PLFS 2025 is India's first calendar-year jobs report

The annual labour survey shifts to a January–December cycle with a revamped, monthly-capable sampling design — and a sample 2.65 times larger than before.

What happened

• The National Statistical Office (NSO), under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), released the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) Annual Report 2025 on 27 March 2026.
• This is the first PLFS annual report built on the calendar-year cycle (January–December 2025), replacing the earlier July–June "agricultural year" reporting window used since 2017–18.
• The headline indicators for persons aged 15 and above (usual status, ps+ss) are LFPR 59.3%, WPR 57.4% and Unemployment Rate 3.1% — all broadly stable versus 2024.
• The survey's sampling methodology was revamped from January 2025, scaling the household sample about 2.65 times and adding the capacity to produce monthly indicators.
• Because of that redesign, the report carries an explicit caution: the 2025 estimates may not be strictly comparable with earlier PLFS annual reports or with the 2022–2024 calendar-year results.

Background & context

The PLFS is India's principal source of official employment and unemployment statistics. It was launched by the NSO in 2017 to replace the old quinquennial (once-in-five-years) Employment–Unemployment Surveys that the erstwhile National Sample Survey Office used to conduct, and the first PLFS Annual Report covered July 2017 to June 2018. The survey's purpose is to deliver labour-market indicators at a much higher frequency than the five-year cadence of the past: quarterly bulletins for urban areas in Current Weekly Status, and an annual report covering both rural and urban India.

Before this edition, seven PLFS annual reports had been published, each spanning a July–June survey period: 2017–18, 2018–19, 2019–20, 2020–21, 2021–22, 2022–23 and 2023–24. Alongside, the NSO had separately released calendar-year indicators for 2021 to 2024 at the all-India level. The 2025 report is therefore the eighth annual report overall but the first that is itself anchored to a January–December calendar year as its native survey period.

Two structural changes drove this release. First, the shift from the July–June agricultural year to the January–December calendar year was made to align India's labour reporting with the international convention followed by most statistical agencies, which makes cross-country comparison cleaner. Second, the sampling design was overhauled from January 2025 to support the production of high-frequency — eventually monthly — estimates. The redesign introduced a rotational panel scheme of four consecutive monthly visits, ensuring 75% sample matching between consecutive months and 50% matching across successive quarters, and it extended quarterly estimation to rural areas, which the earlier quarterly bulletins did not cover.

The sampling architecture itself was rebuilt around the goal of higher frequency. Districts are now treated as the basic strata, separately for rural and urban sectors, across most of the geography covered by the National Sample Survey (NSS) regions, with additional stratification based on distance from district headquarters and for large urban centres to improve geographical representation. Large villages and urban (UFS) blocks are split into roughly equal-sized sub-units so that First Stage Units (FSUs) are uniform in size, and FSUs are drawn by Simple Random Sampling, one per stratum each month. The earlier design covered an average of about 12,800 FSUs (7,016 rural and 5,784 urban) with 8 households each, roughly 1.02 lakh households; from January 2025 this rose to 22,692 allotted FSUs with 12 households each, about 2.72 lakh households — the 2.65-times scale-up that underpins the report's far larger evidence base.

It helps to place PLFS within the wider family of MoSPI data products. The ministry's statistical wing, the NSO, also runs the National Sample Surveys on consumption and other themes, the Annual Survey of Industries, and the compilation of national accounts (GDP). PLFS is the labour-market member of this family; it is distinct from administrative jobs proxies such as EPFO payroll data, which count formal-sector provident-fund subscribers rather than measuring the whole workforce through a household sample. Where EPFO captures only formal enrolments, PLFS estimates participation, employment and unemployment across the entire population, formal and informal, rural and urban — which is why it remains the authoritative source for the headline rates.

For Prelims

• Conducting body: National Statistical Office (NSO), under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI). PLFS is not conducted by the RBI, the Labour Ministry or a private agency.
• Launched: 2017; it replaced the five-yearly Employment–Unemployment Surveys of the old NSSO with a higher-frequency design.
• Survey period from 2025: January–December (calendar year), shifted from the earlier July–June agricultural year to match international practice.
• The three core indicators: LFPR (share of population working, seeking or available for work), WPR (share of population employed) and UR (share of the labour force that is unemployed). Note LFPR ≥ WPR always, since the labour force includes the unemployed.
• Two activity-status concepts: Usual Status (ps+ss) uses a 365-day reference period (principal + subsidiary status); Current Weekly Status (CWS) uses a 7-day reference period. The headline annual numbers below are usual status.
• 2025 headline (age 15+): LFPR 59.3% · WPR 57.4% · UR 3.1%. Male LFPR 79.1%, female LFPR 40.0%; male WPR 76.6%, female WPR 38.8%.
• Youth (15–29) unemployment: fell to 9.9% in 2025 from 10.3% in 2024 (rural youth 8.3%, urban youth 13.6%).
• Urban female UR: down to 6.4% from 6.7%; educated UR (secondary & above, 15+) eased to 6.5% from 7.0%.
• Employment status mix: self-employed 56.2% (down from 57.5%) · regular wage/salaried 23.6% (up from 22.4%) · casual labour ~20.2%. The rise in regular salaried work is the report's notable structural shift.
• Sectoral mix: agriculture's share fell to 43.0% (from 44.8%) but remains the largest employer; manufacturing rose to 12.1%, construction ~12.0%, other services 13.1%.
• Absolute workers: on average 61.6 crore persons (15+) were employed during Jan–Dec 2025 — 41.6 crore male and 20.0 crore female — estimated using MoHFW projected population figures.
• Sample size: ~2.72 lakh households (1,48,718 rural + 1,21,754 urban) and ~11.49 lakh persons surveyed across 22,594 First Stage Units — about 2.65 times the pre-2025 sample of ~1.02 lakh households.
• What it is NOT: PLFS 2025 is NOT directly comparable with the seven earlier July–June annual reports — the redesigned sampling frame and estimation procedure mean the levels are not a clean continuation of the old series. NEET ("Not in Employment, Education or Training", 25.0% for ages 15–29) is a PLFS data point, not a separate survey.
• The full annual-report set: July 2017–18, 2018–19, 2019–20, 2020–21, 2021–22, 2022–23, 2023–24 (the seven July–June reports), plus the calendar-year 2025 report — useful for "how many / which period" questions.

Why it matters

The headline story is not a single number but the redesign of the instrument that produces the numbers. By moving to a calendar-year survey period and a rotational-panel sample capable of monthly estimates, the PLFS narrows the gap between when labour-market conditions change and when the official statistics can detect them. The old July–June cycle, inherited from an agrarian-economy framing, delivered annual labour data with a long lag; the revamped design lets policymakers track participation and joblessness closer to real time and in both rural and urban areas quarterly.

The substantive findings address a recurring policy concern: the quality, not just the quantity, of work. The rise in the regular wage/salaried share to 23.6% alongside a fall in self-employment points to a modest formalisation of jobs, which matters because salaried work typically carries more income security than own-account or casual labour. The decline in agriculture's employment share to 43.0% with gains in manufacturing and services reflects the slow structural transition of the workforce away from farming. At the same time, the data flag persistent gaps: female LFPR at 40.0% remains far below the male 79.1%, urban youth unemployment at 13.6% stays elevated, and a quarter of those aged 15–29 are not in employment, education or training — the problems the survey itself surfaces for Mains use.

The comparability caveat is itself examinable. Because the sampling frame changed, headline improvements between 2024 and 2025 must be read carefully — part of any apparent shift may reflect the new method rather than a real change in the economy. The report is explicit that users should interpret post-January-2025 results within the context of the redesigned methodology, a rare instance of a statistical release foregrounding its own break-in-series. The concepts, definitions and coverage of the labour-force indicators remain unchanged; it is the sample allocation, selection and estimation that differ, so the indicators measure the same thing but on a new statistical footing.

The earnings data add a further dimension that answers on wages and gender can use. In regular wage/salaried employment, average monthly male earnings rose to about ₹24,217 and female to about ₹18,353 (roughly 7.2% growth, faster than men's 5.8%). Female nominal-wage growth outpaced male across all three work categories — self-employment, salaried and casual — at 8.8%, 7.2% and 5.4% respectively, narrowing the gender earnings gap at the margin even though the absolute gap remains wide. Educational attainment also rose: persons aged 15 and above averaged 10.0 years of formal schooling, and 67.8% had at least secondary education (79.7% urban, 61.9% rural), data points that connect labour-force participation to human-capital questions.

For Mains