A man doing general agricultural labour in rural India earned ₹459 a day in Jul 2026, and a woman ₹377.

Between Apr 2013 and Mar 2026, the last month the price index also covers, the men’s wage rose 109% and consumer prices on the industrial workers’ index 90%, so the wage gained 10% after prices. Women earned 82% of the men’s wage in Jul 2026, against 77% in Apr 2013.

Other rural work

Other rural work paid ₹531 a day for construction, ₹492 for harvesting and ₹486 for non-agricultural labour (men, Jul 2026).

Skilled trades, since 1998

A rural mason’s daily wage was ₹102 in Apr 1998 and ₹726 in Mar 2026, 7.1 times as much. Prices rose 5.2 times as much over the same months, so the wage gained 37% after prices.

What this can and cannot tell you

These are wages reported by Labour Bureau for a sample of villages, averaged for all of India, in rupees a day and in the rupees of the month. They are not earnings: they say nothing about how many days of work a person gets. Some months are missing, and the charts leave them out and join the months either side.

Prices here are the linked Consumer Price Index for Industrial Workers, the index used on the pay pages. It tracks the spending of industrial workers’ households, not rural labourers’, so the real changes above are a guide, not a measure of what a labourer’s wage could buy.

Labour Bureau’s file labels each month by fiscal year, with January to March in the following calendar year. The pipeline checks that no month is later than the date the file was retrieved.

Where the numbers come from

• Wage Rates in Rural India (all states), CSV download

  • Fetched automatically

  Labour Bureau, Ministry of Labour and Employment. Retrieved 29 September 2026. Source page.

  • Labour Bureau, Wage Rates in Rural India
  • Daily wage in rupees, as reported for the all-India rural series. Months with no wage collected are left out.
  • The file's year is a fiscal year; January to March fall in the following calendar year.
  • The site's certificate chain is self-signed, so certificate checking was skipped for this public file. The 'Year' label mapping in the file is unverified.

• Linking factors between the bases of the Consumer Price Index for Industrial Workers

  • Entered from documents

  Labour Bureau, Ministry of Labour and Employment. Retrieved 29 September 2026.

  • Economic Survey 2000-01, Statistical Appendix Table 5.3: All India Consumer Price Index Numbers, footnote * (1982 series introduced October 1988; conversion factor from the new to the old series 4.93 for the General index)
  • All India and Centre-wise Linking factors of Consumer Price Index Numbers for Industrial Workers: base 2016=100 to 2001=100 (all-India 2.88) and 2001=100 to 1982=100 (all-India 4.63)
  • Handbook of Statistics on the Indian Economy, Table 34: Consumer Price Index - Annual Average, notes 2 and 4 (linking factors 4.63 and 2.88)
  • The 2001-to-1982 and 2016-to-2001 factors are published by Labour Bureau and repeated in the RBI Handbook. The 1982-to-1960 factor (4.93) appears in one document, the Economic Survey 2000-01, and we found no second publisher for it.
  • The monthly index behind this series is stored as published, per base, in the four cpi-iw series.