The Code on Wages, 2019 (Act No. 29 of 2019) is an Act of the Parliament of India that consolidates and amends the laws relating to wages and bonus payments. It was enacted as the first of four proposed Labour Codes to rationalize India's labor laws and improve the ease of doing business. The bill was passed by the Rajya Sabha on August 2, 2019, and received the President's assent on August 8, 2019.
The Code was created to solve the problem of fragmented and complex wage legislation, which previously covered only about 40% of the labor force. It replaced and subsumed four older Acts: the Payment of Wages Act, 1936, the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, the Payment of Bonus Act, 1965, and the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976.
Its key mechanism is to provide a unified framework for wage regulation, extending the protection of minimum wages and timely payment to all employees in both the organized and unorganized sectors, irrespective of their wage ceiling or sector. A major provision is the introduction of a National Floor Wage (Section 9), which the Central Government fixes, and no State Government can set its minimum wages below this level, aiming to reduce wage disparity across the country. The Code mandates that employers must not discriminate on the basis of gender in matters of wages and recruitment for the same or similar work (Section 3), ensuring equal pay for equal work. Furthermore, it requires employers to pay overtime wages at a rate not less than twice the normal wages for work beyond regular hours (Section 14).
The Code on Wages, 2019, is intrinsically connected to the other three new Labour Codes: the Industrial Relations Code, 2020, the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, and the Code on Social Security, 2020, all part of the same reform effort. A significant change is the replacement of the term 'Inspector' with Inspector-cum-Facilitator (Section 51), emphasizing a dual role of enforcement and guidance for compliance. The Code also standardizes the definition of 'wages' across the subsumed laws to reduce ambiguity.