Equal Remuneration Act, 1976

What Is the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976?

The Equal Remuneration Act, 1976 (ERA) is the foundational central legislation in India that prohibits gender-based discrimination in payment of wages and in recruitment for the same work or work of a similar nature. It gives statutory effect to the constitutional guarantees under Articles 14 (equality before law), 15 (non-discrimination on grounds of sex), 16 (equality of opportunity in public employment), and 39(d) (equal pay for equal work as a Directive Principle). The Act applies universally, with no employee-count or wage threshold, and binds every employer in every establishment in India. It is now subsumed into the Code on Wages, 2019, which retains and extends its protections.

Key Provisions

The Act is short and direct, structured around four operative provisions:

• Section 4 — Duty to pay equal remuneration. No employer shall pay to any worker, employed by him in an establishment or employment, remuneration at rates less favourable than those at which remuneration is paid by him to workers of the opposite sex for performing the same work or work of a similar nature. Where there is disparity, the lower rate must be raised to the higher; reduction of the higher rate is not permitted.
• Section 5 — No discrimination in recruitment. No employer shall, while making recruitment for the same work or work of a similar nature, make any discrimination on the ground of sex against women, except where employment of women is prohibited or restricted by or under any law. This bar extends post-recruitment to promotions, training, and transfer.
• Section 6 — Advisory Committee. The appropriate Government shall constitute Advisory Committees to advise on increasing employment opportunities for women, including part-time work.
• Section 7 — Authority for hearing claims. The appropriate Government appoints an authority to hear and decide complaints of unequal pay or discriminatory recruitment, with appeal to a higher authority.

Applicability and Thresholds

The Act applies to every employer and every employee in India, with no minimum threshold of workers or wages. It covers regular employees, contract labour, casual workers, part-time workers, daily wagers, apprentices (subject to specific Apprentices Act provisions), and workers in factories, shops, establishments, plantations, mines, dockyards, offices, and any other place of work. Both organised and unorganised sectors are covered. The Act explicitly overrides any inconsistent provision of any other law, agreement, or contract.

Recent Amendments and the Code on Wages, 2019

The Code on Wages, 2019 consolidates four central labour laws — the Payment of Wages Act, 1936, the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, the Payment of Bonus Act, 1965, and the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976 — into a single statute. Section 3 of the Code reproduces and strengthens the equal-remuneration principle:

• Prohibits discrimination on the ground of gender in matters relating to wages by the same employer in respect of the same work or work of a similar nature.
• Prohibits discrimination on the ground of gender in recruitment for the same work or work of a similar nature.
• Removes the earlier limitation that the prohibition on recruitment discrimination applied only “while making recruitment”, clarifying that discrimination at any stage of the employment lifecycle is forbidden.
• Carries the same exception where employment of women is prohibited or restricted by law (such as certain mines or hazardous processes under the Factories Act).

Section 3 is universally applicable and is enforced through the Code’s unified Inspector-cum-Facilitator regime. Once the Code on Wages is brought into operational force across all States, the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976 stands repealed.

Penalties for Non-Compliance

Under the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976:

• Section 10(1) — failure to maintain registers or comply with directions: fine up to ten thousand rupees.
• Section 10(2) — paying unequal wages, discriminating in recruitment, or omitting compliance: imprisonment for a term not less than three months extending to one year, or fine of ten thousand rupees extending to twenty thousand rupees, or both.
• Section 10(3) — repeat offences: imprisonment up to two years.

Under the Code on Wages, 2019:

• Other than minimum-wage breaches, contraventions attract fines extending to twenty thousand rupees for first offence.
• Repeat offences within five years attract fines up to one lakh rupees and imprisonment up to three months.
• Compounding of first-time non-imprisonable offences is permitted.

In addition to statutory penalties, employers face civil liability for back-pay (the differential between actual wages and the higher rate paid to the opposite gender), interest, and reputational damage in disclosure-driven sectors and ESG reporting.

Common Scenarios

Identical role, different pay. A retail chain pays male and female sales associates at the same store different base wages, citing “experience”. On audit, the actual experience differential is found to be one month and the wage differential is twenty per cent — a clear contravention.

Title engineering. An employer designates female team members as “associates” and male team members in identical roles as “executives” with a higher pay band. Courts apply the substance-over-form test — same skill, effort, and responsibility under similar working conditions amounts to the same work, and the wage differential is unlawful.

Recruitment advertising. A job advertisement specifies “male candidates only” for a role that has no statutory restriction on women’s employment. This violates Section 5 of the Act and Section 3 of the Code on Wages and exposes the employer to penalties and to writ-petition challenge.

How Omnivoo Helps

Omnivoo builds equal-remuneration compliance into its EOR engagement and payroll engine by design. Every CTC issued through Omnivoo is benchmarked against the role’s pay band, not against gender, and salary-band analytics flag intra-role gender-pay deltas above a configurable tolerance for HR review. Wage registers, muster rolls, and wage slips are maintained in the formats prescribed under the Code on Wages (Central) Rules, 2020 with the gender field populated for statutory inspection. Omnivoo also runs an annual gender-pay-gap report at the role and band level so client employers can demonstrate Section 3 compliance well before the Code on Wages is brought into operational force. Read our overview of the India Labour Codes, 2025 for the broader implementation context.