Minimum Wages in India

There is no single minimum wage in India

Minimum wages have sat in the Code on Wages, 2019 since 21 November 2025, when it replaced the Minimum Wages Act, 1948. The Code still leaves the actual rates to state governments, and every rate notified under the old Act stays payable under the savings in section 69(2), so payroll runs on most of the same notifications it did before. What changed is the reach. The Code has no schedule of employments and no scheduled employment gateway, so the floor now binds all employment, not only the industries a state chose to list. States still notify separately per employment, and Maharashtra alone runs around sixty, so a rate for shops and establishments tells you nothing reliable about construction, security services or manufacturing in the same state.

Every rate is made of two parts: a basic component that changes rarely, and an allowance indexed to the Consumer Price Index for Industrial Workers. Section 7 of the Code calls this the cost of living allowance; the notifications, and everyone who works with them, call it the variable dearness allowance. It is the part that moves at each revision, which is why minimum wages rise twice a year in most states without any new policy decision. The Code sets no revision interval; the twice-yearly cycle comes from the notifications themselves. Section 50 obliges the employer to issue wage slips in the prescribed form and to display category-wise wage rates, the wage period and the pay day on the notice board.

Most underpayment happens by accident. A payroll configuration is set correctly at one revision, then quietly goes out of date at the next. Each page below states the effective date and the next revision due, so a stale rate is easy to spot.