If you run payroll for a business in Ludhiana, Jalandhar or Amritsar, most of the compliance content you will find online was not written for you. It was written for a national audience, and in Punjab’s case a good part of it is wrong.

Here is the position as of August 2026, with the notification behind each number.

Punjab minimum wages changed on 1 May 2026

The Government of Punjab revised minimum wages for all scheduled employment with effect from 1 May 2026, under notification No. Labour-Lab0MIWA/1/2021-4L (260032)/166 (Punjab Gazette Extraordinary, 1 May 2026).

Two practical points trip up payroll teams every revision cycle.

First, the revision is effective from a date, not from when you noticed it. If you are still paying the old rates in August, you have arrears to settle, and a labour inspector reads the wage register, not your intentions.

Second, if your establishment falls in the central sphere — railways, mines, major ports, banking, telecom, central PSUs and similar — you are not on the Punjab schedule at all. You are on the Chief Labour Commissioner’s variable dearness allowance order, revised with effect from 1 April 2026, in which Ludhiana Municipal Corporation, Amritsar, Jalandhar and Jalandhar Cantt. are all classified Area B (CLC(C) VDA order). Unskilled construction work in Area B is ₹693 a day there. Getting the sphere wrong is the single most common minimum-wage error we see in Punjab payrolls.

Punjab professional tax is live. It was never suspended.

Several widely-read HRMS guides list Punjab as a state with no professional tax, or mark it “Limited/Suspended”. That is incorrect, and if you configured your payroll from those pages you are accruing a penalty of ₹50 a day.

The Punjab State Development Tax Act, 2018 is in force. From the Punjab Government’s own PSDT portal FAQ:

Note the wording on liability. Punjab does not publish a fixed salary slab. Liability follows income-tax payability, which means the correct test in your payroll engine is whether the employee is an income-tax payee, not whether gross salary crosses some round number. Guides that quote “above ₹25,000 a month” or “above ₹2,50,001 a year” are approximating a rule that is written differently, and the approximation breaks at the margins.

If you employ people across states, remember that professional tax follows the employee’s place of work, not your registered office — the Karnataka PT portal states this explicitly (ptax.karnataka.gov.in). A Ludhiana company with three engineers in Bengaluru owes Karnataka PT for those three, on Karnataka’s due date of the 20th.

The Shops Act change that cut compliance for small establishments

The Punjab Shops and Commercial Establishments (Amendment) Act, 2025 narrowed the Act’s applicability to establishments with 20 or more workers (Bill text via PRS India). Below 20 workers, an establishment only has to intimate commencement of business to the Inspector.

For those still covered, the operating limits moved:

• Daily working hours: 9 → 10 hours
• Spread-over: 10 → 12 hours
• Overtime per quarter: 50 → 144 hours
• General penalty: from ₹100/₹300 to ₹500–₹2,000 for a first offence and ₹3,000–₹30,000 thereafter

That is a large relaxation on hours paired with a twenty-fold increase in penalties. It rewards businesses that actually track hours and punishes those that guess.

One caution: the separate notification permitting registered establishments to open on all 365 days ran only up to 31 May 2026. If you run retail or a QSR and you are still rostering on that basis, confirm the renewal before your next weekly-off cycle.

Where the labour codes actually leave Punjab employers

All four labour codes have been in force since 21 November 2025 (PIB), and the Central Rules were notified on 8 May 2026. But the Central Rules mainly bind establishments where the Central Government is the appropriate government, plus multi-state establishments for social security purposes.

Punjab’s own draft rules under the Code on Wages, the Industrial Relations Code and the Code on Social Security were published on 29 December 2025 and remain draft. So a single-state Punjab manufacturer sits in an in-between state: the codes apply, the state machinery around them is not final.

What does apply today, from the Labour Ministry’s own Compliance Handbook for Employers:

• Attendance-cum-muster roll, wage register, overtime register and register of fines and deductions
• Register of employees and register of dangerous occurrences under the OSH Code
• Records preserved for five years
• Wage slips issued before payment
• Monthly wages paid by the 7th of the following month
• Full and final settlement within two working days of leaving
• Appointment letters mandatory for all workers
• Grievance Redressal Committee at 20+ workers

What this means for your payroll setup

Punjab compliance is not hard, but it is specific, and it changes on dates that no national vendor tracks for you. The setup that survives an inspection looks like this: wage floors mapped by category and effective date, PSDT deducted on the income-tax-payability test with PSDT-8 and PSDT-6 on the calendar, hours captured well inside the 10-hour and 144-hour limits, and the six statutory registers generated from the same attendance data you already collect rather than maintained separately in a drawer.

IntelloHRM is built in Ludhiana for exactly this. Attendance, leave, overtime and payroll run off one record, the Punjab wage categories and PSDT deduction are configured in, and the statutory registers come out of the system in inspection-ready form instead of being reconstructed the night before.

If you want the Punjab wage table and the PSDT filing calendar as a one-page reference for your finance team, ask us and we will send it across.

Published 4 August 2026. Positions verified against the Punjab Gazette, psdt.punjab.gov.in, clc.gov.in and labour.gov.in on that date.