In general, techniques are described that facilitate application of service within MPLS networks. More specifically, a router comprises a forwarding plane, a service plane and a routing engine. The routing engine maintains data defining an association between a handle identifying a property common to a plurality of packets of a particular context and one or more MPLS labels associated with these packets. The routing engine automatically generates and installs a filter to identify these packets within both the forwarding and service planes. The forwarding plane applies the filter to incoming packets to determine whether each of the incoming packets includes a label matching any of the labels of the filter and forwards the incoming packets to the service plane upon a match. The service card selects one or more services identified by the filter and applies the selected one or more services to the incoming packet.