China's minimum wage by province, 2026

Every supplier quote I get has a labour line in it, and the only labour number the law fixes is the minimum wage. It is also the number buyers most often misuse: someone finds 2,380 yuan on a provincial table, divides it by the hours in a month, and treats the result as the wage bill.

This page is the table I keep open when a quote needs checking. It gives the monthly and hourly minimum for all 31 provincial-level units, the number of tiers each province uses, and the date the current standard took effect, read from the provincial notice rather than from a news summary.

Two things to hold onto before the numbers. China has no national minimum wage; each province sets its own, by zone. And the standard is a floor for the least skilled work in the cheapest zone of that province, not a description of what a factory pays.

Every province’s top tier now clears 2,000 yuan

All 31 provincial first-tier monthly minimums sit above 2,000 yuan, and the whole set of published cells runs from 1,800 to 2,740 yuan.

Figures are yuan per month for the first four columns and yuan per hour for the next four, with a blank where a province sets no such tier. The monthly standard covers full-time employees and the hourly standard covers part-time employees, a split written into Article 5 of the Minimum Wage Regulation, in force since March 2004. Shenzhen sets its own figure inside Guangdong, at 2,700 yuan. A ‡ marks a row where the provincial page failed and I read a city or county government’s republication of the same notice instead.

A tier is a map, not a discount

Provinces divide themselves into one to four zones, and the zone where the plant sits sets the floor that applies.

Five provinces publish a single number (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Tibet, Qinghai), four publish two, twenty publish three, and Anhui and Fujian publish four. The boundaries are geographic. Yunnan’s notice attaches a table assigning every county in the province to class one, two or three; Guangxi’s puts the urban districts of seven named cities in class one and every county and county-level city except one in class three, and Gansu’s counts 15 areas in class one against 54 in class three. A factory does not choose its tier, and one county over the floor can legally be several hundred yuan lower.

Guangdong collapsed four tiers into three on 1 September 2026, the clearest recent example of how fast this map moves. In January the province still listed a fourth tier at 1,750 yuan; the current notice has no such tier, and its third tier is 2,040 yuan.

Tier labels do not travel between provinces. Guangdong’s second tier, 2,300 yuan, sits above Hunan’s first tier of 2,200, and Hunan’s third tier of 1,800 is the lowest cell in the country. Reading a provincial first-tier number as the wage level of that province gets the geography backwards, the same problem that shows up in provincial GDP against the national figure.

Beijing and Shanghai quote the figure net of the worker’s own contributions

Beijing and Shanghai exclude the employee’s own pension, medical and housing-fund contributions from the monthly minimum; Yunnan and Xinjiang include them.

Beijing’s 2025 notice lists overtime, special-condition allowances, and “the social insurance premiums and housing fund the worker pays personally” as items the employer pays on top of 2,540 yuan. Shanghai’s labour bureau says the same of its 2,740 yuan, and adds summer heat, night-shift, meal, commuting and housing allowances to the list. Yunnan’s notice runs the other way: the pay counted toward the minimum includes the contributions the worker pays personally, so a worker on the floor of its first zone takes home less than 2,270 yuan. Xinjiang’s release uses Yunnan’s wording.

Guangdong’s notice repeats only the three exclusions in Article 12 of the national regulation — overtime, allowances for special conditions, statutory welfare — and says nothing about personal contributions, so the treatment there has to be read from practice rather than from the document. Article 12 is the national floor: after those three items are removed, pay must reach the local minimum, and the same test applies to piece rates.

The practical effect is that a ranking by headline number compares two definitions. Shanghai’s 2,740 and Beijing’s 2,540 exclude the worker’s contributions; Yunnan’s 2,270 includes them, so the real gap between Shanghai and Yunnan is wider than 470 yuan. For a buyer building a cost model, the municipality’s number needs the worker’s contributions added, and the province’s number does not.

Four provinces moved the number in the second half of 2026

Guangdong, Yunnan, Xinjiang and Shanxi changed their standards between 1 September and 1 October 2026.

Yunnan’s notice is dated Saturday 29 August and took effect on Tuesday 1 September, which left employers two working days. Sichuan opened a public consultation on a new schedule in May 2026, with comments due on 9 June, and the October table still shows the January 2025 figures of 2,330 and 2,200, so nothing had been implemented by the date I checked. A consultation is not a standard.

Piece rates still clear the same floor

Piece-rate and commission pay must reach the local minimum for the hours a worker puts in during normal working time.

The regulation adds a condition that matters inside a factory: the quota behind the piece rate has to be set on a scientific and reasonable basis, and the total paid must not fall below the minimum. Guangdong’s notice repeats the clause almost word for word. In practice the quota becomes the disputed number rather than the rate, and a loose quota can make a legal-looking per-piece price illegal in a slow week.

Overtime does not raise the floor. The minimum is tested after overtime pay is stripped out, so a twelve-hour day does not justify a lower base; the extra hours are paid on top at the statutory premium, which I did not re-check province by province. The hourly minimum is a separate construct rather than a division of the monthly one. Beijing’s 27.7 yuan includes the pension, medical and unemployment contributions both employer and worker pay, Guizhou’s notice puts the employer’s pension and medical contributions inside its hourly tiers, and that is why Guangdong’s hourly tier one, 25.4 yuan, sits above what its monthly tier one works out to across a standard month.

The minimum is about half of what the worker actually earns

A migrant worker in China earned 5,075 yuan a month on average in 2025, about twice the top-tier minimum in most provinces.

The figure comes from the 2025 migrant-worker survey the National Bureau of Statistics published on 30 April 2026: 5,075 yuan a month, up 2.3%, with 5,774 for workers who left their home province, 4,376 for those who stayed, and 5,501 in the eastern region. My arithmetic puts that at 2.1 times Hebei’s first tier and 1.9 times Shanghai’s. The gap is the part of a wage bill a minimum-wage table cannot see: skill, tenure, overtime, and the piece rate itself.

Two uses survive contact with that gap. The minimum sets the floor for the social-insurance contribution base, and in some provinces it sets the level of unemployment benefit; Shenzhen pays 90% of its minimum, which became 2,430 yuan a month when the minimum rose to 2,700 in September 2026. And it tells a buyer what a supplier cannot legally pay, which is a different question from what the supplier does pay. For the second question, what a China factory quote contains is the better starting point, and renting an apartment in China is where that money goes on the housing side.

How I collected these numbers

Every figure here comes from a government page I opened on 18 October 2026, and every effective date is read from the notice itself. The usual line is 自2025年12月1日起执行.

I used two national editions as the frame: the ministry’s own table dated 1 January 2026, and a 1 October 2026 edition (republication, 10 October 2026). The ministry page for the October edition would not load from here, so I read it as republished by a district human-resources bureau and treated the amounts as a cross-check rather than as the source. Where a province had moved during 2026, the amount came from the provincial notice itself.

Each date was then matched to its own notice, or to a city or county government’s republication of that notice when the provincial page failed. No news articles, aggregator sites or commercial wage databases supplied a number, and no value was carried forward from an earlier year. Amounts that agreed across the two national editions and the provincial notice went in without comment.

What I could not check

• Whether Beijing moved during 2026. Its 2,540 comes from the notice of 24 July 2025, and I found no later Beijing notice rather than confirming that none exists.
• Which districts sit in which tier in Hubei, Hainan, Tibet and Shaanxi. Those four schedules are attachments I could read only through city republications, so the zone detail above comes from provinces whose tables I could open.
• Whether any province outside Beijing and Shanghai excludes the employee’s own contributions. Hunan’s, Anhui’s, Fujian’s, Yunnan’s and Xinjiang’s notices all say their figures include them, and Guangdong’s is silent on the point.
• Guizhou’s consultation on a new schedule. A September 2026 draft appeared in secondary indexes; the provincial page did not load, and the October table still shows the February 2025 figures.
• Employer social-insurance rates on top of each minimum. Rates vary by province and city, I did not verify current ones, and the tables say nothing about total employer cost.
• Whether each province uses the minimum wage as the base for overtime. Practice differs and I did not check it province by province.