Code on Wages Rules 2026, and Who Must Follow Them
They bind one narrow group of employers and nobody else. But every state is now drafting from them, so the eight-hour day, the ten-day ceiling and the Form V payslip are worth reading whoever you are.
If you run a factory, a shop, a hospital or a school, the Code on Wages rules notified on 8 May 2026 are probably not yours to follow.
They cover a short list of industries where the central government, rather than your state, writes the labour rules. Railways, mines, banks, ports and a handful more. This page calls it the central list.
They still matter to the rest of us, because the states are now drafting from them. They put a number on the working day, cap how long a worker can go without a day off, and fix when a payslip is due.
This page sets out what the rules say, which employers must follow them, and what to do if your business is not one of those (explained in detail below).
Key Takeaways
- The working day: eight hours, if you pay by the day.
- The working week: forty-eight hours, if you pay weekly, fortnightly or monthly.
- Rest days: one every week, and never more than ten days worked in a row without one.
- Who must follow them: the central list only. Railways, mines, oil fields, major ports, air transport, telecom, banking, insurance, central public sector undertakings and their contractors.
- Everyone else: the Code still applies to you. Your rule book is your own state’s, and this central set is the template your state is most likely to draw from.
- On paper, on the central list: wage slips in Form V, on or before payment, and three registers in Forms I, IV and IX, kept electronically or physically.
- The arithmetic: minimum wages are fixed by the day, then divided by eight for an hour and multiplied by twenty-six for a month. The daily figure itself has not been fixed yet.
- When it changed: 8 May 2026, superseding seventeen older sets of rules including the Minimum Wages (Central) Rules, 1950.
What the 8 May 2026 Rules Changed
The short answer is that the law came into force first and the paperwork caught up five and a half months later. Here is what filled the gap.
The four labour codes were made effective on 21 November 2025. The Code on Wages was one of them, and it merged four older laws on pay into a single statute.
A code sets the duty. The rules underneath it set the paperwork, and for almost six months the Code on Wages had none of its own. The old rule books carried on in the meantime.
So the Code kept saying that a thing would be done in the manner to be prescribed, while nothing had prescribed it.
The Code on Wages (Central) Rules, 2026 closed that on 8 May 2026. They were made under section 67 of the Code, they came into force on publication, and they superseded seventeen older sets of rules.
Two of those seventeen are worth naming, because they had been in service for most of a century: the Minimum Wages (Central) Rules, 1950 and the Payment of Wages (Procedure) Rules, 1937.
In Simple Words
The law came first and the forms came later. The forms are here now. They say how long a day is and what a payslip must show. They apply to one group of employers, and the next part says which.
Which Employers Must Follow Them?
The central list, and nobody else. This is the first thing to settle, because every number below it changes with the answer.
The Code on Wages applies to every employer in the country. These rules do not. Every officer named in them is a central government appointee, down to the one who settles a dispute about a daily rate.
Section 2(d) of the Code on Wages, 2019 draws the line. The central government is the labour authority for anything it runs itself, and for railways, mines, oil fields, major ports, air transport, telecom, banking and insurance.
The list reaches further than those words first suggest. Central public sector undertakings are in, so are their subsidiaries and autonomous bodies the Centre controls, and so are contractors working for any of them.
For everybody else the labour authority is your own state, and the rule book is whatever that state notifies. A fabrication unit, a hospital chain, a school: none of them reads these rules for its own everyday obligations.
Did You Know?
Supply staff to a central public sector undertaking and that work lands on the central list, even though you do not. Your own state’s rules still govern everything else you run.
Hours, Rest Days and the Ten-Day Rule
This is the part that lands on a roster rather than a payslip, and it binds the central list only.
Hours and the Weekly Rest Day
Your wage period is the stretch of time one payment covers: a day, a week, a fortnight or a month. Which one you use decides which rule below applies to you.
A normal working day is eight hours where the wage period is a day. Where it is anything longer, the working day is set so that the week does not exceed forty-eight hours.
An employee who has worked the week through for you earns a rest day that week. In a six-day week it is ordinarily Sunday; in a shorter week it falls on Saturday or Sunday, and you may fix a different day instead.
Where the week is shorter than six days, the days nobody works are paid rest days rather than unpaid gaps.
The Ten-Day Limit and Rest-Day Pay
Then comes the limit that will catch rosters out. A rest day may be substituted, but no substitution may leave anybody working more than ten days consecutively without one.
Work on a rest day is not free either. It is paid at the overtime rate, and overtime cannot be less than twice the normal rate of wages.
The substituted rest day is paid too, at the rate for the previous working day. Our overtime calculation template works the doubling through if you would rather see it on a sheet.
Where there is a dispute about how the daily rate was worked out, the Chief Labour Commissioner (Central) or the Deputy Chief Labour Commissioner decides it after hearing both sides.
Wage Slips and the Three Registers
There are three things to produce here: a payslip in a set form, three registers, and a notice board. Most of the detail in these rules sits in this section.
Section 50 of the Code already required every covered employer to keep a register of who is employed, a muster roll of who attended, and a record of wages. It left the way of keeping them to be settled later. These Rules are what prescribed it.
The Wage Slip
Every employer on the central list issues wage slips in Form V, electronically or in physical form, on or before payment of wages. Not after, and not on request.
The Three Registers
All three may be kept electronically or on paper, which is the part worth noticing if yours are still in a ledger.
| Register | Form | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
| Employee Register | Form I | Who is on the roll |
| Register of Wages, Overtime, Advances, Fines and Deductions | Form IV | What was paid, and what was taken off |
| Attendance Register-cum-Muster Roll | Form IX | Who attended, on which day |
There is a notice board duty alongside them. The abstract of the Code, the category-wise wage rates, the wage period, the day and time of payment, and the name and address of your Inspector-cum-Facilitator, the labour officer for your area, all go up where people can read them.
Our statutory register formats template covers how these sit alongside the registers other codes ask for.
How to Work Out the Minimum Wage
The arithmetic is short, and worth knowing exactly, because getting it wrong is how a legal-looking salary ends up under the legal minimum.
The minimum rate of wages is fixed by the day. From that one figure, two others follow: divide by eight for an hourly rate, and multiply by twenty-six for a monthly rate.
Twenty-six, not thirty or thirty-one. A month of minimum wages is twenty-six daily rates, which is the number that decides whether a monthly salary actually clears the floor.
The rules stop short of the figure itself. The criteria for fixing the daily rate are to be set separately by the central government, so anyone quoting a national minimum wage from these rules is quoting something that is not in them.
The cost-of-living top-up on that wage, called dearness allowance, does move on a fixed rhythm. On the central list it is recomputed once before 1 April and once before 1 October each year, against the Average Consumer Price Index Number for Industrial Workers published by the Labour Bureau.
Did You Know?
A lawful deduction still cannot be taken in one go. Under these central rules, where a recovery is larger than the month allows, the balance carries forward and no month’s recovery may exceed half of wages.
If You Are Not on the Central List
This is the part most readers of this page need, because most businesses are not on that list.
Nothing here binds you directly. Your obligations under the Code on Wages are unchanged, and your rule book is the one your state notifies.
That is not the same as nothing to do. The Ministry of Labour and Employment’s answers on the labour codes are written for the codes generally rather than for one set of employers.
Whether your state copies this template or departs from it is not settled, and no state rules are quoted on this page for that reason.
So the sensible thing is to read these rules as a strong hint of where your own state is heading.
Two things are cheap to get ready now: a wage slip that issues on or before payday, and attendance and wage records you could hand over electronically.
The labour codes readiness checklist covers what else the four codes moved, and the probation period rules changed on the same day, under the Industrial Relations Code.
Where the Code on Wages Rules Trip You
The faults repeat, and they change with how you organise the week.
| Type of business | What goes wrong |
|---|---|
| Manufacturing unit on rotating shifts | A substituted rest day pushes somebody past ten consecutive days |
| Hospital or diagnostic chain | Weekend cover treated as ordinary time rather than at the overtime rate |
| Hotel or resort in season | Rest days deferred through a busy month and never given back |
| Retail chain across states | One rule book assumed for every branch, when each state writes its own |
| IT services firm with a central PSU contract | The contract team left on state rules when that work sits in the central list |
| Logistics or warehousing hub | Wage slips issued after payday, which the Rules do not allow |
Read down that second column and most of those faults are set by a roster, not by payroll. The shift plan settles the rest day and the ten-day limit, weeks before anybody runs a salary.
One pattern is worth naming, and it is my judgement rather than data. No business I have worked with ever set out to run somebody eleven days straight.
It happened anyway, and each time the roster had been changed twice by different people, with no single record showing the whole run.
Where Attendo Fits
Attendo (formerly Petpooja Payroll) is a complete workforce management system, built by Petpooja and used by 40,000+ businesses. Attendance, shifts, leaves, approvals, payroll and statutory compliance run in one place.
Because the roster and the attendance record sit in the same system as the salary, a run of consecutive days is visible while it is still a plan rather than a payroll problem.
Our guide to the attendance to salary workflow shows where that record starts.
Your Code on Wages Rules Checklist
Run your own position past six questions.
- Are you on the central list, and have you checked section 2(d) rather than assumed?
- Does any roster in the last quarter show somebody working more than ten days in a row?
- Is the wage slip issued on or before payday, every time? Your state may already ask this too.
- If you are on the central list, are the three registers being kept, in Form I, Form IV and Form IX?
- Is work on a rest day being paid at the overtime rate rather than ordinary time?
- Is a notice board up, with the wage rates, the wage period and the payment day on it?
That first question is the one most businesses have never actually looked up. It takes one reading of section 2(d), and it is the cheapest thing on this list.
What to Do Before Your Next Payday
The whole page turns on one question, and it is not how long a working day is. It is whether you are on the central list.
Answer that and the rest follows. Either these are your rules, or they are the template your own state is drawing from.
What is genuinely new is that the template exists at all. Until 8 May 2026 the Code said what had to happen and left the how unwritten.
If I had to pick one habit to start before your next payday, it would be the roster. A long unbroken run is set weeks before payroll ever sees it, and it is the hardest thing to put right afterwards.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What are the Code on Wages rules for 2026?
2. Do the Code on Wages central rules apply to every employer?
3. How many days can an employee work without a rest day?
4. When does a wage slip have to be issued?
5. How is a monthly minimum wage calculated under the new rules?
6. Which registers do the Code on Wages rules require?
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