Rung 11 — Postgraduate, general
11.15 million people aged 21–34. 34.26% hold a regular salaried job, of which 25.57% of the rung is formal work — below a technical diploma, after two more years of study.
Who is counted
Section titled “Who is counted”| Filter | Value |
|---|---|
release_id |
calendar_2025 |
visit |
V1 |
gedu_lvl |
13 — “Literate: postgraduate and above” |
tedu_lvl |
01 or a diploma code — no technical degree |
age |
21–34 |
Sample: 13,241 people across 8,218 first-stage units, representing 11.15 million. An M.A., M.Sc. or M.Com., and 83% of everyone holding a postgraduate qualification.
This rung is why “a master’s does not help” looked true. Postgraduates were one bucket until this split, reading 29.11% — a weighted average of this rung and three far smaller technical ones. Split out, the picture inverts: a general master’s reaches 25.57%, below a technical diploma’s 30.77%, while PG engineering reaches 53.13% and PG medical 62.12%. Level was never the variable. Field was.
What they are doing
Section titled “What they are doing”| Share | People | |
|---|---|---|
| Formal work | 25.57% | 2.85m |
| Informal wage work | 8.28% | 923k |
| Self-employed, earning | 9.42% | 1.05m |
| Studying | 6.51% | 726k |
| Unemployed, seeking | 14.59% | 1.63m |
| Domestic duties | 24.87% | 2.77m |
Two more years of study past a general degree buys 9.4 percentage points of formal employment — 16.20% to 25.57% — and leaves a quarter of the rung in domestic duties, almost exactly the general degree’s 24.96%.
Gender
Section titled “Gender”| Share of rung | Formal work | Domestic duties | Median wage | People | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Male | 41.2% | 37.68% | 0.18% | ₹30,460 | 4.59m |
| Female | 58.8% | 17.08% | 42.18% | ₹25,600 | 6.55m |
A majority-female rung with a 2.2× employment gap. 42% of women holding a general master’s are in domestic duties — a higher share than at any degree rung.
What formal work pays
Section titled “What formal work pays”| Tenure | n | p25 | Median | p75 | ≥₹50k |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1 year | 285 | ₹14,200 | ₹25,000 | ₹35,000 | 9.8% |
| 1 to 3 years | 1,072 | ₹16,000 | ₹25,000 | ₹40,000 | 11.7% |
| Over 3 years | 1,760 | ₹20,000 | ₹34,500 | ₹46,000 | 26.2% |
Median rises 1.38×. Entry pay of ₹25,000 matches an engineering degree — the master’s buys wage level, not employment odds.
What the premium jobs actually are
Section titled “What the premium jobs actually are”552 people in this rung hold a job paying ≥₹6 lakh a year. The same three pre-specified clusters tested on rung 10 were run here, on the same definitions:
| Route | Share of the ≥₹6L jobs | n | Public sector |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software / IT | 21.38% | 74 | 0.2% |
| Teaching | 19.56% | 154 | 85.8% |
| Protective services / armed forces | 2.01% | 12 | 98.4% |
| All three together | 42.95% | 240 | |
| Everything else | 57.04% | 312 | 38.5% |
42.9% — higher than the undergraduate rung’s 36.5%, but still a minority. Two things move between the rungs, in opposite directions:
- Teaching more than doubles, 8.86% → 19.56%, and its composition changes: primary teaching falls away and university teaching (9.78%) and secondary teaching (6.32%) take its place. A master’s is the entry ticket to a teaching post that pays, and 86% of those posts are government.
- Protective services collapses, 6.45% → 2.01%. Police and military recruitment is a graduate-level route, and a master’s is not how you get in.
Software holds almost exactly the same share on both rungs (21.2% vs 21.4%) and is even more purely private here — 0.2% public sector. As on rung 10, whether these are computing degrees is not testable: PLFS records no field of study for a non-technical qualification.
The long tail
Section titled “The long tail”Every occupation reaching five people, smaller cells pooled so the column sums to 100:
| Occupation | Share | Cum. | n | Public | Median |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All other occupations (39, each under 5 people) | 16.34% | 16.3% | 79 | 45% | — |
| Software and application developers, and analysts | 14.87% | 31.2% | 56 | 0% | ₹65,000 |
| Finance professionals | 12.34% | 43.5% | 56 | 13% | ₹65,000 |
| University and higher education teachers | 9.78% | 53.3% | 57 | 82% | ₹65,000 |
| Secondary education teachers | 6.32% | 59.6% | 56 | 90% | ₹60,000 |
| Professional services managers | 5.41% | 65.1% | 31 | 41% | ₹65,000 |
| Sales, marketing and development managers | 3.96% | 69.0% | 19 | 28% | ₹72,000 |
| Business services and administration managers | 3.62% | 72.6% | 21 | 25% | ₹70,000 |
| Other services managers | 3.37% | 76.0% | 13 | 2% | ₹65,000 |
| Primary school and early childhood teachers | 2.94% | 79.0% | 35 | 94% | ₹58,700 |
| Database and network professionals | 2.21% | 81.2% | 7 | 0% | ₹65,000 |
| Manufacturing, mining, construction and distribution managers | 2.15% | 83.3% | 8 | 0% | ₹65,500 |
| Medical doctors | 2.15% | 85.5% | 22 | 68% | ₹82,000 |
| Protective service workers | 2.01% | 87.5% | 12 | 98% | ₹60,000 |
| General office clerks | 1.85% | 89.3% | 15 | 93% | ₹55,000 |
| Engineering professionals (excl. electrotechnology) | 1.63% | 91.0% | 10 | 31% | ₹62,000 |
| Administration professionals | 1.40% | 92.4% | 8 | 26% | ₹75,000 |
| Managing directors and chief executives | 1.16% | 93.5% | 6 | 96% | ₹65,000 |
| Legislators and senior officials | 1.13% | 94.6% | 7 | 100% | ₹73,800 |
| ICT service managers | 1.07% | 95.7% | 7 | 0% | ₹70,000 |
| Government regulatory associate professionals | 0.93% | 96.6% | 6 | 100% | ₹60,000 |
| Sales, marketing and public relations professionals | 0.88% | 97.5% | 5 | 14% | ₹67,000 |
| Administrative and specialised secretaries | 0.88% | 98.4% | 5 | 100% | ₹60,000 |
| Physical and engineering science technicians | 0.83% | 99.2% | 5 | 33% | ₹50,000 |
| Legal professionals | 0.76% | 100.0% | 6 | 64% | ₹75,000 |
The tail is longer here than on rung 10 — 63 distinct occupations against 72 on a rung with 32% more people, and the largest single cell is the residual. No occupation reaches 15%.
Two differences from the undergraduate rung are worth naming:
- Finance is the big gainer — 5.33% → 12.34%, more than doubling, and it is private (13% public). Together with software it makes a clear private-sector professional track that the undergraduate rung does not have at this scale.
- The top of the distribution is higher. Medical doctors at ₹82,000, administration professionals at ₹75,000, legal professionals at ₹75,000 and sales managers at ₹72,000 sit above anything on rung 10 bar legislators. But note the same threshold effect as there: every median is conditioned on ≥₹50,000 and so reads the bottom of the occupation, not its centre.
The 22 general postgraduates recorded as medical doctors are the same open question flagged on
rung 10 and in ASSUMPTIONS.md — a gedu_lvl/tedu_lvl coding conflict, not a
finding about medicine. They are 2.15% of this rung’s premium jobs.
Across a working life
Section titled “Across a working life”| At entry (23–25) | Age 30 | Age 40 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sample n | 3,225 | 2,993 | 1,899 |
| Population | 2.68m | 2.48m | 1.62m |
| — in formal work | 463 | 834 | 834 |
| In formal work | 16.09% | 28.84% | 43.04% |
| Mean wage | ₹26,158 | ₹38,788 | ₹50,728 |
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 | 25.6% | 16.1% | 2.68m |
| Age 30 | 37.9% | 28.8% | 2.48m |
| Age 40 | 50.1% | 43.0% | 1.62m |
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 | 22.61% | 644k | 58.6% | ₹25,000 |
| Clerical & office support | 17.05% | 486k | 48.1% | ₹25,000 |
| Software & IT | 12.05% | 343k | 1.7% | ₹40,000 |
| Finance & accounting | 10.79% | 308k | 21.1% | ₹28,200 |
| Management & business operations | 9.48% | 270k | 19.2% | ₹40,000 |
| Sales & marketing | 8.70% | 248k | 12.6% | ₹25,000 |
| Engineering, science & technical | 6.04% | 172k | 21.3% | ₹32,000 |
| Health & medical | 3.83% | 109k | 53.8% | ₹30,000 |
| Skilled trades & production | 2.58% | 73k | 32.6% | ₹18,000 |
| Protective services & armed forces | 1.94% | 55k | 90.9% | ₹36,800 |
| Law, public administration & policy | 1.66% | 47k | 82.5% | ₹40,000 |
| Hospitality, personal & care services | 1.59% | 45k | 53.9% | ₹16,800 |
| Arts, media, culture & social | 0.74% | 21k | 38.4% | ₹30,000 |
| Transport & logistics | 0.73% | 21k | 64.4% | ₹34,600 |
| Agriculture, forestry & fishing | 0.24% | 6,887 | 100.0% | ₹35,000 |
Sample sizes
Section titled “Sample sizes”| Cut | n |
|---|---|
| The rung, 21–34 | 13,241 |
| — in formal work | 3,117 |
| Formal, tenure under 1 year | 285 |
| Earning ≥₹50,000 a month | 552 |
Well measured throughout.
What this rung does not tell you
Section titled “What this rung does not tell you”It is not split by subject. An M.A. and an M.Sc. are the same row; PLFS records no field of study for non-technical qualifications.
“Postgraduate and above” includes PhDs, who are not separable.
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.