What It Costs to Make a Garment in India 2026: Wages, Workers and the State-by-State Gap

Almost every conversation about clothing prices in India ends up at the same unexamined assumption: that the person who sewed the garment is a rounding error. This report sets out what that person is actually paid, how many of them there are, and why, when Karnataka raised minimum wages across most of its economy in 2026, garment workers were left out. The numbers come from state wage notifications, official labour statistics and industry bodies.

1. The scale: 45 million people

India's textile and apparel sector provides direct employment to more than 45 million people on 2025 estimates,^[1] and contributes around 2 per cent of national GDP.^[2] Older official framing put it at roughly 4.5 crore directly employed with a further 6 crore in allied activity,^[4] which gives a sense of how much the total moves depending on where the boundary is drawn.

It is India's second largest employer after agriculture on most industry accounting, and the country is the sixth largest apparel exporter globally,^[19] holding 3.91 per cent of world trade in textiles and apparel.^[3]

2. Who actually makes the clothes

Roughly 60 per cent of workers in India's formal apparel-export sector are women, and in Tiruppur the share approaches 80 per cent.^[15] The Tiruppur Exporters Association’s own figure is 65 per cent of the cluster’s six lakh direct workers.^[11] The pattern is not unique to India — the ILO puts women at nearly 60 per cent of garment workers globally, reaching close to 80 per cent in some regions.^[14]

Set against the wider labour market this is striking. Female labour force participation for those aged 15 and above was about 35.3 per cent in December 2025.^[17] Garment manufacturing is one of very few large formal sectors in India where women are the clear majority of the workforce — and PLFS data shows women exceeding half the workforce in the sector.^[18] Seniority is a different picture: women hold a much smaller share of supervisory roles than of line roles.^[15]

3. The state-by-state wage gap

There is no national garment wage in India. Minimum wages are fixed by state governments under the Minimum Wages Act, separately for each scheduled employment, usually split by skill class and by geographic zone within the state. The result is a spread wide enough that the same job is legally worth very different amounts a few hundred kilometres apart.

Reported monthly figures show how wide the gap has long been. In April 2017, Scroll reported that units in Bengaluru — India's largest region for readymade apparel production and export — were paying ₹7,474 a month including dearness allowance. Tiruppur knitted-garment companies paid the Tamil Nadu stipulated minimum of ₹9,600, and woven-garment units ₹11,000. Delhi units paid ₹9,742 until March 2017, when a 36 per cent hike raised the minimum to ₹13,350.^[12] Those are 2017 figures, and every state has revised its rates since. Tamil Nadu's current minimum for tailoring establishments, effective 1 April 2026, is ₹234.65 a day including variable dearness allowance.^[10]

4. What Karnataka changed in May 2026

On 22 May 2026 Karnataka issued a comprehensive, uniform minimum wage framework covering 81 scheduled employments.^[7] The average increase is about 60 per cent, with rates ranging from about ₹19,300 for an unskilled worker in Zone 3 to ₹31,100 for a highly skilled worker in Zone 1.^[22] The revised zone-wise rates for the highly skilled classification are approximately ₹31,114 in Zone 1, ₹28,285 in Zone 2 and ₹25,714 in Zone 3.^[6] The state's own labour department publishes the scheduled-employment rate tables.^[5]

Garment workers were not among the beneficiaries. The garment sector was one of 19 scheduled employments, alongside beedi, plantation, handloom and powerloom work, kept out of the revision.^[23] Wages for those sectors are to be revised separately through the committee method under the Code on Wages, 2019. The Garment and Textile Workers' Union says around 4 lakh garment workers in Karnataka earn a minimum of approximately ₹13,000 a month, nearly 30 per cent lower than wages paid in other industries^[24] — below even the lowest rate the revision set for the employments it covered. In July 2025 the same union had sought a monthly minimum of ₹42,000 for garment workers.^[13] Tamil Nadu separately notified revised rates effective 1 April 2026, including for tailoring establishments.^[9][10]

"When people ask why something handmade costs what it does, the honest answer is that somebody was paid properly to make it. That is not a premium. That is the price."— Ramola Bachchan, Founder

5. The clusters: Tiruppur, Bengaluru, Delhi

Indian garment manufacturing is concentrated rather than spread. Tiruppur is the country's largest knitwear cluster: knitwear exports from Tiruppur were ₹44,747 crore in 2024-25, with around six lakh workers employed directly.^[11] Bengaluru is the biggest region for readymade apparel production and export, reported in 2017 to have over 1,200 factories.^[12] Delhi and the National Capital Region form the third major hub.

Because minimum wages are set state-wise, this concentration means a handful of state notifications determine the floor for most of the industry. Ready-made garments were the largest category of India's textile and apparel exports in FY26, at US$ 15.77 billion or 44 per cent of the total.^[2]

6. Minimum wage is not a living wage

The distinction sits at the centre of the current debate. A minimum wage is the legal floor an employer must pay. A living wage is the level at which a worker can meet basic needs. India's movement toward living-wage benchmarking is an active policy discussion rather than settled law, and industry bodies have published on the challenges of making the shift.^[20]

Reporting from Bengaluru's garment hub has made the sharper point that in practice the minimum frequently functions as the maximum — the floor becomes the going rate rather than a starting point.^[12] That is what makes a revision like Karnataka's consequential: where the minimum is the market rate, moving the minimum moves actual pay — and why leaving garments out of it matters.

“Anyone who sells Indian clothing has to be able to answer what the person who made it was paid — if the number is uncomfortable, that is information, not an excuse.” according to fashion designer Ramola Bachchan, who has been designing resort wear in India since 2018.

7. Why wages barely move the shelf price

Labour is a small share of what a garment retails for. Fabric, trims, freight, duties, brand margin and retail margin between them account for most of the price. The practical consequence is counter-intuitive but consistent: a large percentage increase in the wage line produces a small percentage increase in the shelf price, because the wage line was a small share to begin with.

This is the arithmetic behind the living-wage argument. The cost of paying substantially better sits within the normal variance of fabric prices and freight — which is why the constraint is rarely the retail price and usually the competitive dynamics of sourcing.

8. Factory wages and hand-work are different markets

Factory garment workers are paid monthly wages set against state schedules. Hand embroidery and hand-spinning are usually paid per piece or per unit of output — khadi spinning, for instance, is paid per hank of yarn. These are separate labour markets with different economics, and figures from one should never be used to characterise the other.

The handloom sector is a third distinct population again: 35.22 lakh weavers and allied workers, more than 72 per cent of them women.^[21]

9. Where the data is weakest

Employment totals are the softest numbers here. They shift between releases depending on whether allied activity is counted, which is why the same sector appears as 45 million in one official statement and 4.5 crore plus 6 crore allied in another.^[1][4] Both are official; they measure different boundaries.

Wage notifications are firmer, because each carries a gazetted rate and an effective date. But notified minimums are not the same as observed pay, and several figures quoted in reporting are plant-level or union-reported rather than gazetted. Where this report gives a reported figure rather than a notified one, it says so. Labour force participation figures come from the Periodic Labour Force Survey.^[16]

Frequently Asked Questions

Related research: What Hand Embroidery Really Costs in India · India’s Khadi Economy 2026 · India’s Handcraft and Embroidery Economy 2026 · India's Tariff Whiplash 2026