Bihar minimum wages: ₹436 a day unskilled, and a second schedule of piece rates that runs to twelve employments
Notification No. 5/M.W.-40-16/2021, Shram No. 46, of 1 April 2026 revises wages under section 5 read with section 3 of the Minimum Wages Act, 1948 on the average All India Consumer Price Index (base 1960=100) for July to December 2025, which comes to 9,696.44 on a link factor of 4.63 x 4.93 x 2.88. Schedule-II fixes the ordinary daily rate across the 89 scheduled employments of Schedule-1(b) — ₹436 unskilled, ₹452 semi-skilled, ₹551 skilled and ₹672 highly skilled — with a month the day times twenty-six, and, for domestic employments only, an hour the daily rate divided by eight. Schedule-III is a second and much larger regime: about a hundred and thirty PIECE rates for twelve employments, charged against output rather than time — per hundred cubic feet of stone, per lakh of bidis, per thousand bricks, per haircut, per railway wagon, per fifty thousand kendu leaves. The allowance lands three months after the half-year it is computed on closes, so the cycle is 1 April and 1 October. The notification is bilingual and the two texts disagree on seven figures, each of which this desk publishes both ways rather than choosing between them.