarism Standing Committee — all of it addressed to institutions. There is no individual HEC login that gives a student or independent researcher a personal Turnitin account. If you need a similarity report and your institution has not enrolled you, the route is your institution, not HEC; our guides to how Turnitin, iThenticate and Crossref Similarity Check differ and to India’s UGC anti-plagiarism regulations cover the comparable institutional models elsewhere in the region.

Access problems that are structural

The following are causes that can be pointed at, in HEC’s own interfaces or its own instructions. Generic advice — clear your cache, try another browser — is omitted deliberately; it is not what is failing here.

1. You are on the wrong portal. “HEC eportal” still resolves to the legacy Online Portal, but HEC’s attestation and equivalence procedures both direct applicants to eServices. If the service you want is not in the dashboard menu, check the hostname in the address bar before anything else.
2. The www prefix on eServices does not work. HEC’s own attestation page writes the portal address with a www. prefix. Checked on 26 August 2026, both hostnames resolve to the same server, but https://www.eservices.hec.gov.pk/ fails certificate validation — a browser shows a security or “connection is not private” warning — while https://eservices.hec.gov.pk/ serves the portal normally. The fix is to drop the www., and never to click through a certificate warning on a portal that will hold your CNIC and scanned degrees.
3. Your email is not your User ID on the legacy portal. The eportal sign-in screen states the User ID format outright: a CNIC entered as 13 digits with no dashes (its own example is 1234512345670), or a name-shaped ID such as firstname.lastname or firstname123. Entering an email address in the User ID field will fail regardless of whether the password is right. Its password-recovery screen, by contrast, accepts either the User ID or the primary email — so recovery is the reliable way to find out which User ID your account actually has.
4. The verification SMS never arrives because your number blocks it. HEC’s own registration form carries the warning that SMS will not be delivered if a Promotional Messages Block Service is active on the number. Pakistani mobile operators offer exactly such a block, and applicants who have enabled it will not receive HEC’s registration or status messages. Deactivating the block on the registered number is the fix; changing the number mid-application is not.
5. Your account exists, but on a different system. Because each portal has its own registration, a password reset on the portal you are looking at cannot recover an account that was created on another one.
6. The application shows as unsubmitted after you paid. Payment and submission are separate events. Until Verify Payment succeeds, HEC’s system holds the case in saved / pending-payment state.
7. Nothing has moved for weeks. Check Task Assigned to Me and Revision Requested. A returned application waits on the applicant, silently, if the SMS and email notifications did not land.
8. Scrutiny will not start because your name does not match. A CNIC-versus-degree discrepancy in name, father’s name or date of birth prevents initiation, per HEC’s own wording. Correcting the academic record with the awarding university, or the CNIC with NADRA, is the prerequisite — not resubmitting.

What HEC does not publish, and what to do instead

HEC’s attestation and equivalence pages do not publish a processing-time commitment, a service-level target, or a queue position for either service. Figures circulating in third-party guides — a set number of working days for attestation, or for equivalence — are not traceable to these HEC pages, and this guide does not repeat them. HEC’s published mechanisms for finding out where a case stands are the Track Application view in the applicant’s own account, the onlinehelp.hec.gov.pk ticket system, and the support numbers HEC publishes: UAN 111-119-432 and 0334-111 9432 (the eportal login screen additionally shows a call centre number of 051 111 11 9432). Those were the contact routes on HEC’s pages as read on 26 August 2026.

Why this matters to research administrators outside Pakistan

For an admissions office, a funder, or a research office assessing a Pakistani applicant, the portal estate above determines what evidence can legitimately be asked for:

• The verifiable artefact for a Pakistani degree is an HEC e-Attestation Certificate, downloaded by the applicant from their eServices account after the awarding university has verified the record to HEC — so it carries a university-level verification step, not only a document check.
• For a degree earned abroad and being used in Pakistan, the artefact is an HEC equivalence letter; HEC never attests the foreign degree itself.
• For doctoral credentials, HEC maintains the PhD Country Directory, and inclusion in it is a condition of attestation.
• For journal-level questions about a Pakistani applicant’s publication record, the relevant instrument is HJRS, not attestation — see our HJRS categories guide.

HEC’s wider mandate — funding, accreditation, policy — is covered in our overview of Pakistan’s HEC, and the adjacent national funder in our Pakistan Science Foundation guide. This page sits in CASRAI’s research information systems and identifiers cluster alongside comparable national platform guides: India’s VIDWAN and IRINS, Mexico’s CVU under SECIHTI, and Kenya’s NACOSTI portal migration — all of which show the same pattern of a national research-administration service moving hosts and leaving stale instructions behind.

Frequently asked questions

Is eportal.hec.gov.pk the same thing as eservices.hec.gov.pk?

No. They are separate systems on separate hostnames with separate registrations. As of 26 August 2026 both are live, but HEC’s Degree Attestation and foreign-equivalence procedure pages both direct applicants to eServices. An account created on one does not work on the other.

Why does my email address not work as a login?

On the legacy eportal, the User ID field is not an email field. Its own on-screen guidance gives the accepted formats as a 13-digit CNIC with no dashes, or a name-based ID such as firstname.lastname or firstname123. The forgot-password screen does accept an email, which is the practical way to recover the User ID your account was issued.

Can HEC attest my foreign degree?

No. HEC states that degrees awarded by foreign universities and degree-awarding institutions are not attested. HEC issues an equivalence letter against the foreign qualification, and it is that letter which HEC then attests.

Who issues equivalence for a foreign school certificate?

The IBCC, not HEC. HEC’s foreign-equivalence procedure requires grade-10 and grade-12 foreign qualifications to carry an IBCC equivalence certificate, submitted as supporting evidence in the HEC application.

What does HEC attestation cost?

HEC’s Degree Attestation page stated Rs. 3,000 per document when read on 26 August 2026, and states that fees for an incorrectly selected document are not refunded, adjusted or transferred. Equivalence is charged separately: Rs. 5,000 for a foreign qualification, Rs. 2,000 for a local one or a Deeni Asnad. Re-check both before paying; HEC revises fees by notification.

I paid, but my application still shows as not submitted. Why?

Because payment and submission are separate steps. HEC’s guidance states the application remains in saved / pending-payment mode until the fee is verified in the portal — the Verify Payment action in your account is what submits it.

Can I get a personal Turnitin account from HEC?

No. HEC publishes the plagiarism policy, Turnitin SOPs and guidelines, and committee checklists, all addressed to universities. Turnitin access is administered by your institution’s Turnitin administrator, not issued by HEC to individuals.

How long does HEC attestation or equivalence take?

HEC does not publish a processing time or service-level target on these pages, so this guide does not state one. Use the Track Application view in your account, and raise a ticket at onlinehelp.hec.gov.pk or call the published UAN if a case appears stalled.

Sources

• HEC, Degree Attestation — Attestation of Degrees/Diplomas/Certificates, hec.gov.pk/english/services/students/DAS — four-step process, attestable document types, fee, 1-Link payment and Verify Payment, NADRA and CNIC-consistency checks, MS/MPhil NOC after 7 November 2013, PhD Country Directory, PMDC/PNMC upload, foreign-degree exclusion, DAS duplicate-entry warning, support routes. Read 26 August 2026.
• HEC, Equivalence Degree Issuance — Procedure for Equivalence and Foreign Equivalence, hec.gov.pk/english/services/students/DES — Section 10(1)(o) mandate, the three equivalence services, paperless process, application sequence, and the prior-qualification prerequisite chain including IBCC. Read 26 August 2026.
• HEC, Fee for Equivalence, same section — equivalence and duplicate-letter fee tables, and the 1 August 2019 revision note. Read 26 August 2026.
• HEC, Plagiarism Policy & Blacklisted Faculty Members, hec.gov.pk/english/services/faculty/Plagiarism — policy, Turnitin SOPs and guidelines, Plagiarism Standing Committee checklist. Read 26 August 2026.
• HEC Online Portal sign-in, registration and password-recovery screens, eportal.hec.gov.pk/hec-portal-web — User ID formats, CNIC/POC registration fields, the promotional-SMS-block warning, and the published call-centre numbers. Read 26 August 2026.
• HEC E Services Portal, eservices.hec.gov.pk — live status and the www certificate-validation failure, both checked directly on 26 August 2026.

HEC reorganises this estate periodically. Where a detail here conflicts with what HEC’s own pages say today, HEC is the authority.