For the first three months of 2026-27, the Centre did not revise wages under the rural employment guarantee. Workers were paid the 2025-26 rates while the scheme moved from MGNREGA to its replacement, the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, known as VB-G RAM G. The new law took effect on 1 July 2026 with new wage rates (notification S.O. 3518(E) of 30 June): a national floor of Rs 300 a day and, by the ministry’s figures, a national average of Rs 327.4 against Rs 298.8 before, a rise of 9.6% (described officially as “over 10%”).

This blog’s piece in August showed how a change in the Labour Bureau’s village sample made rural wages look as if they had jumped 17% when they had not, and how the same rebased price index for agricultural labourers (CPI-AL) feeds the rules that set these wages. This follow-up asks the next question: once prices are taken into account, did the July rise leave workers better off? Nationally, only just. State by state, the answer splits in two.

Prices turned just as wages were reset

For most of the year the price side helped. Year-on-year inflation for agricultural labourers was 1.73% in June 2025 and 0.04% in December, so a frozen wage lost little. Then it turned. The index rose from 140.06 in June 2026 to 144.82 in September, 3.4% in three months, and year-on-year inflation reached 6.3% in September, the highest in the new series. Over the whole stretch from June 2025, when the rebased series begins, to September 2026, prices for agricultural labourers rose 8.0%. Against the 9.6% wage rise, that leaves a real gain of about 1.4% nationally, most of it gone within one quarter of the new rates taking effect.

The floor lifted the poorest states; the rest fell behind

The national figure hides two different outcomes. The Rs 300 floor raised wages by 15–19% in states that had been paying Rs 252–261, such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Assam, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Their workers came out 4–11% ahead after prices. States already above the floor got rises of 0.3–4.0%, apart from Goa (7.4%) and Kerala (8.7%), and several of them are where rural inflation has been highest; Gujarat, lifted from Rs 288 to the floor, got 4.2%. In 8 of the 17 states examined the new wage buys less than the old one did in June 2025: Andhra Pradesh (-9.1%), Telangana (-8.5%), Maharashtra (-6.3%), Tamil Nadu (-4.9%), as well as Haryana, Karnataka, Punjab and Gujarat.

Wage rates: 2025-26 from S.O. 1463(E) of 27 March 2025, checked in the Gazette of India (CG-DL-E-27032025-262013); from 1 July 2026, S.O. 3518(E) of 30 June 2026 as reported by Upstox, SCC Online, The Tribune and others; some sites give different figures for a few states (Karnataka, Punjab, Goa, Kerala), and the gazette-based lists were used. Prices: CPI-AL (2019 = 100) for each state, June 2025 and September 2026, MoSPI data service. The 2025-26 rates took effect in April 2025; the rebased index starts in June 2025, and the all-India old-series index barely moved between April and May 2025. The comparison asks what the July 2026 wage buys in September 2026 against what the 2025-26 wage bought in June 2025.

Telangana is the starkest case. Its wage rose by one rupee, from Rs 307 to Rs 308, while prices for its agricultural labourers rose 9.7%. Andhra Pradesh’s rose Rs 5 against prices up 11.8%. The notification does not say how each state’s rate was calculated, so it is not possible to tell from the published material whether these small rises reflect a formula, the timing of the price data used, or a decision to concentrate the increase on the floor.

Two corrections to the earlier piece

The August piece reported that the March 2025 notification gave “a national average of Rs 370 a day”, and set that against the Rs 298.8 average in the VB-G RAM G announcement as two official figures it could not reconcile. The state rates settle it. In 2025-26 only Haryana (Rs 400), Goa (Rs 378) and Karnataka (Rs 370) paid Rs 370 or more; the simple average of the 17 states above is about Rs 307. Rs 370 cannot have been a national average, while Rs 298.8 is consistent with the state rates. The August piece also gave June 2025 inflation the wrong way round: per the MoSPI data service it was 1.73% for agricultural labourers (CPI-AL) and 1.42% for rural labourers (CPI-RL). Both points are corrected in that piece.

What would fix this

• The Ministry of Rural Development should publish, with every wage notification, the method used to set each state’s rate: the price index, the months it covers and any floor or cap applied.
• Wage rates under VB-G RAM G should be revised against the latest twelve months of each state’s CPI-AL, so that a state with 9–12% price growth does not receive a rise of under 2%.
• The ministry should publish its national average wage with the weights used, so figures such as Rs 298.8 and Rs 327.4 can be reproduced from the state rates.

These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.

What this piece could not establish

The 2025-26 rates and the Act’s start date were read in the Gazette of India’s own text through the SansadSaar index of the archive.org Gazette of India collection (S.O. 1463(E), CG-DL-E-27032025-262013; S.O. 2382(E), CG-DL-E-11052026-272413). The July 2026 wage notification, S.O. 3518(E), is not in that index, so the new rates come from news lists of it, which disagree for a few states. The price comparison uses each state’s overall CPI-AL; it does not account for the extra 25 days of work the new law guarantees, which raises what a household can earn without changing the daily rate. Whether workers in each state actually received the higher rate from 1 July, and how many days they worked, is not covered.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.