There has always been a working assumption in India's policy circles that the country's biggest cities are its economic powerhouses. Until now, that assumption ran mostly on anecdote — on the visible churn of construction cranes, delivery bikes and glass office towers in places like Bengaluru, Pune or Hyderabad. What has been missing is the paperwork: hard, city-specific numbers that prove or disprove the story.

That gap has just been filled. In a release dated June 29, the National Statistics Office, under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, published the first-ever set of standalone estimates for India's 46 million-plus cities — urban centres that, as defined by the 2011 Census, each carry a population of ten lakh or more. Built from the 2025 rounds of the Periodic Labour Force Survey and the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises, the two reports amount to a granular X-ray of how these cities work, who they employ, and how much they pay — set directly against the rest of urban India.

India's biggest cities are outperforming the rest of urban India on almost every measure that matters — participation, employment, wages, and now, entrepreneurship.

A Decade of Climbing Numbers

Track the labour force participation rate in these 46 cities since 2017-18, and the line moves in only one direction. It stood at 47.7 per cent that year. By 2021-22 it had reached 50.4 per cent. This year, it touched 52.4 per cent — a gain of nearly five percentage points in under a decade, achieved through a pandemic, a survey methodology overhaul, and a shift in how the reference year itself is counted (PLFS moved from a July–June cycle to a calendar year in 2025, aligning India with international practice).

Male participation rose too, but modestly — from 74.2 percent to 75.9 percent — because it had comparatively little room to grow. The real story is on the other side of the ledger. Female labour force participation in these cities climbed from 19.8 percent in 2017-18 to 27.2 percent in 2025, a jump of 7.4 percentage points. Female worker population ratio moved in lockstep, rising from 17.9 percent to 25.5 percent — a 7.6-point gain that outpaced the increase recorded by men over the same stretch.

It's worth sitting with what that means in practice. A quarter-century ago, roughly one in five working-age women in India's biggest cities was in the labour force. Today it's closer to one in four — still a minority, but a meaningfully larger one, and moving faster than the male curve.

Unemployment, meanwhile, has been heading the other way. The jobless rate across million-plus cities fell from 7.9 per cent in 2017-18 to 4.9 per cent in 2025 — a three-point drop. Male unemployment alone fell from 7.5 per cent to 4.5 per cent. Female unemployment had a bumpier path, spiking to 10.4 per cent in 2018-19 before dropping sharply to 6.1 per cent by 2025.

Why the Reasons People Stay Out Still Split by Gender

Not every number in the report tells a story of convergence. Ask why people of working age are not in the labour force at all, and the answers still fall along starkly gendered lines. Among men who are out of the workforce, 53.5 per cent say it's because they want to continue studying. Among women, 68.7 per cent point to childcare or other home-making responsibilities. It's a reminder that rising participation numbers, however encouraging, sit on top of a domestic structure that hasn't shifted nearly as fast as the labour market has.

The Big-City Wage Premium

If there's one number that captures why these 46 cities matter economically, it's this: self-employed workers in million-plus cities earned an average of Rs 30,858 over the last 30 days, against Rs 23,013 for the same group across urban India as a whole — a premium of more than 34 per cent. Regular salaried employees earned Rs 28,808 a month versus Rs 26,258 elsewhere in urban India, a smaller but still real 9.7 per cent gap. Casual labourers pulled in Rs 624 a day compared with Rs 550 — a 13.5 per cent premium.

The employment mix in these cities looks different too. More than 55 per cent of workers hold regular wage or salaried jobs, and casual labour accounts for roughly half the share it does in urban India overall. Nearly a quarter of workers — 24.3 per cent — are employed by public or private limited companies, against 17.2 per cent for urban India at large. In current weekly status terms, 58.5 per cent of workers in million-plus cities are in regular wage employment against 42.9 per cent elsewhere in urban India, while casual labour accounts for just 6.3 percent of the workforce against 14.4 per cent outside these cities. Agriculture, unsurprisingly, is nearly absent — 1.6 per cent of workers, against 10.1 per cent in other urban areas — while transport, storage and communication, and other services, both carry a noticeably heavier weight.

Youth outcomes tell a similar story. The share of 15-to-29-year-olds who are neither employed nor in education or training — the NEET rate — stood at 22.2 per cent in million-plus cities, nearly three points below the 25.0 per cent recorded across urban India.

The Businesses Nobody Counted Until Now

The second report released alongside the labour force data turns the lens on something India's statistical system has historically struggled to capture with precision: the country's vast unincorporated economy — the proprietorships, partnerships, and small trusts and societies that keep neighbourhood commerce running.

Drawing on ASUSE 2025, the NSO has for the first time produced a city-by-city statistical map of this sector across all 46 million-plus cities. Collectively, these cities house about 13 per cent of India's unincorporated non-agricultural establishments, employ 16 percent of the sector's workforce, and generate 21 per cent of its gross value added. That last figure is the one worth dwelling on: cities that account for roughly a tenth of the country's unincorporated businesses are producing more than a fifth of the value that sector creates.

Three cities in particular stand out as entrepreneurial hubs. Kolkata, Surat, and Greater Hyderabad together account for more than 22 per cent of all estimated establishments across the 46 cities. On the employment side, the leaderboard shifts slightly — Greater Hyderabad, Delhi, and Kolkata together employ around 22 per cent of the sector's total workforce in these cities.

Productivity tells its own story. GVA per worker across million-plus cities averaged Rs 2,11,433, against Rs 1,80,177 in other urban areas. GVA per establishment came in at Rs 4,17,012, well above the Rs 3,23,945 recorded elsewhere. Pimpri Chinchwad, Greater Hyderabad, and Delhi posted the highest GVA per worker of any million-plus city; Faridabad, Pimpri Chinchwad, and Greater Hyderabad led on GVA per establishment. Hired workers in these cities also earn more — an average emolument of Rs 1,69,130, compared with Rs 1,49,536 outside them.

Where Women Are Building, Not Just Working

Perhaps the most striking thread running through the enterprise data concerns women. Female ownership of unincorporated proprietorships crosses 40 per cent in three cities — Surat, Vadodara, and Pune — a level of participation that would be notable in any economy, let alone one where female labour force participation nationally still trails far behind male participation. More broadly, in 32 of the 46 million-plus cities, at least a fifth of all establishments are run by a woman.

On the employment side, women make up more than 30 per cent of the unincorporated-sector workforce in 19 of the 46 cities — a threshold that speaks to genuine structural presence rather than token representation.

Across the full sample of 46 cities, 24.28 per cent of establishments employ at least one hired worker on a fairly regular basis, against 19.04 percent in other urban areas, and female-owned proprietary establishments make up 27.69 percent of the total, compared with 25.27 per cent elsewhere. Srinagar, Greater Hyderabad, and Delhi post the highest concentration of these "hired worker establishments," each crossing the 40 percent mark — evidence that these particular cities aren't just hosting more businesses, they're hosting businesses that hire.

Reading the Numbers With Care

The NSO is careful to flag, in its closing notes, that these are sample-based estimates and should be read with an eye to the differences in demographic structure, industrial composition and local conditions that separate one million-plus city from another — Srinagar is not Surat, and Kolkata is not Pimpri Chinchwad, even if all four now sit on the same statistical table for the first time. Relative standard errors and confidence intervals have been published alongside the estimates precisely so that users can judge how much weight any single city-level figure can bear.

The Bigger Picture

Taken together, the two reports mark something of a milestone for Indian statistics as much as for Indian cities: the shift from talking about "urban India" as a single undifferentiated block to being able to name, rank and compare 46 specific cities on jobs, wages, unemployment and enterprise. For policymakers hunting for where to target skilling programmes, credit access for women entrepreneurs, or urban employment schemes, that granularity is not a technical footnote — it's the difference between designing a policy for a country and designing one for a city.