• SL ranks 120th out of 130 countries in global minimum wage comparison
• Workers cut meals, take second jobs, enter debt traps simply to reach payday
• Women bear heaviest burden of low-wage economy built on precarious labour
• Plantation wage deal allegedly excludes 40,000 workers
• Inadequate pay is driving poverty, migration, decline in public services, economists warn
• Govt. orders probes into employers violating new minimum wage

By the last week of the salary cycle of every month, a development officer in Colombo stops buying meat and fish. His household of three survives on sprats, dhal, and eggs when his salary of close to Rs. 50,000 arrives and immediately begins to dry out.

“My salary goes straight into basic provisions, electricity and water bills, and the kid’s school transport. There is no money left for anything else. By the last week, we cut out meat and fish entirely and live on sprats, dhal, or eggs just to make it to payday,” he lamented.

What keeps his family afloat, he explained, was not his salary but the goodwill of a neighbourhood grocer. “To survive the last week of the month, I rely on the neighbourhood grocery shop owner who lets me take items on credit. The second my salary hits the account on the 1st, almost a third of it goes straight to clearing that store tab. It is a cycle I can’t break,” he said.

His account is close to that of the median experience of a Sri Lankan wage earner in 2026 – a country where the minimum wage, even after two rounds of increases in as many years, continues to lag behind the actual cost of staying alive.

Near the bottom of the world

Sri Lanka ranks 120th among 130 countries surveyed in a global minimum wage comparison published by Visual Capitalist, with its purchasing power-adjusted monthly minimum wage estimated at $ 200. The ranking, based on 2024 International Labour Organization data, adjusts minimum wages for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), reflecting differences in living costs and what workers can actually buy with their earnings.

Switzerland tops the list at $ 3,804, followed by Germany ($ 2,928), the United Kingdom ($ 2,902), and the Netherlands ($ 2,876). South Korea records Asia’s highest figure at $ 2,362 (11th globally), while the United States, using its federal minimum wage of $ 7.25 an hour – unchanged since 2009 – ranks 25th at $ 1,257.

Sri Lanka trails most South Asian neighbours in the comparison: Pakistan (68th, $ 570), Nepal (78th, $ 490), Bangladesh (89th, $ 379), and India (111th, $ 233). Only 10 countries – including Niger, Bhutan, Haiti, Guinea, and the Central African Republic – rank below it.  

The figures do not represent direct US Dollar wages, and do not account for taxes, benefits, or within-country cost differences. But for economists tracking Sri Lanka’s post-crisis recovery, the ranking captures what official statistics have struggled to convey: that recorded wage increases have not translated into a meaningfully better standard of living.

A decade and a half of falling behind

A December 2025 policy brief by the Global Labour Institute (GLI), ‘Falling Behind: Minimum wage-setting in Sri Lanka’s apparel industry,’ traces wage revisions between 2010 and 2026 affecting roughly 360,000 apparel workers, most of them women. It found that Sri Lanka lacked a predictable annual wage review process, unlike competitors such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, and China, causing minimum wages to stagnate for years and eroding purchasing power, particularly during inflationary periods.

Although nominal wages rose sharply after the 2022 economic collapse, the brief found these increases largely compensated for past losses rather than delivering real gains: the inflation-adjusted value of the apparel minimum wage fell in 10 of the past 15 years and only recovered to its 2013 level by 2025.

It also found that currency devaluation lowered labour costs for exporters paid in foreign currency even as workers faced surging prices for food, fuel, and services – with the absence of transparent, disaggregated earnings data obscuring the true scale of the gap. Comparing Sri Lanka with Cambodia, where sustained worker mobilisation produced annual wage reviews and rising real wages without hurting exports, the brief recommended annual reviews, living-wage benchmarks, and greater transparency from global apparel buyers.

Trapped between wages and debt

A 26-year-old apparel worker in Katunayake, who did not wish to disclose her salary, said that her wage barely lasted 10–12 days. 

“I support my mother back home in Monaragala, who is suffering from a medical condition, so sending money to her for medicine comes before buying my own food. The factory hasn’t increased our basic salary in over three years. Management keeps saying global orders are down. But everything outside the factory gates costs twice as much now,” she said.

Unable to close the shortfall through wages, she turned to online lending apps. “They disburse money fast, but then the harassment starts – insane interest rates, dynamic processing fees, and continuous calls threatening to message my contacts if I’m late by a single day. I took one loan to settle another, and now I’m completely trapped in a debt trap I can’t see a way out of,” she said.

A 22-year-old sales assistant at a retail clothing shop in Maharagama, who takes home Rs. 28,000 a month plus a small commission, described a similar squeeze: “I live with my family, but my father’s daily-wage work has dried up, so my earnings are expected to keep the kitchen running.”

Even salaried professionals described being pushed into informal borrowing. A journalist at a private newspaper said that his employer routinely delayed salaries and had stopped depositing his EPF and ETF contributions for over a year despite continuing to deduct them from his payslip. 

“Because of the constant salary delays, I couldn’t pay my rent or send money to my parents on time. In desperation, I turned to micro-lending apps and informal private lenders. On weekends, I engage in an app-based delivery service using my motorbike. Sometimes, I even borrow from my mother, who is a retired Government employee. It’s a shame to ask your parents for money when you have to take care of them,” he said.

‘SL might even be at the very bottom’

University of Colombo (UOC) Professor in Economics Priyanga Dunusinghe told The Sunday Morning that Sri Lanka’s official minimum wage of Rs. 17,500 had been calculated on 2021 PPP-adjusted rates – roughly $ 200 at the time – a standard he said the post-2022 crisis had since unravelled entirely. 

“If we adjust it to the current situation, Sri Lanka might even be at the very bottom [of the wage comparison ranking], especially after that severe inflation,” he said, citing a national poverty rate of around 25%, worse than India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, or Nepal.

Prof. Dunusinghe said economic migration had fundamentally changed character, now driven by the inadequacy of wages rather than unemployment alone. “Today, it is actually the employed people who are leaving because the wage level is extremely low. If you talk to 100 youths today, 90 are talking about leaving the country,” he said.

He linked the same pressures to a decline in public sector capacity. “Those who remain in the public sector today are those who lack multiple options. As a result, all these institutions are collapsing.” He also described a system in which citizens were taxed heavily on basic goods while receiving little in return, forcing families to pay separately for private tuition and private medicine.

On solutions, he rejected quick fixes. “The Government cannot just distribute wealth. We must accelerate economic growth to at least 7% or 8%. Without that, we cannot raise people’s wages.”

The gendered cost of a low-wage model

Dr. Amali Wedagedara, a feminist political economist at the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies, speaking to The Sunday Morning, said that mainstream discourse on women’s labour remained outdated.

“There is a very cliché narrative. That narrative has always portrayed women as ‘vulnerable’ or ‘marginal’ even up to today,” she said, tracing the pattern to the mid-1970s, when Sri Lanka’s economic model deliberately absorbed women into the workforce under low skills and low wages – a structure she said remained largely unchanged five decades on.

She was critical of how frameworks like ‘gender budgeting’ were applied purely as growth instruments. “They never stop to problematise what kind of labour they are trying to liberate women to do. They are trying to release women back into that same vicious cycle of low-skilled, low-wage work.” On the tea estates, she said, “Sinhalese people hold the HR, management, and administrative jobs, but the pluckers are exclusively Tamil women,” who lack a fixed daily wage.

In apparel, she said the women “providing the primary labour for these products are still on a low-wage scale,” with a growing share now employed through precarious ‘manpower’ hiring agencies. The occupational toll, she said, was severe and unsupported: restricted water and toilet breaks have left factory workers with high rates of urinary tract infections and anxiety, while plantation workers suffer nutritional deficiencies and uterine prolapse from carrying heavy loads.

“If someone gets sick, the burden of those illnesses must be borne entirely by these individuals privately. They have no maternity support, nor do they have other insurance,” she said.

The plantation wage that left 40,000 workers behind

Sri Lanka’s daily wage for plantation workers was set at Rs. 1,750 under a 2026 Budget agreement between the Government and Regional Plantation Companies (RPCs) – a Rs. 400 increase split evenly between a Rs. 200 company contribution and a Rs. 200 Government attendance allowance, effective retroactively from 1 January 2026. The Cabinet allocated Rs. 5 billion for the State’s share; RPCs are expected to spend over Rs. 6 billion annually on theirs.

Institute for People Engagement and Networking (iPEN) Executive Director Jeewaratnam Suresh told the Sunday Morning that the process bypassed the Wages Board, the body legally responsible for setting plantation wages.

“This time, the Government and the companies made the decision and gave the salary directly. The Wages Board and the Labour Department were not involved,” he said, adding that this exclusion allowed employers to limit the increase to ‘registered workers’ – an estimated 80,000 of the roughly 120,000 estate workers, leaving a gap of some 40,000. “When we asked who is going to increase the wages for those 40,000, they said: ‘That is not our concern.’ But that cannot be the case,” he said.

Suresh accused companies of keeping workers on indefinite temporary status to avoid statutory obligations, resulting in registered workers earning Rs. 1,850 a day for the same work that paid unregistered workers as little as Rs. 800–1,000. “The voice of the workers is mostly not heard because they are temporary. If they speak up too much, they won’t even be given temporary work,” he said. 

By his calculation, using 23 working days a month over eight months, the Government has spent close to Rs. 2 billion subsidising the 80,000 registered workers – a sum roughly matched, he estimated, by what companies saved by declining to register the remaining 40,000 at the same rate. 

“This is exploitation of labour. That is why we complained to the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka,” he said, calling for wages to be set based on “the national economy, the cost of living, and the value of labour,” rather than political announcements.

Govt. position

Meanwhile, Deputy Minister of Labour Mahinda Jayasinghe said that the national minimum wage had been raised twice under the incumbent Government. 

Under the National Minimum Wage of Workers (Amendment) Act No.11 of 2025, effective from 1 April 2025, the monthly minimum wage rose from Rs. 17,500 to Rs. 27,000, with a further increase to Rs. 30,000 from 1 January 2026 – applying to all statutory payments including EPF, ETF, overtime, gratuity, maternity benefits, and holiday pay, and binding on both principal employers and intermediary contractors.

Jayasinghe said that the minimum monthly and daily wage for private sector employees had risen 71% since the incumbent Government took office, from Rs. 17,500 to Rs. 30,000 monthly and from Rs. 700 to Rs. 1,200 daily. He added that he had instructed the Department of Labour to investigate institutions failing to pay the mandated minimum, including a case involving private security officers at a State bank discussed at the department recently.

“The Department of Labour has a responsibility to identify and investigate institutions that have failed to implement this decision,” he said, adding that a 17-member committee chaired by the Secretary to the Ministry of Labour had been appointed to amend labour laws, with preliminary drafts already shared with trade unions on the National Labour Advisory Council ahead of broader consultations.

Multiple attempts to contact Commissioner General of Labour Nadeeka Wataliyadda for comment were unsuccessful.