Corporate Earnings Are Booming, But Employee Pay Is Not Keeping Up
New Delhi: The profitability of the corporate sector in India has grown but the gap between revenue growth and wage-bill growth has expanded rapidly. A combination of factors – the new labour codes, restrained hiring and compensation and growing adoption of AI tools – is allowing companies to keep employee costs low even as sales rise quickly, says a report in the Business Standard.
Sales are up 22.18% year-on-year (YoY) for the June quarter of 2026, while employee costs are 9% higher, says the report. This means wages and compensation grew at a much slower pace than profits. Put differently, earnings have gone into maintaining profitability rather than compensation.
The data cited by Business Standard is for 3,057 non-finance companies, sourced from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.
Sales growth was higher than the increase in salaries and wages in manufacturing companies and electricity firms, said the report. This divergence was particularly stark in mining. Sales grew 40.83% in the sector, while salaries and wages rose by just 1.04%. At Vedanta, a UK-headquartered mining company, the operating revenue increased 53.6%, while employee costs rose only 4.8%.
Market expert Ambareesh Baliga told the publication that he expects AI adoption to extend beyond the IT sector over the next two to three years, which might mean more output growth but again without proportionate wage growth. Significant gains in employee compensation may not happen at least in a few quarters, according to him, the report said.
The report also says that at the IT services provider Infosys, expenses on employee benefits grew 10.7% as against a 14% increase in revenues from operations.
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