PLFS Workforce Explorer
Who actually works in India — and how far apart are women and men? Labour-force participation, the worker ratio and unemployment, across every state and by gender. Drawn from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), the government's official measure of employment — now also with what people earn and how secure their jobs are. Where the learning ladder (ASER → UDISE+ → AISHE) finally meets the economy.
What is PLFS — and why it matters
The Periodic Labour Force Survey is how India officially counts who is working, looking for work, or out of the labour force. Its three headline numbers: LFPR (the share of people working or seeking work), WPR (the share actually employed), and the unemployment rate (the share of the labour force without work). The single biggest fact it reveals is the gender gap: barely two in five Indian women are in the labour force, against nearly four in five men — one of the widest such gaps in the world. But the gap is closing fast, and PLFS is where you can watch it happen.
▸ How to read this explorer
- Start with the question. Tap any underlined word to change the measure, the gender, or the view.
- All three measures are percentages of the 15-and-older population (LFPR, WPR) or of the labour force (unemployment). The dashed line marks the All-India figure.
- Five views: Rank the states, Track the national trend across both survey designs, Compare pay by job type, See job security, or List the table. The rankings and the table let you switch between calendar 2025 and 2023-24.
- Confidence intervals appear on the 2023-24 series only. The whiskers are 95% intervals, showing how much sampling uncertainty sits around each state’s estimate; where two states’ whiskers overlap heavily the gap between them may not be real. They are built from the relative standard errors in the 2023-24 report’s Appendix B. MoSPI has not published equivalents for the calendar series, so the 2025 view carries none rather than borrowed ones.
- Rank & trend are state/national percentages; Compare pay and See job security are all-India (these breakdowns are published nationally). PLFS is designed for state and national estimates, not districts.
- Below the explorer, a separate panel reads the same three measures by social group — the clearest demonstration on this page of why the unemployment rate is the wrong number to read on its own.
Making sense of the numbers
What the measures mean. LFPR (Labour Force Participation Rate) is the share of people aged 15+ who are either working or actively seeking work. WPR (Worker Population Ratio) is the share actually employed. The unemployment rate is the share of the labour force (not the whole population) that is seeking work but hasn't found it — which is why a state can have low unemployment and low participation at once. All figures here use usual status (PS+SS) for the 15+ age group, rural and urban combined.
Reading it responsibly. A low female LFPR does not mean women aren't working — unpaid domestic and care work is not counted as "labour force". High-participation states like Himachal Pradesh reflect large agricultural and informal workforces; a high unemployment rate in a state like Kerala sits alongside high education and high wages (people can afford to wait for a good job). Read participation and unemployment together, and read a state against the All-India line and its own trend rather than in isolation.
The shift to watch. Women's LFPR has risen from about 23% in 2017-18 to nearly 42% in 2023-24 — the fastest change in these numbers, and the reason the trend view leads with the female line. How much reflects genuinely rising opportunity versus distress-driven and unpaid farm work is debated; the data shows the movement, not the cause.
What people earn (Compare pay). Under the calendar-year design PLFS publishes earnings as an annual figure, so the quarter-only caveat that applied to the older series no longer does. The figures shown are calendar year 2025, all-India, rural and urban combined; the API also carries them split by sector. The gap is starkest in self-employment, where women's average gross earnings (₹6,374/month) are about 36% of men's (₹17,914). Superseded note on the older basis: PLFS 2023-24 reported earnings by survey quarter on a current-weekly-status basis, for three kinds of work: regular wage/salaried (monthly), self-employed (monthly gross), and casual labour (per day). The figures shown are the latest quarter, April–June 2024, all-India, rural and urban combined — labelled as such, never as an annual average. The gender gap is starkest in self-employment, where women's average gross earnings (₹5,803/month) are about a third of men's (₹16,723). Source: PLFS 2023-24 report, Statements 10–12.
How secure the work is (See job security). Two things the headline rates hide. First, how people are employed: nearly three in five workers are self-employed and only about a fifth hold a regular wage job — a structure dominated by own-account and unpaid family work, especially for women. Second, the quality of even the regular jobs: among regular wage/salaried employees in non-farm work, most have no written contract (58%), are not entitled to paid leave (47%), and get no social-security benefit (53%). These are the standard PLFS informality measures. Source: PLFS 2023-24 report, Statements 6 and 9.
The confidence intervals. PLFS is a sample survey, so every state figure carries sampling uncertainty. The whiskers on the rank view are 95% confidence intervals, computed as estimate ± 1.96 × (estimate × RSE ⁄ 100) using the relative standard errors published in the report's own Appendix B (Table 1RSE, usual status, by state and gender), clamped to the 0–100 range. Two honest caveats: the RSE table is not broken out by age band, so pairing it with the age-15+ estimate is a close approximation; and for the unemployment rate and the smallest UTs the intervals are wide (the estimate is noisy) — which is exactly what the whiskers are there to show.
Participation, worker-ratio and unemployment figures are pulled from the official MoSPI eSankhyiki PLFS data service (Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation, Government of India), PLFS annual 2017-18 to 2023-24; the wage, job-quality and standard-error figures are transcribed from the published PLFS 2023-24 Annual Report. National figures were validated against that report (LFPR 60.1%, male 78.8%, female 41.7%). Two small UTs (Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Daman & Diu) are omitted from the trend where the series did not return a value. This is an independent, source-linked interface for learning and discussion — for methodology and authoritative interpretation, consult MoSPI directly. ImpactMojo is not affiliated with MoSPI.
The same labour market, read by social group
PLFS breaks its three headline numbers down by social group as well as by state. Doing so is a useful test of whether you are reading the right measure — because participation and unemployment point in opposite directions here.
Read the unemployment column on its own and you get the story backwards. Unemployment is lowest for Scheduled Tribes (2.1%) and highest for the residual “Others” category (3.7%). Taken alone that says Scheduled Tribes are faring best in India's labour market. Participation says something close to the opposite: 73.1% of Scheduled Tribe adults are in the labour force against 53.9% of “Others”, and the gap is far larger than anything in the unemployment column.
The unemployment rate measures search, not hardship. To be counted unemployed you have to be both without work and looking for it, and looking takes a household that can go without your earnings while you do. Where it cannot, people take whatever work is available rather than search, and measured unemployment stays low. That is why the rate varies so little — from 2.1% to 3.7% across every social group — while participation varies by twenty percentage points.
The clearest case is among women. Scheduled Tribe women have the highest participation of any group here (62.6%) and the lowest unemployment (1.7%). Women in the “Others” category have the lowest participation (31.0%) and the highest unemployment (4.7%) — both on the same row. Switch to the Women tab above to see it.
So read them together. Participation tells you how many people are in the market at all; the worker ratio tells you how many are actually working; unemployment tells you only about the minority who are searching. A programme designed off the unemployment column alone would target the wrong households.
Source and caveats. MoSPI eSankhyiki PLFS data service, annual calendar-year 2025 series (LFPR, WPR and UR), All-India, age 15 and above, usual status PS+SS, rural and urban combined, by social group; retrieved 26 August 2026. This is the calendar-year series, not the July–June one used elsewhere on this page — the two are not a continuous run, so do not read the figures here against the 2023-24 numbers above. “Others” is PLFS's residual category for households outside the three reserved classifications, not a group in its own right; the four categories are administrative, and each contains wide variation. Sampling error is not shown for this breakdown because MoSPI does not publish relative standard errors disaggregated by social group.