Rung 02 — Middle school
50.82 million people aged 21–34. 13.90% hold a regular salaried job, of which 3.57% 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 |
gedu_lvl |
07 — “Literate: middle” |
age |
21–34 |
Sample: 43,149 people across 16,280 first-stage units, representing 50.82 million.
Completed middle school (class 8) and went no further. No one on this rung holds a technical
qualification — tedu_lvl is 01 for all 43,149. This is the single largest sample on the
ladder, and the third largest population.
What they are doing
Section titled “What they are doing”| Share | People | |
|---|---|---|
| Formal work | 3.57% | 1.81m |
| Informal wage work | 29.55% | 15.02m |
| Self-employed, earning | 16.41% | 8.34m |
| Studying | 0.07% | 37k |
| Unemployed, seeking | 1.20% | 611k |
| Domestic duties | 33.01% | 16.78m |
Three more years of school than the rung below — class 5 to class 8 — buys 1.9 percentage points of formal employment, 1.66% to 3.57%. Informal wage work still runs eight times formal work.
Unemployment rises from 0.50% to 1.20%. That is not a worsening; it is the first sign of a labour market where searching is possible at all. Read the bottom of this ladder by the domestic-duties and informal-work columns, never by the unemployment rate.
Gender
Section titled “Gender”| Share of rung | Formal work | Domestic duties | Median wage | People | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Male | 50.1% | 5.96% | 0.24% | ₹14,600 | 25.44m |
| Female | 49.9% | 1.17% | 65.84% | ₹10,000 | 25.38m |
The rung splits evenly by sex and completely by outcome. Two-thirds of the women are in domestic duties, against one in four hundred men. A man is 5.1 times more likely to hold a formal job — a wider gap than the rung below (4.4×), because the male rate rose and the female rate barely moved. For women, middle school delivers almost nothing that primary school did not.
Urban and rural
Section titled “Urban and rural”| Share | Formal work | Median wage | People | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rural | 75.6% | 2.47% | ₹13,000 | 38.44m |
| Urban | 24.4% | 6.98% | ₹14,800 | 12.39m |
What formal work pays, and whether it grows
Section titled “What formal work pays, and whether it grows”Monthly wage among the 3.57% in formal work, measured on tenure.
| Tenure | n | p25 | Median | p75 | p90 | ≥₹15k | ≥₹20k | ≥₹30k |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1 year | 81 | ₹9,000 | ₹12,000 | ₹15,000 | ₹20,000 | 35.9% | 9.9% | 0.0% |
| 1 to 3 years | 412 | ₹10,000 | ₹13,000 | ₹16,000 | ₹20,000 | 47.1% | 20.3% | 8.2% |
| Over 3 years | 963 | ₹10,000 | ₹14,000 | ₹18,000 | ₹23,500 | 48.8% | 19.3% | 2.1% |
The median rises 1.17× over three-plus years — ₹12,000 to ₹14,000. Real, but small: three years of work adds ₹2,000 a month.
₹50,000 a month is cleared by 1 person out of 43,149. The ₹6 lakh threshold used for graduates elsewhere in this analysis carries no information here, which is why the columns above stop at ₹30,000.
Where the formal jobs are
Section titled “Where the formal jobs are”| Occupation | n | Share | Median wage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manufacturing labourers | 289 | 20.9% | ₹13,000 |
| Domestic, hotel and office cleaners | 83 | 6.6% | ₹12,000 |
| Heavy truck and bus drivers | 74 | 5.9% | ₹16,000 |
| Transport and storage labourers | 53 | 4.8% | ₹14,000 |
| Agricultural, forestry and fishery labourers | 29 | 4.7% | ₹6,800 |
| Protective service workers | 79 | 4.6% | ₹12,000 |
Shares are of all formally employed on the rung. Occupations with fewer than 15 people are suppressed and further rows below the top six are not listed, so this table sums to less than the rung’s total.
A fifth of formal work is factory labour. The distinguishing feature against the rung below is the appearance of protective service work — security guards — as a route into a contract.
Across a working life
Section titled “Across a working life”Synthetic cohort, not a projection. The age-40 column describes people who are 40 today.
| At entry (21–23) | Age 30 | Age 40 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sample n | 8,935 | 8,542 | 10,042 |
| Population | 9.99m | 10.39m | 10.46m |
| — of whom in formal work | 245 | 315 | 503 |
| In formal work | 2.70% | 4.42% | 5.43% |
| Mean wage | ₹14,120 | ₹14,516 | ₹15,571 |
| Median wage | ₹12,500 | ₹15,000 | ₹15,000 |
Twenty years add 10% to the mean wage. Formal employment doubles, 2.70% to 5.43%, and remains rare. The median moves once — ₹12,500 to ₹15,000 by age 30 — and then stops.
“At entry” is ages 21–23 rather than the age this group left school, around 14. There is no graduation-to-work moment to anchor to; 21–23 is used for every school rung so they compare.
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 | 13.4% | 2.7% | 9.99m |
| Age 30 | 15.1% | 4.4% | 10.39m |
| Age 40 | 16.3% | 5.4% | 10.46m |
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 | 46.13% | 837k | 2.6% | ₹14,000 |
| Hospitality, personal & care services | 16.02% | 291k | 34.0% | ₹12,000 |
| Transport & logistics | 14.65% | 266k | 8.9% | ₹15,000 |
| Agriculture, forestry & fishing | 6.09% | 110k | 6.1% | ₹6,800 |
| Sales & marketing | 5.95% | 108k | 0.1% | ₹13,000 |
| Protective services & armed forces | 4.59% | 83k | 36.0% | ₹12,000 |
| Clerical & office support | 3.88% | 70k | 25.0% | ₹15,000 |
| Health & medical | 1.06% | 19k | 55.8% | ₹8,000 |
| Engineering, science & technical | 0.65% | 12k | 30.1% | ₹15,000 |
| Finance & accounting | 0.51% | 9,185 | 0.0% | ₹12,400 |
| Software & IT | 0.17% | 3,059 | 0.0% | ₹16,800 |
| Law, public administration & policy | 0.14% | 2,623 | 100.0% | ₹1,500 |
| Arts, media, culture & social | 0.11% | 2,021 | 0.0% | ₹7,000 |
1 further function(s) each under 0.05% are omitted from the table but remain in the denominator.
Sample sizes
Section titled “Sample sizes”| Cut | n |
|---|---|
| The rung, ages 21–34 | 43,149 |
| — in formal work | 1,456 |
| Formal, tenure under 1 year | 81 |
| Formal, tenure over 3 years | 963 |
| At age 40, in formal work | 503 |
| Earning ≥₹50,000 a month | 1 |
The entry cell of 81 is the binding constraint on the growth claim. The employment rate itself, 3.57% on 43,149 people, is precisely measured.
What this rung does not tell you
Section titled “What this rung does not tell you”The wage figures describe 3.57% of the rung. Nearly half of these 51 million people are in informal wage work or self-employment, where PLFS records no comparable earnings figure.
The female column is close to a floor. At 1.17% formal employment on a 49.9% share, almost every statement about “middle school leavers in the labour market” is a statement about men.
No causation. People who stopped at middle school differ from those who continued 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.