Rung 01 — Below middle school
53.97 million people aged 21–34. 9.08% hold a regular salaried job, of which 1.66% of the rung is formal work.
Self-contained: everything below is derived from PLFS CY2025 for this rung alone. The ladder-wide
comparison is in ../README.md.
Who is counted
Section titled “Who is counted”| Filter | Value |
|---|---|
release_id |
calendar_2025 |
visit |
V1 — usual principal activity is collected only at the first visit |
gedu_lvl |
01–06: not literate, literate without formal schooling, below primary, primary |
age |
21–34 |
Sample: 34,503 people across 14,056 first-stage units, representing 53.97 million.
This is the largest single rung on the ladder by sample and the second largest by population. It
holds everyone who did not complete middle school, from the never-schooled to those who finished
primary. Nobody here holds any technical qualification — tedu_lvl is 01 for all 34,503.
Why the sub-groups are merged. Not-literate (20.54m), below-primary (6.81m) and primary
(26.38m) are reported together because their labour-market outcomes are indistinguishable at this
resolution and splitting them would imply a precision the wage cells cannot support. Anyone needing
the split can rerun extract.sql with the CASE expanded.
What they are doing
Section titled “What they are doing”| Share | People | |
|---|---|---|
| Formal work — salaried, paid, with a contract or social security | 1.66% | 898k |
| Informal wage work — salaried without either, plus casual labour | 31.34% | 16.91m |
| Self-employed, earning | 15.55% | 8.39m |
| Studying | 0.01% | 3,409 |
| Unemployed, seeking | 0.50% | 267k |
| Domestic duties | 35.25% | 19.02m |
Two numbers define this rung. Informal wage work is nineteen times formal work. And unemployment is 0.50% — not because people are working, but because at this education level almost nobody can afford to search. Being out of work here means domestic duties or informal labour, not a job queue. Any headline “unemployment rate” for this group is close to meaningless.
The gender split is the rung
Section titled “The gender split is the rung”| Share of rung | Formal work | Domestic duties | Median wage | People | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Female | 60.0% | 0.71% | 58.28% | ₹8,000 | 32.39m |
| Male | 40.0% | 3.09% | 0.68% | ₹14,000 | 21.57m |
Six in ten people on this rung are women, and 58% of them are in domestic duties against 0.68% of men. The rung’s 35.25% domestic-duties figure is almost entirely a female figure. A man here is 4.4 times more likely to hold a formal job than a woman, and the women who do work formally earn a median of ₹8,000 a month against men’s ₹14,000.
Reading the rung’s headline 1.66% without this split describes a labour market that does not exist: it is 0.71% for the majority of the people in it.
Urban and rural
Section titled “Urban and rural”| Share | Formal work | Median wage | People | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rural | 77.0% | 0.95% | ₹12,000 | 41.55m |
| Urban | 23.0% | 4.04% | ₹13,500 | 12.42m |
Formal work is four times more likely in a town, but from a base so low that it remains rare everywhere.
What formal work pays, and whether it grows
Section titled “What formal work pays, and whether it grows”Monthly wage among the 1.66% in formal work. Measured on tenure — time in the present activity status — which is available for this rung and preferable to age because it measures time in work directly.
| Tenure | n | p25 | Median | p75 | p90 | ≥₹10k | ≥₹15k | ≥₹20k |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1 year | 37 | ₹9,000 | ₹12,000 | ₹16,000 | ₹20,000 | 61.4% | 27.3% | 6.2% |
| 1 to 3 years | 118 | ₹10,000 | ₹13,500 | ₹16,000 | ₹20,000 | 79.5% | 43.9% | 5.6% |
| Over 3 years | 454 | ₹9,000 | ₹12,000 | ₹15,500 | ₹20,240 | 69.2% | 38.0% | 11.8% |
The median does not move — ₹12,000 at entry, ₹12,000 after three years or more — but this table is not the evidence for that.
The three tenure cells here are not entrants versus veterans. Their mean ages are 27.4, 27.1 and 29.6: 19 of the 37 people in the “under 1 year” cell are aged 27–34, job-changers with a decade of work behind them, and they earn a ₹16,000 median. Restrict to ages 21–26 and the same rung reads ₹10,000 → ₹12,300, a 1.23× rise in line with middle school’s 1.17×. The flat 1.00× is an age-composition artefact of a 37-person cell, not a measurement of stalled wages.
The claim survives on the lifecycle evidence instead — median ₹12,200 at 21–23, ₹12,000 at 30, ₹12,000 at 40, on cells of 4,872 / 8,085 / 18,868. That is the row to cite.
The ₹6 lakh threshold used elsewhere in this analysis is meaningless here — ₹50,000 a month is cleared by 2 people out of 34,503. The thresholds that carry information at this rung are ₹10,000 and ₹15,000, which is why they are the columns above.
Where the formal jobs are
Section titled “Where the formal jobs are”Top occupations among those in formal work:
| Occupation | n | Share | Median wage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manufacturing labourers | 130 | 21.7% | ₹13,240 |
| Agricultural, forestry and fishery labourers | 24 | 7.7% | ₹6,800 |
| Domestic, hotel and office cleaners | 51 | 7.3% | ₹10,000 |
| Refuse workers | 45 | 6.9% | ₹11,000 |
| Market gardeners and crop growers | 33 | 5.5% | ₹6,500 |
| Heavy truck and bus drivers | 22 | 4.8% | ₹15,000 |
Shares are of all formally employed on the rung; occupations with fewer than 15 people are suppressed, so the column sums to 54% rather than 100%.
“Formal” here means a contract or a provident fund contribution, not a desk. A fifth of it is factory labour and another seventh is cleaning and refuse work. The best-paid common occupation is driving.
Across a working life
Section titled “Across a working life”Three life stages. This is a synthetic cohort, not a projection — the age-40 column describes people who are 40 today, not what a 21-year-old on this rung will experience.
| At entry (21–23) | Age 30 | Age 40 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sample n | 4,872 | 8,085 | 18,868 |
| Population | 7.18m | 13.00m | 22.58m |
| — of whom in formal work | 52 | 163 | 364 |
| In formal work | 0.84% | 1.70% | 2.17% |
| Mean wage | ₹13,088 | ₹12,704 | ₹13,904 |
| Median wage | ₹12,200 | ₹12,000 | ₹12,000 |
Twenty years of working life move the mean wage by 6% and the median not at all. Formal employment roughly doubles, from 0.84% to 2.17% — which is to say it goes from almost never to almost never.
“At entry” is ages 21–23 rather than the age this group left school, which was around 13. There is no graduation moment to anchor to, and PLFS at 13–15 is child-labour territory rather than labour-market entry. 21–23 is the earliest age at which this rung’s outcomes can be read as adult labour-market outcomes, and it is used for every school rung so they are comparable.
The same rung at three points in a working life
Section titled “The same rung at three points in a working life”| Life stage | Regular salaried | Of which formal | People |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry | 8.7% | 0.8% | 7.18m |
| Age 30 | 9.5% | 1.7% | 13.00m |
| Age 40 | 9.0% | 2.2% | 22.58m |
Regular salaried is a salaried job of any kind (pas='31'). Formal is the subset that is actually paid and carries a written contract or social security. The difference between the two columns is the informal salaried workforce.
These are three different cohorts, not one cohort ageing. Today’s 40-year-olds finished a different school system in a different labour market from this year’s entrants, so this table shows where each age group stands now. It does not say what today’s entrant will earn at 40.
Entry uses each rung’s own window — three years from that course’s normal completion age; age 30 is ages 29–31 and age 40 is ages 39–41, three-year bands for sample.
What they actually do
Section titled “What they actually do”Job function among those in formal work, rolled up from NCO 2015 three-digit occupation groups by build_job_function.py. NCO orders by skill level before function, so a raw occupation table splits one function across three divisions — software work sits in 251/252, 351/352 and 133. Shares sum to 100; nothing is suppressed.
| Function | Share | People | Public sector | Median wage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Skilled trades & production | 44.03% | 395k | 5.9% | ₹14,000 |
| Hospitality, personal & care services | 21.39% | 192k | 50.7% | ₹10,000 |
| Agriculture, forestry & fishing | 14.86% | 133k | 7.8% | ₹6,500 |
| Transport & logistics | 12.53% | 112k | 14.1% | ₹15,000 |
| Sales & marketing | 2.10% | 19k | 0.0% | ₹12,000 |
| Protective services & armed forces | 1.87% | 17k | 49.7% | ₹11,000 |
| Clerical & office support | 0.75% | 6,723 | 35.9% | ₹15,000 |
| Health & medical | 0.57% | 5,138 | 100.0% | ₹8,500 |
| Law, public administration & policy | 0.56% | 4,990 | 100.0% | ₹12,580 |
| Finance & accounting | 0.55% | 4,954 | 0.0% | ₹9,000 |
| Arts, media, culture & social | 0.43% | 3,878 | 18.2% | ₹10,000 |
| Management & business operations | 0.23% | 2,066 | 0.0% | ₹18,000 |
| Engineering, science & technical | 0.13% | 1,162 | 0.0% | ₹25,300 |
Sample sizes, and what they support
Section titled “Sample sizes, and what they support”| Cut | n |
|---|---|
| The rung, ages 21–34 | 34,503 |
| — in formal work | 609 |
| Formal, tenure under 1 year | 37 |
| Formal, tenure over 3 years | 454 |
| At age 40, in formal work | 364 |
| Earning ≥₹50,000 a month | 2 |
The binding constraint is the entry-tenure cell at 37 people. The claim that the median does not grow rests on comparing 37 people against 454 of the 609 in formal work, and should be read as directional. The claim that formal work is rare — 1.66% on 34,503 people — is among the most precisely measured numbers in this whole analysis.
What this rung does not tell you
Section titled “What this rung does not tell you”The wage figures describe 1.66% of the rung. They say what the rare formal job pays, not what
this population earns. Most of these 54 million people are in informal wage work or self-employment,
where PLFS records no earnings figure comparable to ern_reg.
“Below middle school” is not one group. It merges the never-schooled with primary completers. Their outcomes look alike here, but that is partly a limit of what a 609-person formal-work cell can resolve.
No causation. People who left school before middle school differ from those who did not in ways this cannot see.
Provenance: assumptions governing this note are numbered in ../ASSUMPTIONS.md;
the queries behind every figure are in ../QUERIES.md; every claim’s confidence
grade, and the seven claims this analysis has retracted, are in
../FINDINGS.md. Check a number against FINDINGS before quoting it.