What is a scheduled employment?

It is a category of work that the State has brought within the minimum wage mechanism — shops and commercial establishments, private security services, hotels and restaurants, private hospitals, printing presses, motor transport, construction, and so on. The employment is the unit that matters, not the job title. Two people with the same job title can fall in different scheduled employments depending on what the establishment does.

How accurate is the result?

It is a screen, not a determination, and the tool tells you which it is by showing its confidence and its runner-up. It matches on the words you supply, weighted, and shows exactly which words fired. Where the confidence is not strong, add the work actually performed rather than only the job title — that is usually what separates two candidate employments, and it is information only you have.

Why doesn't the tool show me the rate?

Because no Kerala minimum wage rate has been verified at source for this site. The notifications are image-only scans and the VDA component is notified separately and on its own timetable. Publishing a basic wage without its VDA would understate what an employer owes, which is a wrong answer that costs a client money. The site has already suffered that once, with Professional Tax. So the finder does the part it can do reliably — identify which notification you need — and names the index where you will find it.

What if two scheduled employments both seem to apply?

That is a real possibility and not a tool failure. A single establishment can fall within more than one scheduled employment for different groups of staff: a hotel with a shop attached, a hospital with a pharmacy, a factory with a canteen. The tool shows the runners-up for exactly this reason. Where the answer matters, the classification of each group should be documented against the notification relied on.

Does Kerala have a minimum wage for delivery riders or warehouse staff?

On the sources checked for this site, no minimum wage is in force for Online Delivery Services, for Warehouses, Godowns and Cold Storage, or for the Automobile Industry. Each has been added to the Schedule by a declaration of intention under s.27, and rates have not been notified for them. That distinction is easy to miss and it matters: there is nothing to enforce on those sectors at present, and public discussion frequently treats a rate as existing when only the intention to fix one has been published. The finder labels those sectors, and says so in the result.

What are Zone I and Zone II?

They do not exist in Kerala, and this site previously repeated the claim. Research against the notifications found no such classification. The likely origin is a translation error — the Malayalam word മേഖല means 'sector', not 'zone', and it appears throughout the notification indexes. What Kerala actually uses is a two-tier AREA split in some sectors, with different basic wages: the Sweeping and Cleaning notification sets Rs 450 for Municipality and Corporation areas against Rs 425 elsewhere. Other sectors use a flat urban add-on instead. A genuine district-group split existed once, for River Sand in 2011, and was superseded by S.R.O. No. 554/2019 — so treating it as live would be applying repealed law.

Do all Kerala notifications use the same grades?

No. Some notify by grade letters — Special Grade and Grades A to E are common — while others notify by skill word alone. The finder records which ladder an employment normally uses, so you are asked for the right thing rather than a generic 'skill level' that may not exist in your notification.

Can GHR confirm which category applies to my staff?

Yes, and this is one of the most useful things a Kerala compliance adviser does, because classification is where minimum wage disputes actually begin. GHR classifies each group of staff against the applicable notification, documents the basis, and identifies the rates that follow. Use the contact link below.

What is a scheduled employment?

It is a category of work that the State has brought within the minimum wage mechanism — shops and commercial establishments, private security services, hotels and restaurants, private hospitals, printing presses, motor transport, construction, and so on. The employment is the unit that matters, not the job title. Two people with the same job title can fall in different scheduled employments depending on what the establishment does.

How accurate is the result?

It is a screen, not a determination, and the tool tells you which it is by showing its confidence and its runner-up. It matches on the words you supply, weighted, and shows exactly which words fired. Where the confidence is not strong, add the work actually performed rather than only the job title — that is usually what separates two candidate employments, and it is information only you have.

Why doesn't the tool show me the rate?

Because no Kerala minimum wage rate has been verified at source for this site. The notifications are image-only scans and the VDA component is notified separately and on its own timetable. Publishing a basic wage without its VDA would understate what an employer owes, which is a wrong answer that costs a client money. The site has already suffered that once, with Professional Tax. So the finder does the part it can do reliably — identify which notification you need — and names the index where you will find it.

What if two scheduled employments both seem to apply?

That is a real possibility and not a tool failure. A single establishment can fall within more than one scheduled employment for different groups of staff: a hotel with a shop attached, a hospital with a pharmacy, a factory with a canteen. The tool shows the runners-up for exactly this reason. Where the answer matters, the classification of each group should be documented against the notification relied on.

Does Kerala have a minimum wage for delivery riders or warehouse staff?

On the sources checked for this site, no minimum wage is in force for Online Delivery Services, for Warehouses, Godowns and Cold Storage, or for the Automobile Industry. Each has been added to the Schedule by a declaration of intention under s.27, and rates have not been notified for them. That distinction is easy to miss and it matters: there is nothing to enforce on those sectors at present, and public discussion frequently treats a rate as existing when only the intention to fix one has been published. The finder labels those sectors, and says so in the result.

What are Zone I and Zone II?

They do not exist in Kerala, and this site previously repeated the claim. Research against the notifications found no such classification. The likely origin is a translation error — the Malayalam word മേഖല means 'sector', not 'zone', and it appears throughout the notification indexes. What Kerala actually uses is a two-tier AREA split in some sectors, with different basic wages: the Sweeping and Cleaning notification sets Rs 450 for Municipality and Corporation areas against Rs 425 elsewhere. Other sectors use a flat urban add-on instead. A genuine district-group split existed once, for River Sand in 2011, and was superseded by S.R.O. No. 554/2019 — so treating it as live would be applying repealed law.

Do all Kerala notifications use the same grades?

No. Some notify by grade letters — Special Grade and Grades A to E are common — while others notify by skill word alone. The finder records which ladder an employment normally uses, so you are asked for the right thing rather than a generic 'skill level' that may not exist in your notification.

Can GHR confirm which category applies to my staff?

Yes, and this is one of the most useful things a Kerala compliance adviser does, because classification is where minimum wage disputes actually begin. GHR classifies each group of staff against the applicable notification, documents the basis, and identifies the rates that follow. Use the contact link below.

Kerala minimum wage applicability finder

Kerala notifies a separate minimum wage for each of 80-plus scheduled employments. This finds the one that likely applies to a job, shows the reasoning, and names the notification to read.

Rules last verified 2026-10-01

This is an information tool, not advice. It performs the arithmetic and the screening you see below on the information you give it. It does not decide whether a position is lawful, compliant or correct, it is not a substitute for professional advice, and GHR assumes no duty of care to you in respect of it.

This identifies which notification applies. It does not show the rate. No Kerala minimum wage rate is held on this site, because the notifications are image-only scans and the VDA is notified separately and late — publishing a basic wage without its dearness component would understate what an employer owes. Once you know the scheduled employment, read the rates from its notification, then take them to the arrears calculator.

Describe the work

The work actually performed matters more than the job title. Where you have both, give both.

Job titleWhat the establishment doesWhat the person actually does, in one sentenceSkill level, if you know itEmployment typeDistrictWhich local body area is the workplace in?Kerala does notuse “Zone I” and “Zone II”. Some sectors split the basic wage between Municipal/Corporation areas and the rest; others use a flat urban add-on. The notification for your sector will say which.

There is no single Kerala minimum wage

This is the fact that makes every published Kerala minimum wage table unusable, and it is the reason this tool exists. Kerala notifies a separate minimum wage for each scheduled employment— more than eighty of them — and within most employments there are several grades and more than one area classification.

So a table headed “Kerala minimum wage 2026” with one number beside “shops” cannot be used to pay anybody correctly. It does not say which grade, and it does not say which area. The number may even be right and still be the wrong number for the person in front of you.

The unit that matters is the scheduled employment, and then the grade or skill category within it. Job titles do not map onto it cleanly: two people called “manager” in two different establishments can be in different scheduled employments with different floors.

Kerala does not use Zone I and Zone II — and this page used to say it did

Kerala does NOT classify minimum wage areas as Zone I and Zone II. The likely origin of the claim is a translation error: the Malayalam മേഖല means 'sector', not 'zone'. Kerala uses a two-tier area split in some sectors (Municipality/Corporation against other areas, with different basic wages) and a flat urban add-on in others. A genuine district-group split existed for River Sand in 2011 and was superseded by S.R.O. No. 554/2019.

That correction matters more than it looks. An employer who has been told there is a “Zone I rate” and a “Zone II rate” will go looking for them in the notification, not find them, and then use whichever figure is nearest — which is how the wrong rate gets applied to a whole payroll. What the notification actually contains is either a two-tier area split, expressed as two basic wage columns, or a flat urban add-on, expressed as a monthly amount. The finder asks which local body area the workplace is in and passes that through; it does not ask for a zone, because there is no zone to give.

A genuine district-group split did exist once, for River Sand in 2011, dividing the State into Southern and Northern groups. It was superseded by S.R.O. No. 554/2019. Citing it today would be applying repealed law, which is a category of error this project has had to correct across its content more than once.

How the classification screen works

The tool matches the words you give it against a weighted list of terms for each of 26sectors — job titles, industry words and trade names. It scores whole-word matches, ranks the sectors, and shows you the words that fired, the runner-up, and a confidence band derived from the score and the gap to the runner-up.

It is term-weighted rather than fuzzy on purpose. A fuzzy match on “manager” would confidently place a hotel manager in the shops notification, and a confident wrong classification sends someone to the wrong notification, the wrong rate, and an arrears figure built on the wrong base. Showing the runner-up is how you overrule it.

Adding what the person actually does, rather than only their title, is the single thing that improves the result most. That is also the fact an inspector will ask about, so it is worth having in writing anyway.

Why this does not show you the rate

Because no Kerala minimum wage rate has been verified at source for this site, and a rate that cannot be cited is a rate that cannot be relied on.

Two specific obstacles, both concrete:

The notification PDFs on the Labour Commissionerate’s index are scanswhose text layer is Malayalam in a legacy symbolic font. Machine extraction returns Latin gibberish, so the figures can only be read by rendering each page as an image and reading it visually — sector by sector, grade by grade.
Even a correctly read basic wage is not the minimum wage. Kerala adds Variable Dearness Allowance, revised twice yearly effective 1 April and 1 October, and notified late. Publishing the basic alone would understate what an employer owes.

This site has published a superseded statutory figure once before, on Professional Tax, and it was live for months. The rule adopted since is that an unverified figure is stated as unverified or not stated at all. So the finder does the part it can do reliably — identify which notification you need — and names the index where the rates are.

Sectors with detailed guidance

26sectors carry hand-written guidance on this site. Each page explains what that sector’s notification fixes, what decides the grade, what to have in front of you when you read it, and — the part that is not written down anywhere else — how the sector is distinguished from the ones it is most often confused with.

The situations this tool was built for

An employer does not know which of the notifications covers a new role.
A worker believes they are in the wrong category and is being paid a lower grade.
An inspector has raised a classification and the employer needs the basis for theirs.
An establishment does two things — a showroom with a workshop, a hospital with a pharmacy — and the staff are not all in one sector.
A security agency has guards deployed at client sites in several districts.
An outsourcing contract covers both security and housekeeping staff, who are in different sectors.

Questions people actually ask

Is there one minimum wage in Kerala?: No, and this is the single most important thing to understand before using any published Kerala minimum wage table. Kerala notifies a separate minimum wage for each scheduled employment — 80-plus of them — and within most employments there are several grades and more than one area classification. So there is no figure that is 'the' Kerala minimum wage. A table that shows one number per sector, without saying which grade and which area, cannot be used to pay anybody correctly.
What is a scheduled employment?: It is a category of work that the State has brought within the minimum wage mechanism — shops and commercial establishments, private security services, hotels and restaurants, private hospitals, printing presses, motor transport, construction, and so on. The employment is the unit that matters, not the job title. Two people with the same job title can fall in different scheduled employments depending on what the establishment does.
How accurate is the result?: It is a screen, not a determination, and the tool tells you which it is by showing its confidence and its runner-up. It matches on the words you supply, weighted, and shows exactly which words fired. Where the confidence is not strong, add the work actually performed rather than only the job title — that is usually what separates two candidate employments, and it is information only you have.
Why doesn't the tool show me the rate?: Because no Kerala minimum wage rate has been verified at source for this site. The notifications are image-only scans and the VDA component is notified separately and on its own timetable. Publishing a basic wage without its VDA would understate what an employer owes, which is a wrong answer that costs a client money. The site has already suffered that once, with Professional Tax. So the finder does the part it can do reliably — identify which notification you need — and names the index where you will find it.
What if two scheduled employments both seem to apply?: That is a real possibility and not a tool failure. A single establishment can fall within more than one scheduled employment for different groups of staff: a hotel with a shop attached, a hospital with a pharmacy, a factory with a canteen. The tool shows the runners-up for exactly this reason. Where the answer matters, the classification of each group should be documented against the notification relied on.
Does Kerala have a minimum wage for delivery riders or warehouse staff?: On the sources checked for this site, no minimum wage is in force for Online Delivery Services, for Warehouses, Godowns and Cold Storage, or for the Automobile Industry. Each has been added to the Schedule by a declaration of intention under s.27, and rates have not been notified for them. That distinction is easy to miss and it matters: there is nothing to enforce on those sectors at present, and public discussion frequently treats a rate as existing when only the intention to fix one has been published. The finder labels those sectors, and says so in the result.
What are Zone I and Zone II?: They do not exist in Kerala, and this site previously repeated the claim. Research against the notifications found no such classification. The likely origin is a translation error — the Malayalam word മേഖല means 'sector', not 'zone', and it appears throughout the notification indexes. What Kerala actually uses is a two-tier AREA split in some sectors, with different basic wages: the Sweeping and Cleaning notification sets Rs 450 for Municipality and Corporation areas against Rs 425 elsewhere. Other sectors use a flat urban add-on instead. A genuine district-group split existed once, for River Sand in 2011, and was superseded by S.R.O. No. 554/2019 — so treating it as live would be applying repealed law.
Do all Kerala notifications use the same grades?: No. Some notify by grade letters — Special Grade and Grades A to E are common — while others notify by skill word alone. The finder records which ladder an employment normally uses, so you are asked for the right thing rather than a generic 'skill level' that may not exist in your notification.
Can GHR confirm which category applies to my staff?: Yes, and this is one of the most useful things a Kerala compliance adviser does, because classification is where minimum wage disputes actually begin. GHR classifies each group of staff against the applicable notification, documents the basis, and identifies the rates that follow. Use the contact link below.

Sources

Kerala Labour Commissionerate — Minimum Wage Notifications — 266 notifications across 80-plus sectors. This is the authority for the sector list and for every rate. https://lc.kerala.gov.in/en/minimum-wage-notifications
Code on Wages, 2019, Chapter II, and s.69(2) — the source of Kerala's power to fix minimum wages following the repeal of the Minimum Wages Act, 1948
Kerala Minimum Wages Rules, 1958 — the procedural rules, reproduced on Indian Kanoon https://indiankanoon.org/doc/33469360/
document.kerala.gov.in — re-publishes Kerala notifications as native, text-searchable PDFs. Use this rather than the Commissionerate's image-only scans to read a rate. https://document.kerala.gov.in/
What this site previously got wrong about Kerala minimum wages — Two claims were published here and have been removed. First, that Kerala revises dearness allowance twice yearly on 1 April and 1 October — no official source supports the cycle, and there is no single statewide dearness figure at all: each sector's notification carries its own index threshold and rupee-per-point rate. Second, that rates are notified by Zone I and Zone II — Kerala uses no such classification. The likely origin of that myth is a translation error: the Malayalam മേഖല means 'sector', not 'zone'.
Sector guidance on this site — 26 sectors carry hand-written guidance — what the notification fixes, what decides the grade, and how the sector is distinguished from the ones it is confused with. That last part is not published anywhere else.

Where an official source could not be retrieved or read, this page says so instead of citing a substitute. A figure whose citation cannot be produced is a figure this site will not publish.

Have GHR classify your staff

Classification is where Kerala minimum wage disputes actually start. GHR classifies each group of staff against the applicable notification and documents the basis.

Have GHR classify your staff All GHR tools

Important — please read before relying on this

This calculator is a self-help information tool. It is not legal, tax, accounting, payroll or other professional advice, and it is not an opinion of any kind. GHR Consultancy is not acting for you, and no adviser, client, fiduciary or other professional relationship is created by using it.

The tool and everything it produces are provided as is and as available, without any representation, warranty or guarantee of any kind, express or implied, including as to accuracy, completeness, correctness, reliability, fitness for a particular purpose or freedom from error. GHR does not represent that the statutory position stated is current, complete, or applicable to your establishment.

The output is not a compliance certificate, clearance, approval, verification, audit or determination of any kind. It must not be relied upon and must not be used as a substitute for advice from a qualified professional. GHR assumes no duty of care to you or to any other person in respect of it. Any reliance you place on it is entirely at your own risk.

In particular, it does not:

determine which scheduled employment applies as a matter of law — it screens on the words you give it and states its confidence;
show the notified rate, because no Kerala minimum wage rate has been verified at source for this site;
assert which area or zone a district falls in, because that is set out in each notification rather than in one statewide instrument;
take account of an award, settlement or collective agreement that may set a higher floor; or
constitute advice, a classification, or a determination of any kind.

The position stated on this page is stated as at 2026-10-01. Statutory positions change, sometimes with retrospective effect, and GHR does not undertake to update this page. Do not assume it reflects the law at any later date.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, GHR Consultancy and its partners, employees and agents exclude all liability for any loss, damage, cost or expense of any kind — including indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, and any regulatory, statutory or contractual consequence — arising out of or in connection with the use of, or reliance on, this tool or anything it produces, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), statute or otherwise.

If you need a determination for your establishment, that is a separate professional engagement and the only basis on which GHR can advise you. Obtain professional advice before acting on anything shown here.

These terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts at Kerala have exclusive jurisdiction.

Page last reviewed 2026-10-01. Every statutory figure used on this page is held as a dated, sourced rule with an effective window and a notification reference. See how the rules engine works.