How much do garment workers in Bangladesh earn? (2026)

The legal minimum wage for a garment worker in Bangladesh is Tk 12,500 a month for the entry grade, rising to Tk 15,035 for the top grade. By our arithmetic the entry rate is about Tk 481 a day, Tk 60 an hour and Tk 150,000 a year, or about US$101 (€90) a month at mid-October 2026 exchange rates. The rates were recommended by the Minimum Wage Board, declared by a government gazette published on 20 December 2023, and took effect from 1 December 2023. Since December 2024 workers also receive a 9% annual increment. Independent living-wage estimates for Dhaka are more than twice the entry wage. The next revision is due: the government appointed the members of the wage board on 1 November 2026, and no new rate had been proposed by 2 November 2026.

The legal minimum wage in 2026, grade by grade

On 12 November 2023 the government published a gazette of the Minimum Wage Board’s rates, with five worker grades and a top rate of Tk 14,750, and the board invited objections within 14 days, as The Daily Star reported. The final rates were declared by a Ministry of Labour and Employment notification dated 18 December 2023, published in the Bangladesh Gazette on 20 December 2023 and in effect from 1 December 2023. The final structure cut the worker grades from seven to four and fixed a minimum gross wage for each. A second schedule sets four grades for staff roles such as clerks, drivers, security guards and cleaners, from Tk 12,800 to Tk 18,800. Every grade receives the same fixed allowances for medical care, transport and food; the grades differ in basic pay, and house rent is set at half of basic.

These are minimums, not typical pay. A skilled operator on a complex line is often paid above the floor for their grade, and overtime is paid on top. The table matters to a buyer for a different reason: it is the benchmark an auditor checks payslips against. A factory that pays an experienced sewing operator the entry-grade rate is underpaying, even if every worker receives at least Tk 12,500.

The minimum wage per month, per day, per hour and per year

Bangladesh sets garment minimum wages by the month. There is no legal hourly or daily minimum for a monthly-paid garment worker, so any hourly or daily figure is a conversion. We convert with the rule the law itself uses for overtime: rule 102 of the Bangladesh Labour Rules 2015 counts a month as 208 working hours (52 weeks ÷ 12 months × 48 hours), built on the Labour Act’s 8-hour day and 48-hour week (sections 100 and 102). At 8 hours a day, 208 hours is 26 working days, a six-day week. A year is 12 monthly payments. For currencies we use Bangladesh Bank’s weighted average rate of Tk 123.45 to the US dollar, on its exchange-rate page dated 17 October 2026, and the European Central Bank’s euro reference rate of US$1.1253 on 16 October 2026, which makes about Tk 138.92 to the euro.

Everything in the table except the two monthly taka rates is our arithmetic, rounded to whole taka, whole dollars and euros for a month or a year, and cents for a day or an hour. These are gross legal minimums before the annual increment, overtime, attendance bonuses and festival bonuses, so a worker who has been in the job since 2023, or who works overtime, earns more. The dollar and euro columns move with the exchange rate: at Bangladesh Bank’s rate for 23 September 2026 the entry wage was about US$102 a month. Factories inside the export processing zones follow BEPZA’s own scale, covered below.

Overtime: what the Labour Act says

The minimum wage sets the floor for a normal working month. Overtime is paid on top of it under separate rules, and those rules are often misstated on pages that rank for wage searches. What follows is from the Bangladesh Labour Act 2006 as consolidated on the government’s Laws of Bangladesh website, which includes amendments made in 2026, read on 23 September 2026. Confirm how it applies to a particular factory with its auditor or a Bangladeshi labour lawyer.

The rate: twice the ordinary rate of basic wage

Section 108(1) says a worker who works beyond the hours the Act allows in a day or a week is paid for the extra time at twice the ordinary rate of their basic wage plus dearness allowance and any ad hoc or interim wage. Two details matter on a payslip. The multiplier is 2, not 1.5. And it applies to basic wage, not to the gross monthly figure. The garment gazette has no dearness allowance component, so unless a factory pays an ad hoc or interim wage, the overtime base is basic wage alone: Tk 6,700 a month at the entry grade before increments, not the Tk 12,500 total.

Section 108 does not say how a monthly basic wage is turned into an hourly rate. The Bangladesh Labour Rules 2015 do. Rule 102 takes one 208th of the monthly wage as the hourly rate for a monthly-paid worker, and its note gives overtime pay as basic wage plus dearness allowance and any ad hoc or interim wage, times 2, times the overtime hours, divided by 208.

The overtime rate per hour, grade by grade

Applied to the basic pay in the December 2023 gazette, with no dearness allowance or interim wage, that formula gives these hourly overtime rates before any increment. The dollar and euro figures use the same exchange rates as the table above. All are our arithmetic.

Because overtime is worked out on basic pay, and basic is only just over half of the gross minimum (Tk 6,700 of Tk 12,500 at the entry grade), an hour of overtime pays only a little more than the gross minimum works out at for an ordinary hour: about Tk 64 against Tk 60 at the entry grade. Each 9% increment raises basic, and overtime with it: after the first increment, entry-grade basic is Tk 7,303 and an overtime hour about Tk 70. Ask the factory which calculation it uses, and check that its auditor tested overtime payments against time records.

Piece-rate workers

Section 108(2), as substituted by the Bangladesh Labour (Amendment) Act 2018, says the double rate does not apply to workers paid by the piece. They are still covered by the minimum wage. The December 2023 gazette requires employers who pay piece rates, sweater factories included, to set those rates so that no piece-rate worker earns less than the minimum for their grade, and it gives piece-rate workers the annual increment on basic wage as well.

The hour limits

A delivery date that can only be met by keeping workers past 60 hours a week is not a compliant date, whatever the price. Our guide to how long clothing manufacturing takes is the place to build time into a plan before you agree a date.

Factories inside the export processing zones come under a separate law, the Bangladesh EPZ Labour Act 2019. It sets the same daily and weekly limits and the same double rate on basic wage (sections 38, 40 and 45), and its overtime section has no separate rule for piece-rate workers.

Wage figures still repeated online

Several figures that still appear on sourcing and statistics pages do not match the official record. If one of them turns up in a factory’s costing, a payslip or an audit note, ask where it came from.

• Tk 15,625 as a new garment minimum. No such rate has been declared. The Minimum Wage Board’s list of declared rates, which cites a Labour Ministry memo of 6 September 2026, still shows the gazette of 20 December 2023 as the latest for garments, with Tk 12,500 at the entry grade for workers and Tk 12,800 at the lowest grade for staff.
• Tk 8,000 as the current minimum. That was the entry rate set in 2018. It was replaced from 1 December 2023.
• Tk 9,200 as a 2023 rate. The garment rates declared by the gazette of 20 December 2023 start at Tk 12,500 at the entry grade, and none of them is Tk 9,200.
• Five grades topping out at Tk 14,750. Those were the rates published for objections in November 2023. The final gazette has four worker grades, from Tk 12,500 to Tk 15,035.
• Overtime at 1.5 times pay. Section 108 sets twice the ordinary rate of basic wage.
• Dollar figures well above US$100. A conversion is only as current as its exchange rate. At Bangladesh Bank’s weighted average rate on the page dated 17 October 2026, Tk 12,500 is about US$101, or about €90 at the European Central Bank’s rate of 16 October.

Two conditions in the gazette belong on your audit questions. Employers must place every worker in the correct grade, enter them in the wage register and give them a wage slip. And workers hired through a contractor count as workers under the Labour Act: the contractor may not pay below the minimum, and responsibility for any dues left unpaid falls on the factory’s owner. Our compliance and audit service explains how audit reports are shared on an order.

How the minimum wage has moved since 2006

Garment wages in Bangladesh do not rise every year by law. They are reset by a wage board, and each reset is a large step. The Business Standard, reporting the figures cited by the IndustriALL Bangladesh Council in September 2026, lists the history of the entry-level minimum:

The percentages are our arithmetic on those figures. The pattern is the useful part: the floor has risen by half or more at every reset, and each reset follows a period in which prices have risen and wages have not. A buyer who plans prices over several seasons should expect the next step, not assume the current rate is permanent.

The annual increment: 9% since December 2024

Between resets, workers receive an annual increment. The 2023 structure provided for 5% a year. After a tripartite meeting of government, owners and unions in December 2024, the government added 4 percentage points, bringing the annual increment to 9%. The Business Standard reported that the gazette was issued on 5 January 2025, effective from 1 December 2024, and that it stays in force until the government revises it or the Minimum Wage Board announces the next minimum wage.

The increment is calculated on basic wage, not on the gross total. The Minimum Wage Board’s list of declared rates gives it as 9% of basic, and the worked example in the December 2023 gazette applies each year’s increment to the previous year’s basic. At the entry grade, where basic is Tk 6,700, the first 9% increment adds Tk 603 a month to basic wage. In practice this means a worker who joined at the entry grade in 2023 is now paid more than Tk 12,500, and the gap between the legal floor and actual payroll grows each December. When you read a wage figure in an audit report, check which date it refers to and whether that year’s increment has been applied.

Wages inside the export processing zones

Factories inside Bangladesh’s export processing zones, run by the Bangladesh Export Processing Zones Authority (BEPZA), follow a separate wage structure. BEPZA’s gazette of December 2023, reported by The Daily Star, set the minimum for a garment helper at Tk 12,800, up from Tk 8,200, with senior garment operators at Tk 15,200. The new rates applied from December 2023 and covered more than 480,000 workers in the zones. If the factory making your goods sits inside an EPZ, the auditor should be checking against the BEPZA structure, not the national one.

What Tk 12,500 buys

A wage is only meaningful against prices. Bangladesh has had persistent high inflation since the 2023 wage was set. According to Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics figures reported by UNB on 7 October 2026, inflation was 8.34% in September 2026, up from 8.26% in August, with food inflation at 7.22% and non-food inflation at 9.30%.

The outlook is worse. The IMF's World Economic Outlook of October 2026 forecasts average consumer-price inflation of 10.9% for the fiscal year to June 2027, up from 8.7% in the year to June 2026, and 12.9% by June 2027 itself. Set that against the increment: the 9% is paid on basic pay, which at the entry grade is Tk 6,700 of the Tk 12,500 gross, so it adds about 4.8% to the entry wage in its first year, by our arithmetic. If the IMF is right, prices will rise roughly twice as fast as an entry-grade worker's pay until a new minimum is set, which is the argument unions are making for a new wage board.

Two simple conversions help a buyer picture the number. First, at Bangladesh Bank’s weighted average rate of Tk 123.45 to the US dollar, on its exchange-rate page dated 17 October 2026, Tk 12,500 is about US$101 a month. Second, spread across the 26 working days of a six-day week, it is about Tk 481 a day. Both are our arithmetic and exclude overtime, bonuses and increments; the table of monthly, daily, hourly and yearly figures earlier in this guide gives the euro amounts too. Our Bangladesh garment industry statistics fact sheet converts the same wage into euros and pounds at Bangladesh Bank’s rates for 23 September 2026.

The gap between the minimum and a living wage

A living wage is the income a worker needs for a basic but decent standard of living for a family, including food, housing, health care, education and a small margin for emergencies. The best-known estimates for Bangladesh come from the Anker methodology, published by the Global Living Wage Coalition.

The Dhaka estimate assumes a family of four with 1.58 earners, which is why it is higher than the cost of living for one person. Living-wage figures are estimates built from price surveys, not legal requirements, and brands use them in different ways. What the table shows plainly is that the legal minimum covers roughly half of what these estimates say a family needs, even before the next wage board meets.

For a buyer, the honest conclusion is that a legally compliant factory is not the same as a factory paying a living wage. Very few factories anywhere in the export garment trade pay the Anker benchmark to every worker. What a buyer controls is narrower: paying a price that allows the factory to pay at least the legal wage, every increment and all overtime, on time.

A new wage board is due in 2026

Under amendments to the Bangladesh Labour Act 2006, the minimum wage must now be reviewed every three years instead of five. Because the current rate took effect on 1 December 2023 and was gazetted on 20 December 2023, the three years run out in December 2026. On 20 September 2026 the IndustriALL Bangladesh Council asked the government to reconstitute the wage board by 30 September and fix a new minimum by 30 November, effective from December 2026, as The Business Standard reported.

On 7 October 2026 The Business Standard reported that the Labour Ministry would first form a committee to complete preliminary steps and then set up the wage board, which its secretary hoped would be formed in October, after a meeting with the leaders of two garment owners’ associations who, he said, did not disagree. Labour leaders want a new minimum fixed by December 2026 so that workers are paid it from January 2027, while the president of the knitwear exporters’ association, BKMEA, said the industry was going through a tough time and this was not the right time to raise wages. The paper noted that the last revision, from board to gazette, took about six months.

By mid-October the process had begun. Garment workers blocked roads in Dhaka’s Uttara area for a third day on 14 October 2026 to demand a Tk 30,000 minimum, bdnews24.com reported. On 16 October The Daily Star reported that the Labour Ministry had written to the Bangladesh Employers’ Federation for its views and a nominee for the board, that the president of the garment exporters’ association, BGMEA, said it had no objection to a board but had not yet received a letter, and that a workers’ federation leader said the board could be announced the following week. Tk 30,000 is a demand from workers, not a proposal from the board. The Business Standard reported on 15 October that the Department of Labour had sent letters seeking nominations, and that its secretary said the board would be formed quickly once the nominations arrived, without giving a date. The government appointed the board’s members on 1 November 2026, as the next section sets out.

Whether the board meets that timetable is not yet known, and neither the government nor a board has proposed a new figure. The practical effect for a brand placing orders now is that factory wage bills in Bangladesh are likely to step up again within the life of orders being quoted today. A careful buyer does three things:

• Asks the factory whether its quotation already allows for the December increment and a possible new minimum.
• Avoids fixing prices for a year or more without a clause that shares the cost of a legal wage change.
• Does not treat a price rise that follows a wage-board decision as bad faith. It is the law working as designed.

Labour is one input among several. The guide to what drives the cost of a garment shows how fabric, trims and overheads make up the rest of a price.

The wage board was named on 1 November 2026: what happens next

On 1 November 2026 the Ministry of Labour and Employment published two notifications in the Bangladesh Gazette (extraordinary) appointing members of the Minimum Wage Board. The first, made under section 138(2) and (4) of the Bangladesh Labour Act 2006 as amended in 2026, names the board’s standing members: an independent member, a professor of public administration at Dhaka University; a member for employers, from the Bangladesh Employers’ Federation; and a member for workers, from the Bangladesh Jatiyatabadi Sramik Dal. The second, made under section 138(3) for the board’s work under section 139, adds two members for the garments sector: a director of BGMEA for the owners, and the general secretary of the Bangladesh Garments and Industrial Workers Federation for the workers. With its chairman, a senior district judge according to bdnews24.com, the board has six members for garments, as bdnews24.com and The Financial Express reported the same day.

The board now has to recommend a rate. It had not proposed one when we checked on 2 November 2026, so Tk 30,000 is still a demand from workers, not a proposal. Section 139(2) of the Labour Act gives a wage board six months from the government’s direction to send its recommendation, and the government can extend that period at the board’s request. The notifications do not give the date of that direction; if the six months run from 1 November 2026, the recommendation is due by the start of May 2027.

The three-year clock is set by section 139(6), as amended by section 30 of the Bangladesh Labour (Amendment) Act 2026 (Act 43 of 2026, dated 10 April 2026): the minimum wage fixed for an industry is to be re-fixed every three years, on the government’s direction. The law does not name a month. The current garment rates took effect on 1 December 2023 and were gazetted on 20 December 2023, so the three years are up in December 2026, and bdnews24.com reported on 1 November that the current rate expires the following month. November 2023, the date often given, is when the board’s proposed rates were published for objections, not when the rate was fixed.

Until a new gazette is in force, the December 2023 rates and the 9% annual increment on basic wage continue, and the increment falls due again in December 2026. For a worker at the entry grade since December 2023, basic wage was Tk 7,303 after the first increment and about Tk 7,960 after the second; after a third in December 2026 it would be about Tk 8,680, and an hour of overtime about Tk 83 instead of Tk 64. These figures are our arithmetic, applying each increment to the previous year’s basic as the gazette’s worked example does, and rounded.

What a buyer can check

You cannot verify a factory’s payroll from an email. You can verify it through the evidence that already exists for most export factories:

• The factory’s name and address in writing. Wage checks mean nothing if the goods are made somewhere else. Insist on knowing the site before production.
• A recent social audit for that site. amfori BSCI, SMETA, WRAP and SA8000 auditors sample payslips, time records and grade assignments. Read the wage and hours findings, not only the overall rating. Our guide to which social audit your buyer will ask for explains what each covers, and amfori BSCI audit ratings explained sets out what each grade from A to E means.
• Grade assignment. Ask how many workers are paid at each grade. A factory where almost every operator sits at the entry grade deserves a question.
• Increments and bonuses. Check that the December increment was applied and that festival bonuses were paid before Eid. The labour ministry instructs factories to clear wages and festival allowances before each Eid holiday, and the press reports how many did not.
• Overtime records. Hours that look too tidy, such as the same total for every worker every week, are a warning sign that a second set of records exists.

Our compliance and audit service covers how audit reports are shared on an order, and our guide to quality and ethics in Bangladesh covers the wider picture of safety, environment and responsible sourcing without repeating the wage detail here.

What to do next

Wages are a small part of a garment’s price: in the cost study this site cites (Rajib et al., 2023), the whole cost of making, which covers the factory’s labour, overheads and margin, was 15.2% of a basic t-shirt’s FOB price. Our guide to what is pushing clothing prices in 2026 shows how a wage rise feeds through to a quote.

If you are planning production in Bangladesh, build the wage question into your supplier checks from the first conversation: ask for the factory’s name, its latest social audit, and how its price allows for the December increment and the coming wage board. CMB Sourcing Ltd. makes knitwear and caps in our own factory, our sister company’s, and places everything else in an audited partner factory; either way the factory is named in writing before production, and we share the audit reports it holds with you. See how an order runs from enquiry to shipment, or send us your product details for a quotation.