Periodic Labour Force Survey 2025: Earnings aren’t rising for large groups of Indian workers

The PLFS has been in existence since 2017, yielding annual reports for rural and urban areas along with quarterly reports for only urban India. This survey was a departure from the erstwhile Employment and Unemployment Survey (EUS).

For the first time, we had a rotational panel, with households being revisited for four consecutive quarters. The quarterly estimates were based on this rotational sample and were only for urban areas.

These changed in January 2025, with the PLFS adopting a different sampling strategy, wherein a panel of households was surveyed and then revisited for four consecutive months, a shift from the practice of quarterly revisits.

In addition, the rotational panel scheme was extended to rural areas. This allowed the release of monthly estimates of employment and unemployment for both rural and urban areas.

To align with international practices, the NSO also changed the reference period for its annual reports from the agricultural year (July-June) to the calendar year. The changes in sampling design meant that the sample sizes were now almost 2.5 times those of earlier PLFS surveys.

Fortunately, there are no major changes in the conceptual framework for estimating people’s employment characteristics or earnings from employment, making these broadly comparable with earlier estimates.

The monthly series is now available for a sufficiently long period, with the most recent one available for February. The short time gap between the survey and its publication and the high frequency of employment data are consistent with international practices.

A quick examination of monthly estimates points to a fairly stable pattern of employment and unemployment across categories. Even the annual estimates do not suggest major changes in employment patterns over the survey years for males in both rural and urban areas. But there has been a trend of gradually rising female participation in the workforce over the last five years.

That said, the annual report is no less important since it provides estimates of earnings from employment, which are absent in monthly and quarterly PLFS reports. This holds the key to analysing the trend in earnings. Among workers, casual or daily-wage workers are the most vulnerable.

To avoid the covid pandemic’s impact, all trends reported here are for earnings since 2022. The earnings of rural male casual workers fell in nominal terms in 2025 compared to 2024. In real terms (adjusted for inflation), these were down 3%. Notably, these fell in all years after 2022, posting a 2.4% annual between 2022 and 2025.

During this period, the earnings of male casual workers in urban areas also declined, although at a slower rate of 0.2% per annum. In both rural and urban areas, female wages have risen marginally.

Regular workers have fared better, with earnings rising for males a little over 1% between 2022 and 2025. In fact, these saw a significant rise in 2025 after years of decline since 2011-12.

Earnings of the self-employed also rose in 2025—at a rate of 0.8% for rural workers and more than 5% for urban workers. Despite this recovery, the overall earnings of self-employed workers in rural areas are lower in 2025 than their level in 2022, with an annual decline of 1.3%. However, urban areas saw an annual increase of 3.5%, largely driven by earnings growth among females.

These estimates of earnings from employment are not very different from other sources of data on wages, which indicate a stagnation or decline in the earnings of daily-wage workers. In fact, these estimates confirm the trend of wages stagnating for wage workers seen in data from from the Labour Bureau. While there has been some recovery in recent years, it is insignificant, given the long period of stagnation that workers have faced.

The PLFS is an important source of data on employment and unemployment. While the idea of releasing monthly estimates is certainly useful, it is important for these to be supplemented by corresponding data on earnings from employment and the quality of such employment, including the nature of contracts, availability of social security and the nature of work done.

Hopefully, the NSO will incorporate these in its monthly estimates for a better understanding of labour market dynamics in India.

The author is associate professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University and visiting fellow at the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi.