8th Pay Commission: There is a lot of buzz regarding the 8th Pay Commission. The schedule of interactions with stakeholders in various cities has also been released on the official website of the Pay Commission. Under this, meetings are being organized in many cities like Delhi, Pune, Dehradun.

The staff side of the National Council-Joint Consultative Machinery (NC-JCM) submitted its 51-page final memorandum on 14 April. This includes demands like increasing the minimum basic salary from Rs 18000 to Rs 69000 and increasing the annual increment from 3% to 6%. According to the report of CNBC TV-18, their demand is also for fitment factor of 3.83 in the 8th Pay Commission. This is a scale which has been used for salary revision.

Now I can’t survive on Rs 18000

Employee organizations say that the demand to implement 3.83 fitment factor has been made keeping in mind the family of 5 members. According to the current Consumer Price Index (CPI), Rs 18000 (minimum salary under the 7th Pay Commission) is no longer enough to meet the basic needs of an average family. Expenditure on everything from education to health, food, clothing and accommodation has increased. This is the reason why it has been proposed to keep the fitment factor at 3.83 so that it can help in bridging the gap between salary and inflation.

When will the salary increase?

The government constituted the Eighth Pay Commission on 3 November 2025. It was given 18 months time to submit its recommendations. The tenure of the commission is considered to be effective from January 1, 2026, but the increase in salary and payment of arrears is likely to be made only in the beginning of 2027.

Employee unions also have these demands

Among all the demands, one of the major demands is to amend the structure of HRA (House Rent Allowance). It has been suggested to increase the slab of HRA to 30%, 35% and 40% depending on the cities. Cities have been divided into categories X (40%), Y (35%) and Z (30%). This demand has been made so that the minimum HRA of the employee is not less than a certain amount so that even the lower level employees can get decent accommodation.

Apart from this, the unions also demand restoration of the Old Pension Scheme (OPS) and the amount of pension should be 67 percent of the last drawn basic salary of the employee. In the present system this limit is 50 percent.

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