Rung 03 — Secondary (10th)
34.03 million people aged 21–34. 17.75% hold a regular salaried job, of which 5.95% 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 |
08 — “Literate: secondary” |
age |
21–34 |
Sample: 41,434 people across 16,888 first-stage units, representing 34.03 million.
Passed class 10 and went no further. No one here holds a technical qualification — tedu_lvl is
01 for all 41,434. Anyone who took a diploma after 10th sits on rung 05 or 06 instead, and that
matters: the technical-diploma rung reaches 30.77% formal employment against this rung’s 5.95%, so the
comparison between them is the clearest measure in this analysis of what a technical qualification
adds to a 10th-pass.
What they are doing
Section titled “What they are doing”| Share | People | |
|---|---|---|
| Formal work | 5.95% | 2.02m |
| Informal wage work | 24.96% | 8.49m |
| Self-employed, earning | 16.94% | 5.76m |
| Studying | 0.78% | 266k |
| Unemployed, seeking | 1.98% | 674k |
| Domestic duties | 34.46% | 11.73m |
Formal work rises from 3.57% to 5.95% against the rung below — the largest proportional step so far, but still one formal job for every four informal ones.
Gender
Section titled “Gender”| Share of rung | Formal work | Domestic duties | Median wage | People | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Male | 49.7% | 10.18% | 0.36% | ₹15,000 | 16.90m |
| Female | 50.3% | 1.77% | 68.11% | ₹10,000 | 17.13m |
The gender gap here is 5.8×, the widest point measured — though not distinguishable from middle school’s 5.1× (t = 0.69 on cluster standard errors), so read the school rungs as uniformly bad rather than ranked. Male formal employment has now cleared 10%, while the female rate is 1.77% and 68% of women are in domestic duties — the highest share of any rung. Each additional year of school through the secondary stage raises men’s formal employment and leaves women’s roughly where it was.
What is firm is what happens after: 4.7× at higher secondary, then a collapse to 1.6× at a technical diploma and 1.3× with an engineering degree. The divergence is a feature of school-level education, and it ends at the diploma.
Urban and rural
Section titled “Urban and rural”| Share | Formal work | Median wage | People | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rural | 70.0% | 4.22% | ₹13,500 | 23.83m |
| Urban | 30.0% | 9.99% | ₹15,000 | 10.20m |
What formal work pays, and whether it grows
Section titled “What formal work pays, and whether it grows”Monthly wage among the 5.95% in formal work, measured on tenure.
| Tenure | n | p25 | Median | p75 | p90 | ≥₹15k | ≥₹20k | ≥₹30k |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1 year | 159 | ₹10,700 | ₹13,000 | ₹16,000 | ₹20,000 | 57.7% | 12.2% | 0.3% |
| 1 to 3 years | 686 | ₹11,000 | ₹14,300 | ₹18,000 | ₹22,000 | 55.2% | 19.7% | 1.8% |
| Over 3 years | 1,423 | ₹12,000 | ₹15,000 | ₹20,000 | ₹26,000 | 61.6% | 30.0% | 5.3% |
The median rises 1.15× over three-plus years — ₹13,000 to ₹15,000. The upper quartile moves more than the median: p75 goes ₹16,000 to ₹20,000 and the share above ₹20,000 rises from 12.2% to 30.0%. Growth on this rung is concentrated in the people who were already doing better.
₹50,000 a month is cleared by 10 people out of 41,434. Ten is not a base for any claim; it is recorded so the reader knows the ceiling exists and is nearly empty.
Where the formal jobs are
Section titled “Where the formal jobs are”| Occupation | n | Share | Median wage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manufacturing labourers | 349 | 13.3% | ₹14,000 |
| Protective service workers | 161 | 6.7% | ₹15,000 |
| Garment and related trades workers | 52 | 5.6% | ₹13,200 |
| Shop salespersons | 82 | 5.2% | ₹12,000 |
| Car, van and motorcycle drivers | 91 | 4.5% | ₹15,000 |
| Domestic, hotel and office cleaners | 93 | 4.1% | ₹13,000 |
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.
Factory labour falls from a fifth of formal work at middle school to an eighth here, and retail and security work take its place. The mix broadens; the wages do not change much.
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 | 8,595 | 8,138 | 7,136 |
| Population | 6.80m | 6.92m | 6.16m |
| — of whom in formal work | 371 | 501 | 613 |
| In formal work | 5.33% | 6.77% | 8.31% |
| Mean wage | ₹14,870 | ₹17,415 | ₹19,167 |
| Median wage | ₹14,000 | ₹15,000 | ₹16,000 |
Twenty years add 29% to the mean wage — the first rung where lifetime wage growth is clearly visible. It is still the case that fewer than one in eleven holds a formal job at 40.
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 | 17.4% | 5.3% | 6.80m |
| Age 30 | 18.6% | 6.8% | 6.92m |
| Age 40 | 19.6% | 8.3% | 6.16m |
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 | 45.96% | 930k | 4.9% | ₹15,000 |
| Hospitality, personal & care services | 11.45% | 232k | 46.4% | ₹13,000 |
| Transport & logistics | 11.17% | 226k | 14.0% | ₹15,000 |
| Sales & marketing | 9.46% | 191k | 3.0% | ₹15,000 |
| Clerical & office support | 6.80% | 138k | 40.0% | ₹16,500 |
| Protective services & armed forces | 6.68% | 135k | 36.0% | ₹15,000 |
| Health & medical | 3.28% | 66k | 77.9% | ₹8,000 |
| Engineering, science & technical | 2.03% | 41k | 23.6% | ₹18,000 |
| Agriculture, forestry & fishing | 0.98% | 20k | 33.0% | ₹11,568 |
| Finance & accounting | 0.76% | 15k | 23.4% | ₹15,000 |
| Management & business operations | 0.69% | 14k | 14.3% | ₹18,500 |
| Software & IT | 0.37% | 7,541 | 0.0% | ₹15,000 |
| Arts, media, culture & social | 0.15% | 2,994 | 61.7% | ₹4,500 |
| Teaching & education | 0.13% | 2,674 | 43.8% | ₹3,000 |
| Law, public administration & policy | 0.10% | 2,077 | 100.0% | ₹3,000 |
Sample sizes
Section titled “Sample sizes”| Cut | n |
|---|---|
| The rung, ages 21–34 | 41,434 |
| — in formal work | 2,268 |
| Formal, tenure under 1 year | 159 |
| Formal, tenure over 3 years | 1,423 |
| At age 40, in formal work | 613 |
| Earning ≥₹50,000 a month | 10 |
Cells here are healthier than the rungs below: the growth claim rests on 159 against 1,423, and the wage percentiles are stable.
What this rung does not tell you
Section titled “What this rung does not tell you”The wage figures describe 5.95% of the rung. A quarter of these 34 million people are in informal wage work, where PLFS records no comparable earnings figure.
The comparison with diplomas is not causal. People who took a diploma after 10th differ from those who stopped, in ways this data cannot see. The 5.95% versus 30.77% gap is what the two groups look like, not what the diploma did.
No causation anywhere else either.
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.