India's Labour Market in 2025
Of every thousand Indians aged fifteen and over in 2025, 574 were at work and 19 were looking for it. The headline unemployment rate, 3.1 per cent, is the number most often quoted, and the least telling.
In 2025 India counted its workers in a new way. The Periodic Labour Force Survey moved to the calendar year, visited each household four months running, and grew to more than two and a half times its old sample. Its first annual report says the labour market held steady: 59.3 of every hundred people aged fifteen and over were in the labour force, 57.4 at work, and 3.1 of every hundred in the labour force without it. Steady is true. It is also the least of what the survey shows.
MoSPI, Periodic Labour Force Survey, January to December 2025 (and calendar 2024), unit-level records 85 of 89 cells MoSPI printed match
- Source
- MoSPI, Periodic Labour Force Survey, January to December 2025 (and calendar 2024), unit-level records: the primary unit-level records, weighted as MoSPI weights them
- Checked
- 85 of 89 cells MoSPI printed match at the printed precision (key; status; industry; education)
- 77 of 87 cells MoSPI printed match at the printed precision (1.1; 1.2; 1.3; 5.2; 5.3; 3.4; 3.1; 3.3; 7.1; 3.5; 11.1; 8.1; 10.2; 10.9; 9.2)
- Methodological notes
- Calendar 2025 is the revamped monthly design and calendar 2024 the old design read on a calendar year; MoSPI warns the two may not be strictly comparable, and this story does not read a trend between them.
- Each dot of a thousand is one in a thousand of its population, rounded so that every thousand adds to a thousand; each rate is the survey’s, with its 95% interval in the figures.
Chapter 1A thousand adults
Three rates describe a labour market, and each has a different denominator, which is where most misreadings begin. The clearest way to see them is to count people rather than per cents.
Picture India's adults as a thousand people. Every dot is one in a thousand Indians aged fifteen and over, as the survey of 2025 counted them.
593 of them are in the labour force: at work, or seeking work and available for it. The other 407 are not.
That is the first rate, labour force participation: 59.3 per cent.
574 are at work. 19 are looking for work and not finding it.
The share of all adults at work, the worker-population ratio, is 57.4 per cent.
The unemployment rate sets the 19 who are seeking work against the 593 in the labour force only, not against everyone: 3.1 per cent.
Whoever has stopped looking, or could never look, is not in it. A low rate can mean that few are without work, or that few can afford to say so.
Outside the labour force is not idleness. Of the 407 outside it, 221 keep house as their main activity, 111 are in education, 47 live on a pension or on rent, and 28 are too ill or too old to work, or otherwise outside it.
Now two thousands: one in the villages, one in the towns. 613 of the village thousand are at work, and 497 of the town's.
Unemployment runs the other way: 2.4 per cent in the villages, 4.8 in the towns.
A village rarely lets anyone be idle. There is a field, a shop, a herd, and a family that cannot afford a member who waits. A town has more people who can afford to wait for the job they trained for, and more jobs worth waiting for.
Chapter 2Half the country, a third of the work
A thousand women, and a thousand men. 400 of the women are in the labour force, and 791 of the men: 40.0 per cent against 79.1.
The women outside it are not resting. 425 of the thousand women give their days mainly to domestic duties; of the thousand men, 12.
The survey counts her as outside the labour force. Her work is unpaid and uncounted.
The village woman who works is usually on her family's land or in its shop: 459 of a thousand rural women are in the labour force.
The town offers fewer such places, and the jobs it offers are often far, late or unsafe to reach: 277 of a thousand.
And the women of the towns who do seek work find it hardest to get: 6.4 per cent of urban women in the labour force could not find work, the highest of the six groups of adults by sex and place.
Chapter 3More schooling, more waiting
Of adults who never learned to read, only 0.3 per cent of those in the labour force were without work. They cannot afford to be unemployed, and take whatever work there is.
With schooling the rate climbs, to 11.2 per cent of graduates, and a little fewer of postgraduates, 10.0.
It is not that education makes people less employable. The educated wait, often with a family's support, for the salaried job their schooling promised. The queue is long because such jobs are few.
Women wait longest: 17.4 per cent of women graduates in the labour force had no work, against 9.0 per cent of men.
Women trace a different line in work itself. 46.9 of every hundred women who cannot read are at work, but only 24.9 of those who finished higher secondary.
Past school the share climbs back: 46.6 with a diploma, 32.4 of graduates, 42.9 of postgraduates.
Between the field and the office lies a long stretch of schooling that takes women out of manual work without bringing them into anything else.
Chapter 4The young
Among the young, aged fifteen to twenty-nine, 9.9 of every hundred in the labour force could not find work, against 3.1 for all adults.
In the towns the figure was 13.6.
For young urban women it was 18.9: about one in 5 of the young women who sought work in India's towns did not find it.
Those who stay longest in education wait longest for work. Of young graduates in the labour force, 22.3 of every hundred were unemployed: of young women graduates 28.4, of young men 19.4.
Chapter 5Between school and work
Unemployment counts only those who look. A thousand young people show who it leaves out.
Of a thousand young people aged fifteen to twenty-nine in 2025, 393 were at work and out of education, 326 were in education, 21 were both, and 260 were in neither.
Split by sex, the two pictures part. 85 of a thousand young men are in neither. Of a thousand young women, 440.
What these young women do is not idleness: 395 of the 440 keep a house. Of the 85 young men in the same place, 59 are looking for work.
The survey counts the first as outside the labour force, and the second as unemployed.
The gap opens with age. Of women aged fifteen to nineteen, 19.2 of every hundred were neither working nor studying; at twenty to twenty-four, 52.7; at twenty-five to twenty-nine, 60.4, when for men of that age it was 7.1.
The survey asks those who left education why. Of young men who had left, 76.0 of every hundred left to add to their household's income; of young women, 61.2 left to attend to its chores. Two exits from the same door: a household that cannot spare its young, and spends its sons' time on wages and its daughters' on the house.
Why young people left education, 2025
From July 2025 the survey asked for the first time who had been coached at an institute for an entrance examination or a government job: 1.6 of every hundred young people, and 4.6 of every hundred young graduates. Few as they are, they are the visible edge of a longer wait: the preparation for a public job that may take years, and that the survey's week cannot see.
Formal training for a trade is rare too: 5.0 of every hundred young people had had formal vocational or technical training. Of everyone aged fifteen to fifty-nine who had, 77.8 of every hundred paid for it themselves or from their household's purse, and 18.4 were trained at the government's expense. The trained work far more often: of women with formal training, 51.4 of every hundred were at work, against 28.5 of women with no training of any kind. The survey cannot say whether training brings work or work brings training; it shows that the two go together, and how rarely the first is offered.
At work, by vocational training, persons aged 15 to 59, 2025
Every figure here, with its margin of error and for rural and urban India, is in the 2025 tables: the young and vocational training; and the Atlas reads them for every State.
Chapter 6Caste, faith and work
India does not live in its averages.
Among men, the household's social group makes little difference to whether they work: 74.4 to 81.8 of every hundred are at work.
Among women it makes a great deal. In households of the Scheduled Tribes, 61.5 of every hundred women were at work. Adivasi women work the family's land and the forest as a matter of course.
In households outside the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes, 29.6. The survey does not say why. Scholars of Indian work have long read a woman's withdrawal from paid work, in better-off households, as a mark of standing.
Faith draws a similar line through women's work, and almost none through men's: 47.5 of every hundred Christian women were at work, 40.5 of Hindu women and 26.8 of Muslim women.
What the work is matters as much as whether there is any. 34.5 of every hundred workers in Scheduled Caste households are casual labourers, paid by the day; in households outside the three groups, 10.4, and 32.2 have a regular wage.
Where a community lives, what it owns and how its households earn explain much of this; the survey records the pattern, not its causes.
Chapter 7What kind of work
Most of India's workers still work for themselves or for their families: 562 of a thousand. 236 have a regular wage or salary; 202 are casual labourers, paid by the day.
A regular wage reached 264 of a thousand working men, and 182 of a thousand working women. 642 of the women are self-employed.
The farm still holds 430 of a thousand workers, the factory 121 and the building site 120; trade and services, 319.
For women the farm is larger still: 598 of a thousand working women, against 343 of a thousand working men. 159 of the men are on a building site, and 46 of the women.
Where do you fit?
Choose who you are, and see what the survey counted for people like you in 2025, beside India as a whole.
Each card is a group the survey counts as a group; the survey does not cross every choice with every other, so the cards are read side by side. Per cent; usual status.
Chapter 8Employment is not security
A low unemployment rate in India is not a sign of good jobs; it is a sign that few can afford to have none. What a job offers, a written contract, paid leave, social security, a wage that keeps a family, is the measure that matters.
Take a thousand of the best jobs the survey counts: regular wage or salaried employees outside farming.
582 of them have no written contract. 473 are not eligible for paid leave. 517 have no social security of any kind: no provident fund or pension, no gratuity, no health care or maternity benefit.
369 of the thousand have none of the three: a regular job, and nothing that makes it secure.
Below them are the casual labourers, paid by the day. Of a thousand, 935 have none of the three.
And what a regular job pays depends on schooling, and on whether the worker is a woman.
A regular job paid a man who cannot read ₹12,574 a month, on average, in 2025.
A man with a postgraduate degree, ₹49,235. Schooling pays, once the job comes.
A woman is paid less than a man at every level of schooling: a woman graduate ₹27,687 a month, a man ₹34,450.
Chapter 9Many labour markets
India's labour market is 36 labour markets. Each dot below is a State or Union Territory; as the measure changes, watch them change places. Choose a State to follow it.
The share of adults in the labour force runs from Delhi 44.2% to Sikkim 74.7%.
Women's participation spreads far wider: from Delhi 13.1% to Sikkim 66.7%.
A regular wage or salary: Dadra & Nagar Haveli & Daman & Diu 74.3% of workers at the top, Bihar 12.0% at the bottom. The States where most adults work are seldom those where work pays a regular wage.
Among regular employees outside farming, the share with no social security of any kind runs from Mizoram 4.6% to Punjab 70.5%.
What a regular job pays in a month: from Punjab ₹16,467 to Ladakh ₹42,060.
And the young who neither work nor study: from Ladakh 7.8% to Lakshadweep 33.7%.
The Atlas reads every State on these measures and more, each with its margin of error, and the 2025 tables give every number in this story.
Employment is not economic security
India's headline numbers tell a story of steadiness. The composition of its employment tells another: who is counted, what work awaits them, and on what terms. The labour market does not simply sort workers into jobs. It carries the country's older divisions, of sex, caste and place, into the work people do.
The authors
Abhinav Kumar works on platform labour, AI and labour, and the political economy of technology. Ananya Pradhan is affiliated with the V. V. Giri National Labour Institute.
Cite this story
Kumar, A., and Pradhan, A. (2026). India's Labour Market in 2025. India Labour Observatory, Release 2026.10. indialabourobservatory.com/stories/indias-labour-market-in-2025/