The Labour Commissioner's office Indore, Madhya Pradesh on 30 September 2026 has notified minimum wage rates and variable dearness allowance (VDA) under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, effective 1 October 2026 to 31 March 2027. Following Indore bench High Court orders of 10 February and 20 March 2025, the Labour Department's March 04, 2024 minimum wage revision applies again, with VDA, to all notified employments except three: textile and made-ups, apparel from woven, knitted and technical textile fabric, and footwear manufacture. Those three new employments are covered separately in Section A, while Section B covers the remaining 67 scheduled employments, along with agriculture, bidi, agarbatti and government daily-wage workers.
The VDA is linked to the all-India consumer price index (base 2001=100), which averaged 431 for January to June 2026, up 6 points from the previous half-year average of 425. At Rs 25 per index point, VDA is Rs 3,000 per month (Rs 115.38 per day) for the 67 employments in Section B, and Rs 4,750 per month (Rs 182.69 per day) for semi-skilled, skilled and highly skilled workers in the three new employments, or Rs 4,450 (Rs 171.15 per day) for unskilled workers there.
Including VDA, monthly wages in Section B are Rs 12,575 for unskilled, Rs 13,571 for semi-skilled, Rs 15,294 for skilled and Rs 16,919 for highly skilled workers. In Section A, they are Rs 10,950, Rs 11,807, Rs 13,185 and Rs 14,485 respectively. Daily rates are based on a 26-day month, and employers may not reduce pay for workers already earning more than the notified rates. The scan covers only pages 1 to 10 and is of low quality in places, so the rates for agriculture, bidi, agarbatti and daily-wage workers are not included, and the figures should be checked against the original.
