Rung 08 — Degree, medical
0.85 million people aged 21–34. 45.67% hold a regular salaried job, of which 32.41% of the rung is formal work. 18.82% are still studying.
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 |
12 — graduate, not postgraduate |
tedu_lvl |
04 — “Technical degree in medicine” |
age |
21–34 |
Sample: 885 people across 775 first-stage units, representing 0.85 million. The smallest rung on the ladder.
“Medicine” here is not doctors
Section titled ““Medicine” here is not doctors”This is the most important thing to know before reading any number below. PLFS’s tedu_lvl='04' is
a degree in medicine in the broad sense, and the occupation mix shows what that means in practice:
| Occupation among those in formal work | Share | People |
|---|---|---|
| Medical doctors | 24.2% | |
| Nursing and midwifery professionals | 19.6% | |
| Nursing and midwifery associate professionals | 12.2% | |
| Medical and pharmaceutical technicians | 9.8% | |
| Other health professionals | 5.7% |
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 quarter are doctors. Nearly a third are nurses. Every rung-level figure here is a weighted average across those groups, and they earn very differently — ₹50,000 median for doctors against ₹21,800 for nursing professionals and ₹18,000 for nursing associates.
Anyone needing doctors specifically must identify them by occupation (NCO group 221), not by this education code. That is what the separate NIRF analysis does, and why.
What they are doing
Section titled “What they are doing”| Share | People | |
|---|---|---|
| Formal work | 32.41% | 275k |
| Informal wage work | 12.67% | 108k |
| Self-employed, earning | 10.80% | 92k |
| Studying | 18.82% | 160k |
| Unemployed, seeking | 8.51% | 72k |
| Domestic duties | 10.52% | 89k |
The studying share is the highest of any degree rung — 18.82%, against 6.05% for engineering. This is postgraduate training: NEET-PG, MDS, nursing specialisations. Formal employment of 32.41% looks low against engineering’s 52.58%, but a fifth of this rung has not finished training rather than failed to find work.
Unemployment is 8.51%, roughly half engineering’s rate.
Gender — equal employment, unequal pay
Section titled “Gender — equal employment, unequal pay”| Share of rung | Formal work | Domestic duties | Median wage | People | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Female | 55.1% | 32.94% | 19.08% | ₹25,000 | 468k |
| Male | 44.9% | 31.75% | 0.00% | ₹35,000 | 381k |
Women are a majority of this rung, at 55.1% — the only rung where that is true.
Their formal employment reads 32.94% against men’s 31.75%, but that difference is not real. Cluster-robust standard errors are ±3.30 and ±3.74 points, so the 1.19-point gap has t = 0.24 on 485 women and 400 men. It is a coin flip. What the data supports is that medicine is the rung where the gender gap in employment disappears — not that women are ahead.
And the wage gap is the widest of any degree rung: women earn ₹25,000 median against men’s ₹35,000, a 29% shortfall. Engineering, by contrast, has an employment gap and no wage gap; medicine has no employment gap and a large wage gap.
The occupation table explains it. Doctors earn ₹50,000 and nurses ₹21,800, and the split between those roles is heavily gendered. This is not equal work paid unequally — it is unequal access to the better-paid role inside the same education category. Which of those is the more troubling finding is not something this data can settle.
Urban and rural
Section titled “Urban and rural”| Share | Formal work | Median wage | People | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Urban | 59.1% | 38.17% | ₹32,000 | 502k |
| Rural | 40.9% | 24.09% | ₹20,000 | 348k |
The rural median is 38% below the urban one — the widest urban-rural wage gap of any degree rung.
What formal work pays
Section titled “What formal work pays”Monthly wage among the 32.41% in formal work, measured on tenure.
| Tenure | n | p25 | Median | p75 | p90 | ≥₹30k | ≥₹50k |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1 year | 43 | ₹16,000 | ₹25,000 | ₹35,000 | ₹50,000 | 34.7% | 10.3% |
| 1 to 3 years | 125 | ₹17,000 | ₹25,000 | ₹40,000 | ₹60,000 | 43.0% | 15.6% |
| Over 3 years | 124 | ₹20,000 | ₹35,000 | ₹50,000 | ₹68,000 | 55.0% | 24.9% |
The median rises 1.40× over three-plus years. The p25 barely moves — ₹16,000 to ₹20,000 — while p75 goes ₹35,000 to ₹50,000. Growth on this rung accrues to the upper half, which is consistent with the doctor/nurse split widening over a career rather than converging.
Cells here are thin: 43 at entry and 124 at 3+ years. These are among the smallest wage cells in the whole analysis and every figure in this table should be read as indicative.
Across a working life
Section titled “Across a working life”Synthetic cohort, not a projection.
| At entry (24–26) | Age 30 | Age 40 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sample n | 317 | 154 | 53 |
| Population | 306k | 138k | 44k |
| — of whom in formal work | 85 | 70 | 25 |
| In formal work | 26.74% | 40.59% | 49.53% |
| Still studying | 23.00% | 7.37% | 0.00% |
| Mean wage | ₹30,237 | ₹40,319 | ₹51,608 |
| Median wage | ₹23,000 | ₹35,000 | ₹40,000 |
The age-40 column rests on 53 people, 25 of them in formal work. It should not be quoted as a point estimate. It is included for completeness and because its direction agrees with every other rung, not because it is measured well.
The entry window is 24–26 rather than 21–23, because MBBS is five and a half years including internship, so a medical graduate is licensed at about 23.5. Even so, 23% are still studying at that age.
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 | 40.2% | 26.7% | 306k |
| Age 30 | 55.6% | 40.6% | 138k |
| Age 40 | 49.5% | 49.5% | 44k (n=53 — too thin to read as a rate) |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Health & medical | 76.12% | 210k | 32.1% | ₹28,550 |
| Sales & marketing | 6.77% | 19k | 4.9% | ₹21,000 |
| Clerical & office support | 4.32% | 12k | 64.3% | ₹35,000 |
| Software & IT | 3.32% | 9,133 | 0.0% | ₹55,000 |
| Teaching & education | 3.23% | 8,884 | 1.6% | ₹22,000 |
| Engineering, science & technical | 2.39% | 6,568 | 11.8% | ₹25,000 |
| Management & business operations | 1.33% | 3,650 | 0.0% | ₹25,000 |
| Finance & accounting | 1.24% | 3,422 | 0.0% | ₹25,000 |
| Agriculture, forestry & fishing | 0.81% | 2,239 | 0.0% | ₹45,000 |
| Skilled trades & production | 0.48% | 1,320 | 73.2% | ₹15,180 |
Sample sizes
Section titled “Sample sizes”| Cut | n |
|---|---|
| The rung, ages 21–34 | 885 |
| — in formal work | 292 |
| Formal, tenure under 1 year | 43 |
| Formal, tenure over 3 years | 124 |
| At age 40, in formal work | 25 |
| Earning ≥₹50,000 a month | 61 |
This is the thinnest rung on the ladder and the caveats are proportionate. In the companion
graduate analysis this same population fails the n≥50 rule and falls back to age bands. This ladder
applies no such rule — see ../ASSUMPTIONS.md G5 — so the tenure table above
is published at n=43. Neither lens is strong here.
What this rung does not tell you
Section titled “What this rung does not tell you”It is not a doctors rung. Doctors are 24.2% of its formal workers; nursing, technician and allied-health roles are 47.3%, and a further 29% are in occupations too small to name. Any statement about “medical graduates” from this data is a statement about the health workforce broadly.
The gender wage gap is an occupation gap. It reflects who becomes a doctor and who becomes a nurse, not differential pay for identical work — which this data cannot test.
Everything rests on 885 people, and the age-40 and entry-tenure cells on far fewer.
Selection, not causation.
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.