Rung 09 — Degree, other technical
2.27 million people aged 21–34. 33.55% hold a regular salaried job, of which 24.85% of the rung is formal work. 17.87% are unemployed — the highest rate on the ladder.
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 |
02 agriculture (n=125), 05 crafts (n=29), 06 other subjects (n=2,157) |
age |
21–34 |
Sample: 2,311 people across 1,720 first-stage units, representing 2.27 million.
This rung is 93% code 06, “technical degree in other subjects” — a residual category PLFS
never defines further. Agriculture and crafts are too small to read separately (125 and 29 people).
So in practice this is “professional degree that is not engineering and not medicine”, and the
occupation table is the only way to see what that means:
| Occupation among those in formal work | Share | Median wage |
|---|---|---|
| Primary school and early childhood teachers | 15.8% | ₹26,000 |
| Software and application developers | 14.4% | ₹35,000 |
| Secondary education teachers | 8.1% | ₹22,000 |
| General office clerks | 3.8% | ₹35,000 |
| Finance professionals | 3.7% | ₹26,000 |
Shares are of all formally employed on the rung. This rung has the most suppressed cells on the ladder — every occupation with 15 or more people sums to just 52%, so nearly half its formal workers are in occupations too small to name individually.
Teaching is the largest identifiable destination — primary and secondary teachers together are 23.9%, ahead of software developers at 14.4%, who earn ₹35,000 against teachers’ ₹22,000–26,000. An earlier version of this note said teaching was 45.9% and called this “the B.Ed rung”; that rested on a denominator bug and is withdrawn. Teaching is the plurality, not the majority.
Reading this rung as one thing is a mistake. It is at least two labour markets — school teaching and IT — sharing a residual education code, plus a long tail of occupations too small to name that account for nearly half its formal workers.
What they are doing
Section titled “What they are doing”| Share | People | |
|---|---|---|
| Formal work | 24.85% | 565k |
| Informal wage work | 8.17% | 186k |
| Self-employed, earning | 8.32% | 189k |
| Studying | 13.02% | 296k |
| Unemployed, seeking | 17.87% | 406k |
| Domestic duties | 16.24% | 369k |
Unemployment of 17.87% is the highest of any rung on the ladder — above engineering’s 15.46% and more than triple higher secondary’s 3.59%. Combined with 13.02% still studying, nearly a third of this rung is neither working nor settled.
A professional degree outside engineering and medicine buys a long search. Formal employment of 24.85% is below both diploma rungs (30.77% and 25.80%), despite three or four more years of study.
Gender
Section titled “Gender”| Share of rung | Formal work | Domestic duties | Median wage | People | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Female | 52.4% | 20.12% | 30.89% | ₹25,000 | 1.19m |
| Male | 47.6% | 30.06% | 0.11% | ₹27,650 | 1.08m |
A majority-female rung, consistent with teaching being its largest destination. The employment gap is 1.5× and the wage gap is small — ₹25,000 against ₹27,650 — but 30.89% of women here are in domestic duties.
Urban and rural
Section titled “Urban and rural”| Share | Formal work | Median wage | People | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rural | 50.4% | 17.87% | ₹23,615 | 1.15m |
| Urban | 49.6% | 31.96% | ₹27,000 | 1.13m |
Evenly split, unlike engineering’s 74% urban — consistent with school teaching being distributed where children are.
What formal work pays
Section titled “What formal work pays”Monthly wage among the 24.85% in formal work, measured on tenure.
| Tenure | n | p25 | Median | p75 | p90 | ≥₹30k | ≥₹50k |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1 year | 47 | ₹14,300 | ₹18,000 | ₹28,000 | ₹38,000 | 30.4% | 12.3% |
| 1 to 3 years | 181 | ₹15,500 | ₹23,000 | ₹30,000 | ₹42,000 | 31.1% | 4.6% |
| Over 3 years | 317 | ₹20,000 | ₹30,000 | ₹45,000 | ₹58,000 | 54.4% | 19.0% |
The median rises 1.67× over three-plus years — ₹18,000 to ₹30,000, second only to the technical diploma among non-engineering rungs.
Note the ≥₹50,000 column: 12.3% → 4.6% → 19.0%. That is not a pattern, it is noise — the entry cell holds 47 people and the middle one 181. The median and quartiles are stable; the tail percentages at this rung are not, and should not be quoted.
Across a working life
Section titled “Across a working life”Synthetic cohort, not a projection.
| At entry (21–23) | Age 30 | Age 40 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sample n | 473 | 412 | 225 |
| Population | 495k | 430k | 227k |
| — of whom in formal work | 51 | 139 | 111 |
| In formal work | 10.86% | 35.09% | 52.69% |
| Still studying | 33.67% | 2.56% | 0.00% |
| Mean wage | ₹22,447 | ₹34,052 | ₹42,456 |
| Median wage | ₹18,000 | ₹26,000 | ₹41,000 |
Formal employment quintuples from entry to 40 — 10.86% to 52.69%, the largest proportional climb on the ladder. A third are still studying at 21–23, which depresses the entry figure, but even allowing for that the trajectory is unusually steep. This rung starts badly and ends respectably.
Twenty years multiply the mean wage by 1.89×.
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 | 17.1% | 10.9% | 495k |
| Age 30 | 42.1% | 35.1% | 430k |
| Age 40 | 60.8% | 52.7% | 227k |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Teaching & education | 24.94% | 141k | 63.5% | ₹23,000 |
| Software & IT | 19.91% | 112k | 0.0% | ₹35,000 |
| Clerical & office support | 14.43% | 82k | 45.6% | ₹20,000 |
| Finance & accounting | 7.98% | 45k | 34.1% | ₹25,000 |
| Engineering, science & technical | 7.43% | 42k | 20.5% | ₹30,000 |
| Health & medical | 6.75% | 38k | 45.2% | ₹26,000 |
| Sales & marketing | 5.79% | 33k | 0.1% | ₹23,450 |
| Management & business operations | 3.40% | 19k | 21.1% | ₹40,000 |
| Skilled trades & production | 3.35% | 19k | 7.2% | ₹17,000 |
| Hospitality, personal & care services | 2.68% | 15k | 21.6% | ₹27,750 |
| Law, public administration & policy | 1.87% | 11k | 90.3% | ₹45,000 |
| Protective services & armed forces | 1.00% | 5,674 | 100.0% | ₹26,000 |
| Agriculture, forestry & fishing | 0.24% | 1,337 | 100.0% | ₹25,000 |
| Transport & logistics | 0.22% | 1,241 | 26.0% | ₹32,500 |
Sample sizes
Section titled “Sample sizes”| Cut | n |
|---|---|
| The rung, ages 21–34 | 2,311 |
| — in formal work | 545 |
| Formal, tenure under 1 year | 47 |
| Formal, tenure over 3 years | 317 |
| At age 40, in formal work | 111 |
| Earning ≥₹50,000 a month | 74 |
The entry-tenure cell of 47 people is thin. The companion analysis applies an n≥50 rule that
would drop this rung to age bands; this ladder applies no such rule and publishes the tenure lens
for every rung — see ../ASSUMPTIONS.md G5. The later cells here are adequate;
the entry row specifically should be treated as indicative.
What this rung does not tell you
Section titled “What this rung does not tell you”It is a residual category, not a field. 93% is coded “other subjects”, which PLFS does not define. The occupation mix — a quarter teaching, a seventh software, and nearly half in cells too small to name — is the only evidence of what it contains.
Agriculture and crafts degrees are inside it and invisible, at 125 and 29 people.
The tail percentages are unstable. Use the median and quartiles.
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.