Rung 07 — Degree, engineering
5.42 million people aged 21–34. 56.92% hold a regular salaried job, of which 52.58% of the rung is formal work — the highest of any first degree, though two postgraduate rungs beat it.
Self-contained for the ladder. A deeper treatment of this rung already exists in
../../plfs/entry/ENGINEERING.md, which
covers how the entry age window was chosen, the tenure-versus-age instrument, the bootstrapped check
on the ₹6 lakh figure, and the threshold grid. This note adds what that one does not have — the
occupation mix, the gender split, and the position on the ladder — and does not repeat it.
Who is counted
Section titled “Who is counted”| Filter | Value |
|---|---|
release_id |
calendar_2025 |
visit |
V1 |
gedu_lvl |
12 — graduate, not postgraduate |
tedu_lvl |
03 — “Technical degree in engineering/technology” |
age |
21–34 |
Sample: 4,734 people across 3,035 first-stage units, representing 5.42 million.
Degrees only. Engineering diplomas are rung 05 and reach 30.77% formal employment against this rung’s 52.58% — the single clearest measure in this analysis of what the degree adds over the diploma.
What they are doing
Section titled “What they are doing”| Share | People | |
|---|---|---|
| Formal work | 52.58% | 2.85m |
| Informal wage work | 4.29% | 232k |
| Self-employed, earning | 7.84% | 424k |
| Studying | 6.05% | 327k |
| Unemployed, seeking | 15.46% | 837k |
| Domestic duties | 7.79% | 422k |
Two numbers stand out against every rung below.
Informal wage work is 4.29% — the lowest on the ladder, against 31.34% at the bottom. An engineering degree does not just raise the chance of work; it changes the kind of work available. Almost nobody with this degree ends up in informal wage labour.
Unemployment is 15.46%, the second-highest on the ladder (only “other technical degree” is higher at 17.87%). This is not a contradiction. Below middle school unemployment reads 0.50% because searching is unaffordable; here it reads 15.46% because searching is both affordable and worth doing. The bottom of the ladder does not queue for jobs. This rung queues.
Gender
Section titled “Gender”| Share of rung | Formal work | Domestic duties | Median wage | People | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Male | 71.8% | 56.37% | 0.07% | ₹37,500 | 3.89m |
| Female | 28.2% | 42.95% | 27.41% | ₹37,500 | 1.53m |
The medians are identical at ₹37,500 — the only rung where that is true. Read it as “no measurable wage gap” rather than “exactly zero”: the distribution is flat through that range (p45 = ₹35,000 and p55 = ₹40,000 for both sexes), so any median landing in the gap would tie. The weighted means, ₹45,350 for men and ₹46,704 for women, make the same point less crisply and in the same direction. The employment gap is 1.3×, the narrowest of any rung except medicine.
The qualification, however, does not undo everything: 27.41% of women here are in domestic duties against 0.07% of men, and women are 28.2% of the rung.
Urban and rural
Section titled “Urban and rural”| Share | Formal work | Median wage | People | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Urban | 74.1% | 58.18% | ₹40,000 | 4.01m |
| Rural | 25.9% | 36.61% | ₹32,000 | 1.41m |
The only rung that is majority urban — three in four. Every rung below is 59–77% rural.
What formal work pays
Section titled “What formal work pays”Monthly wage among the 52.58% in formal work, measured on tenure.
| Tenure | n | p25 | Median | p75 | p90 | ≥₹30k | ≥₹50k | ≥₹75k |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1 year | 182 | ₹20,000 | ₹25,000 | ₹35,000 | ₹50,000 | 39.7% | 11.2% | 2.2% |
| 1 to 3 years | 762 | ₹25,000 | ₹34,500 | ₹45,000 | ₹65,000 | 69.6% | 24.4% | 7.6% |
| Over 3 years | 1,216 | ₹30,000 | ₹42,000 | ₹60,000 | ₹80,000 | 82.0% | 42.9% | 15.8% |
Median rises 1.68×. The share clearing ₹50,000 a month goes 11.2% → 42.9%.
The detailed treatment — including that the age window was checked against tenure and reads
slightly generous, and that 4.42% of the entry cohort clears ₹6 lakh with a bootstrapped interval of
[2.19%, 7.19%] — is in
ENGINEERING.md.
Where the formal jobs are
Section titled “Where the formal jobs are”| Occupation | n | Share | Median wage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software and application developers | 858 | 45.8% | ₹43,700 |
| Engineering professionals | 250 | 10.2% | ₹40,000 |
| Electrotechnology engineers | 65 | 2.6% | ₹40,000 |
| General office clerks | 62 | 2.4% | ₹30,000 |
| ICT professionals | 52 | 2.4% | ₹32,500 |
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.
Nearly half of all formally employed engineering graduates are software developers — 45.8%. No other rung is close: the largest single occupation is 21.7% at the bottom rung, 20.9% at middle school, and under 16% everywhere else.
This is the central fact about Indian engineering employment: the degree is, in practice, a software-industry credential. Adding electrotechnology and ICT takes the software-adjacent share to 50.7%. The wage premium follows the same line — developers earn ₹43,700 median against ₹30,000 for the office clerks who hold the same degree.
Across a working life
Section titled “Across a working life”Synthetic cohort, not a projection.
| At entry (22–24) | Age 30 | Age 40 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sample n | 1,042 | 1,121 | 245 |
| Population | 1.16m | 1.24m | 277k |
| — of whom in formal work | 304 | 620 | 168 |
| In formal work | 34.65% | 63.05% | 75.62% |
| Still studying | 16.70% | 0.46% | 0.00% |
| Mean wage | ₹33,771 | ₹48,719 | ₹69,834 |
| Median wage | ₹30,000 | ₹40,000 | ₹55,000 |
Three in four hold a formal job at 40, and the mean wage is ₹69,834 — both the highest on the ladder. Twenty years multiply the mean by 2.07×.
The age-40 cell holds 245 people. It is also the most selected column in this analysis: a 40-year-old engineering graduate today qualified around 2008, when far fewer people did. Read it as what senior engineers earn now, not as a forecast for a current graduate.
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 | 37.5% | 34.6% | 1.16m |
| Age 30 | 68.5% | 63.0% | 1.24m |
| Age 40 | 78.4% | 75.6% | 277k |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Software & IT | 51.63% | 1.47m | 1.8% | ₹42,000 |
| Engineering, science & technical | 21.27% | 606k | 14.4% | ₹36,000 |
| Clerical & office support | 5.76% | 164k | 54.7% | ₹28,000 |
| Sales & marketing | 4.79% | 136k | 4.8% | ₹24,500 |
| Management & business operations | 4.65% | 132k | 24.0% | ₹42,500 |
| Skilled trades & production | 3.55% | 101k | 18.9% | ₹22,000 |
| Finance & accounting | 2.90% | 83k | 18.3% | ₹27,000 |
| Teaching & education | 1.85% | 53k | 48.2% | ₹25,000 |
| Protective services & armed forces | 1.20% | 34k | 78.1% | ₹33,000 |
| Law, public administration & policy | 1.16% | 33k | 100.0% | ₹45,000 |
| Hospitality, personal & care services | 0.42% | 12k | 23.4% | ₹35,000 |
| Health & medical | 0.36% | 10k | 64.2% | ₹20,000 |
| Transport & logistics | 0.36% | 10k | 97.4% | ₹45,000 |
| Agriculture, forestry & fishing | 0.09% | 2,476 | 65.8% | ₹8,000 |
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 | 4,734 |
| — in formal work | 2,160 |
| Formal, tenure under 1 year | 182 |
| Formal, tenure over 3 years | 1,216 |
| At age 40, in formal work | 168 |
| Earning ≥₹50,000 a month | 645 |
The best-measured rung above the school levels. The ≥₹50,000 cell of 645 is the largest on the ladder outside the general-degree and postgraduate rungs.
What this rung does not tell you
Section titled “What this rung does not tell you”No branch detail. PLFS records “engineering/technology” and nothing finer — there is no computer-science-versus-mechanical split anywhere in this data. The 45.8% software share is an occupation, not a degree branch.
Postgraduates are excluded — 13.1% of engineering-degree holders go on to complete one (709 people, who sit on rung 11), the lowest progression rate of any degree rung. This rung is therefore “engineering graduates who did not do a master’s”, and any comparison against rung 11 is between a field-pure pool and a field-mixed one.
Selection, not causation, against the diploma rung and against everything else.
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.