Construction labour in Ayodhya

The self-declaration is the reason this is worth doing

In most states the thing that stops a worker registering is the employment certificate: somebody else has to sign that you did ninety days of construction work, and often nobody will.

Uttar Pradesh's published document list for registration includes a self-declaration — a swaghoshna patra — as a required enclosure, alongside a copy of an employment certificate. In other words the state's own form set anticipates the worker who cannot produce a contractor's signature.

If you are working from a labour chowk, moving between sites every few weeks, or working for small builders who keep no records, ask specifically for the self-declaration form at the Jan Suvidha Kendra and fill it in. Do not accept "no employer certificate, no card" as the end of the conversation.

Be aware of one gap. The board's website links to the self-declaration form as a download, and that link does not currently serve the file. So ask for the form at the Jan Suvidha Kendra or Lokvani Kendra rather than expecting to print it at home.

What it costs, and the annual twenty rupees that keeps it alive

The board publishes a registration fee of twenty rupees, plus a contribution to maintain membership of twenty rupees per year, or sixty rupees for three years. Three years at a time is the sensible choice: same money, two fewer chances to forget.

The board also states the continuation rule plainly on the identity card itself: a construction worker must maintain the continuity of registration by depositing twenty rupees each year in order to receive the benefits of the various schemes.

There is a late fee if you renew after the due date, and it rises the longer you leave it. The amount is not published on the board's public pages, so ask at the Kendra — but the principle is enough: renewing on time is cheaper than renewing late, and renewing late is very much cheaper than not renewing.

Twenty rupees a year is less than a cup of tea a month. It is also the difference between a family that can claim after a fatal accident and one that cannot.

The six documents, and where to hand them in

The board's list: the registration fee and annual contribution; one passport size photograph of the worker; a self-attested copy of the Aadhaar card; a copy of the self-declaration; a copy of the employment certificate; and a self-attested copy of the bank passbook.

The bank passbook is not optional and it is worth getting right. Scheme money in Uttar Pradesh is paid by direct transfer, so a passbook copy that does not match your Aadhaar name will stop a payment months after you have forgotten about it. Fix the spelling now.

Three routes to apply: a Jan Suvidha Kendra, a Lokvani Kendra, or the board's own portal. The portal is the state's newer worker registration system and the board's site links to it directly. If you are not comfortable online, the Kendra route is not second-best — it is the same application, filed by someone who does it every day.

The board publishes a toll-free helpline. Use the number in the site footer; the board's contact page still carries an unfinished placeholder phone number that will not connect you to anybody.

The board keeps its own list of what counts as construction work

Uttar Pradesh maintains a list of around forty occupations that qualify a worker for board registration — everything from masonry and carpentry through to work under dam, bridge, road or building construction operations.

This list is separate from, and broader than, the list of scheduled employments used for minimum wages, which is a genuine source of confusion in this state. Two different laws, two different lists. Being outside one does not put you outside the other.

If you are unsure whether your work qualifies, the board's occupation list is the one that governs your labour card. Ask at the Kendra to be shown it.

A caution about scheme counts

The board's own surfaces disagree about how many schemes it runs — its Hindi page lists ten, its English page twelve, its live application system shows a smaller number currently open, and its homepage says eleven or more.

That is not a reason to distrust the board; it is a reason to check what is open on the day you need it rather than planning around a list you read six months ago. The schemes named include maternity and child support, education incentives, residential schooling, daughters' marriage assistance, disaster relief, a pension scheme, serious illness assistance, and death and disability assistance for construction workers.

As everywhere on this site we do not print the amounts. Read them on the board's schemes page, and check whether the scheme is currently accepting applications before you assemble the file.

Three new district categories, from 1 April 2026

This is the biggest structural change in any state we track, and it is recent enough that most wage tables online are simply wrong about it.

The 17 April 2026 order classifies the state into three categories. Category I is Gautam Buddha Nagar and Ghaziabad districts. Category II is all districts having a Nagar Nigam, excluding those two. Category III is all remaining districts. The order records that this classification was agreed by both employers and workers, and that it reflects geographical diversification, the status of industries, urban infrastructure and cost of living.

So if you are working in Noida, Greater Noida or Ghaziabad you are in the highest band in the state, in a category created specifically for those two districts. If you are in Lucknow, Kanpur, Varanasi, Agra, Prayagraj or any other district with a municipal corporation, you are Category II. Everywhere else is Category III.

Before this order there were no zones in Uttar Pradesh. A table without district categories is a table from before April 2026.

The three UP tables, and what they actually pay

The 17 April 2026 order prints three tables, one per district category, and each shows a basic wage, a variable dearness allowance and a total. The totals are the numbers you want and the order does the addition for you.

Category I, Gautam Buddha Nagar and Ghaziabad: unskilled ₹12,885 basic plus ₹805 allowance, total ₹13,690 a month. Semi-skilled ₹14,173 plus ₹886, total ₹15,059. Skilled ₹15,876 plus ₹992, total ₹16,868.

Category II, every district that has a Nagar Nigam other than those two: unskilled ₹12,241 plus ₹765, total ₹13,006. Semi-skilled ₹13,464 plus ₹842, total ₹14,306. Skilled ₹15,082 plus ₹943, total ₹16,025.

Category III, all remaining districts: unskilled ₹11,629 plus ₹727, total ₹12,356. Semi-skilled ₹12,791 plus ₹799, total ₹13,590. Skilled ₹14,328 plus ₹896, total ₹15,224.

So the category is worth ₹1,334 a month to an unskilled worker between the top and bottom bands, and ₹1,644 to a skilled one. If you are working in Noida, Greater Noida or Ghaziabad and being paid a rate someone describes as "the UP minimum", check which table it came from — the statewide figure that existed before April 2026 no longer exists.

One thing the order does NOT print is a daily rate. Every figure in it is monthly. If you are paid by the day, the conversion is yours to make and the usual divisor in Uttar Pradesh is 26, but the order itself is silent on it — so treat a day rate as a calculation you did, not as a figure the government published, and if it is disputed, argue from the monthly number.

Rates are re-notified from time to time and this order is explicitly interim. Check the labour department's circulars page for anything later before you rely on these figures.

The UP trap: a link labelled "Latest" that expired last year

The labour department's website has a page titled "Minimum Wages and Related VDA". It is reached from the main navigation, it is correctly titled, and it is the obvious destination. On it is an entry whose link text includes the word "Latest".

That "Latest" document is the variable dearness allowance for seventy-four employments covering 1 October 2024 to 31 March 2025. It expired more than a year ago. The newest item on the whole page is from February 2025. The page has no pagination and no year filter, so there is nothing on screen to suggest anything newer exists.

It does exist. The current notification is published by the same department, on the same website, on the circulars page and the latest updates page. Anyone who takes Uttar Pradesh minimum wages from the obvious, correctly-titled page publishes rates roughly two years stale.

Two more defects on that page make the point. One row is dated 2025 but links a file whose name says 2024, and its title names one industry while its file name names another. File names on this site are not evidence of dates. Only the notification inside is.

The current rates are interim relief, not a routine revision

This matters if you are arguing with a contractor who says "there has been no new minimum wage notification".

The 17 April 2026 order was issued by the state government, not the Labour Commissioner, and it directs that as an interim relief minimum wages shall be paid at the rates specified in it, in those employments where minimum wages are otherwise fixed under the Minimum Wages Act. It supersedes the Labour Commissioner's Order No. 1477-84 (M.W.)/15 of 25 March 2026 — with one carve-out worth knowing if you work a kiln: brick kilns, where wages are fixed on a piece-rate basis, are expressly left out of that supersession. It was made under the state Industrial Disputes Act rather than as a routine dearness allowance revision.

The order also recites, unusually frankly, why the rates moved. It records that revisions due in 2019 and in 2024 were never carried out, that a further revision was due from 1 April 2026, and that the immediate trigger was labour unrest in Noida and Greater Noida in which the workers' main demand was to be brought up to the level of minimum wages in Haryana. That is a useful thing to know: the figures above are catch-up, not a routine increment, and a contractor who tells you nothing has changed since 2024 is describing a failure the government has now admitted in writing.

It is a real, binding government order that fixes what you must be paid. It just does not look like the document people expect, and it is not on the page people expect. If someone tells you it is not a minimum wage notification, they are technically right and practically wrong.

The same order notes that the process for notifying the Uttar Pradesh Code on Wages Rules is under way. Uttar Pradesh's wage machinery is mid-rebuild, so check the circulars page more often than once a year while that continues.

Which schedule covers building work — and the honest answer

Uttar Pradesh does not have a scheduled employment called building and other construction work. That is not us failing to find it; the seventy-four entry list does not contain one.

What it contains is a set of adjacent entries: construction and maintenance of dams and embankments, irrigation projects, and digging of wells and ponds; construction operations for roads and their maintenance; stone breaking and stone crushing; the brick kiln industry; and, as entry seventy-four, a residual catch-all for employment in establishments not covered by any scheduled employment.

A general building labourer on a housing site in Lucknow is most likely covered through that residual entry rather than through a named construction entry. That is a genuine ambiguity in Uttar Pradesh law and we are not going to paper over it.

What it means in practice: the residual entry is still a scheduled employment with notified rates, so you are not outside minimum wage law. And since November 2025 minimum wages are in any case a statutory right for employees across all sectors, organised and unorganised, with a national floor below which no state may go. If a contractor argues that building work is not a scheduled employment in Uttar Pradesh, the answer is that it does not need to be for you to have a wage floor.

Do not confuse this with the welfare board's own occupation list, which does have an explicit entry for dam, bridge, road and building construction work. Two statutes, two lists, two purposes.

Revision cycles, and the one that catches people out

For the seventy-four scheduled employments, the variable dearness allowance runs on half-year windows: 1 April to 30 September, and 1 October to 31 March. It is worked out against a base index from the second half of 2012.

But Uttar Pradesh does not use one cycle for everything. The engineering industry schedule for establishments with fifty or more workers runs on a different calendar entirely — adjusted from 1 February against the previous year's July to December average, and from 1 August against that year's January to June average.

So "when does UP revise" has more than one answer, and quoting the wrong cycle will have you looking for a notification that was never due. For construction, use the April and October windows.

Skill categories are the familiar three: unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled. Brick kiln work is different again — it is on piece rates with its own named categories, quoted per thousand.