An interactive look at real and nominal earnings for India's regular/salaried, casual, and self-employed workers from PLFS data, 2018 to 2025, showing casual labour wages rose in real terms while salaried and self-employed earnings stayed roughly flat.
The only Indian wage that grew
Real earnings for India's three worker categories, FY2018-19 through 2025. Casual day-labour is the one that got an actual raise.
PLFS splits India's workforce into three categories: regular wage/salaried employees, casual labour, and the self-employed. Between FY2018-19 and 2025, only one of the three saw its earnings rise faster than prices. It wasn't the salaried class, and it wasn't the self-employed. It was casual day-labour — the category with the least security and, on paper, the least bargaining power.
Each line is deflated to September 2025 purchasing power using CPI-IW, chained across the 2016-base revision with the Labour Bureau's own linking factor (2.88). Solid segments use PLFS's original July-June survey year; the lighter, dashed segment from 2022 uses the revamped January-December calendar-year design introduced in 2025, with 2022-2024 back-filled by that redesign's own annual report. The two measurement bases are not identical and shouldn't be read as one continuous line — see the methodology note below.
Casual labour has spent a decade near the bottom of every wage table. A real wage rise of roughly 14-16% in six years — after MGNREGA indexation and a tightening rural labour market post-COVID — is casual labour finally clawing back ground, not a fluke. Meanwhile salaried and self-employed earnings holding flat in real terms, rather than falling, is itself consistent with a broader economy where nominal growth is at least keeping pace with inflation for most workers.
Flat real wages for regular/salaried and self-employed workers across six years of a growing economy is not a success story — it means an entire decade's GDP growth translated into essentially zero real income gain for roughly 78% of India's workforce. Casual labour's gain may simply reflect people being pushed out of salaried and self-employment into worse, less secure daily-wage work, which would show up as a "wage gain" in this narrow sense while representing a deterioration in job quality. The data here can't distinguish between these two stories on its own.
Wages: PLFS Annual Reports 2018-19, 2019-20, 2021-22, 2023-24 (July-June survey year, quarterly first-visit data averaged across four quarters, rural+urban combined, all-India, both sexes) and PLFS Annual Report 2025 (January-December calendar year, revamped design, backfilled 2022-2024), all from mospi.gov.in.
Deflator: CPI-IW (Industrial Workers), Economic Survey 2025-26 Statistical Appendix Table 4.3, sourced to Labour Bureau. Chained across the 2016-base revision using the official linking factor of 2.88. Calendar-year figures are deflated using the fiscal-year CPI-IW average for the fiscal year containing most of that calendar year (e.g. CY2022 ≈ FY2022-23's average, which covers nine of CY2022's twelve months) — a documented approximation, not an exact calendar-year index.
2025 figure: marked as provisional. The CPI-IW anchor for "today's rupees" uses the average of April-November 2025 monthly indices (the most recent available at time of writing), not a full fiscal-year average.
What's missing: FY2020-21 and FY2022-23 on the original July-June basis. The FY2020-21 Annual Report was reachable only as a condensed bulletin without earnings tables; the FY2022-23 full Annual Report could not be located at a stable URL. The calendar-year 2022-2023 figures partially substitute for this gap on a different time basis, which is why the chart shows a basis change rather than a smooth line through it.
Not shown: the FY2017-18 Annual Report reports rural and urban earnings separately with no combined column, so it isn't comparable to the combined figures charted here.