Topic: Minimum wage: who sets it, how often, and who it covers
What does India require?
Everyday topic
India's minimum wage system is in the middle of a handover year. The older Minimum Wages Act, 1948 only protects workers in “scheduled employment” — roughly 30% of the workforce. Section 3 requires the “appropriate government” (the central government for railways, mines, oilfields, major ports, and central corporations; state governments for everything else) to fix a minimum wage for each scheduled employment and review it at intervals not exceeding five years, and a single state can further split its rates by skill level (unskilled/semi-skilled/skilled) and by zone. The Code on Wages, 2019 extends the statutory right to a minimum wage to all employees, not just scheduled ones, and Section 9 empowers the central government to fix a binding floor wage that no state's or the center's own minimum wage may fall below. The Code's rules were only notified on November 21, 2025, and it — together with three companion labour codes — became fully operative on April 1, 2026. But as of August 2026, the central government had only just begun consulting states and forming a Central Advisory Board to recompute the consumption basket needed to set the first binding floor wage; until then, the only reference point is a non-binding National Floor Level Minimum Wage of ₹176 a day, unchanged since 2017. In other words, India now has a new, universal principle on paper, and an open question — what the floor wage actually is — that has not yet been answered.
What is this topic?
Taiwan's Minimum Wage Act (enacted 2023) is decided each year by a 21-member Minimum Wage Review Council that meets in the third quarter; the rate for 2026 is NT$29,500 a month or NT$196 an hour, a single national figure with no regional variation.
Japan runs 47 separate rates instead: local minimum wage councils in each prefecture set their own number after the central council issues a nationwide guideline — the 2026 guideline points to a weighted average of ¥1,176 an hour, but the actual figure differs prefecture by prefecture.
China's Regulation on Minimum Wages requires provincial governments to review their rates at least every two years, and a single province can still run two to four tiers — Shaanxi's 2026 notice sets ¥2,376 a month in its top tier and ¥2,140 in its lowest.
The US federal minimum has sat at $7.25 an hour since July 24, 2009 — seventeen years unchanged — while states are free to set higher floors (Washington, D.C. runs $18.40) or simply default to the federal rate.
India's Code on Wages, 2019 only became fully operative on April 1, 2026, extending statutory minimum-wage coverage from the roughly 30% of workers under "scheduled employment" to nearly everyone — but the binding national floor wage it authorizes was still under consultation as of August 2026, with the only reference point being a non-binding ₹176-a-day benchmark unchanged since 2017.
Indonesia's 2025 regulation lets each of its 34 provincial governors set an annual UMP tied to local economic growth; Jakarta's 2026 figure, the country's highest, is Rp5,729,876 a month.
Brazil sets one national number by presidential decree, adjusted each year for the prior year's INPC inflation plus GDP growth two years back — R$1,621 a month from January 2026 — though a handful of states such as São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul are allowed under a 2000 law to set their own regional floor above it.
Sources and dates
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