Lesotho minimum wage

What this value means

DO NOT INVENT A NATIONAL FIGURE. There are 41 distinct wage floors here, from M872 a month for a domestic worker with under a year's service to M7,577 a month for an EC-code driver with over a year's service. The closest thing to a headline number is the residual 'GENERAL MINIMUM WAGE' of M2,242 a month (under 12 months' service) / M2,448 (over 12 months) — and that is only the floor for an unskilled or manual labourer in a commercial or industrial undertaking that is not one of the named sectors. AGGREGATOR TRAP: several payroll and EOR sites report 'Lesotho's minimum wage is LSL 2,242 per month effective January 2026, up from LSL 2,125 in 2025'. That is wrong twice over — M2,242 is the general minimum wage set on 28 March 2025, not January 2026, and it is not a national minimum wage. CITATION QUIRK IN THE INSTRUMENT ITSELF: the notice's own heading calls it the 'Labour Act Wages (Minimum Wages) Notice, 2025' but its paragraph 1 citation clause says it 'may be cited as the Labour Code Wages (Minimum Wages) Notice, 2025' — the drafter left the old Labour Code name in the citation clause after the Labour Act 2024 replaced the Labour Code Order 1992. Both names refer to LN 62 of 2025. The notice is also undated in the signature block ('DATED:' is left blank); the operative date is the gazette date, 28 March 2025. SECTOR DEFINITIONS MATTER: paragraph 2 defines each sector and the definitions are exclusionary — 'small business' means an undertaking with no more than ten persons wholly or majority owned by Basotho and covers only butchery, cafe/snack bar, coal and wood dealer, general cafe, green grocer and public bar, and expressly excludes supermarket and wholesaler licence holders; the clothing/textile/leather sector excludes operations employing fewer than twenty people or selling on premises/streets/house to house; the construction sector applies only to undertakings employing more than five people. Misclassification changes the floor by thousands of maloti. NON-WAGE TERMS: Part K of the schedule also sets maternity leave — six weeks' paid maternity leave after one year's continuous service in the textile/clothing/leather sector and in the private security sector, and six weeks before plus six weeks after confinement in all other sectors, limited to two confinements per employee with the same employer. 2026 ORDER — DO NOT SERVE AS FACT: as at 24 July 2026 NO 2026 minimum wages notice has been found in any official source. The Wages and Conditions of Employment Advisory Board published recommendations for the statutory 30-day public-comment period in April-May 2026 (reported 23 April and 4 May 2026): roughly 3% for the private sector, 4% for textile/factory workers and 4.5% for other sectors except security and textile, to apply retrospectively from 1 April 2026, with textile general workers under 12 months going M2,724 to M2,833, textile machine operators M2,929 to M3,046, textile general workers over 12 months M3,017 to M3,137, construction skilled under 12 months M5,078 to M5,306, construction unskilled over 12 months M3,552 to M3,711 and construction skilled over 12 months M5,664 to M5,919. Those are PROPOSALS reported in the press, not a gazetted instrument — do not serve them. Serve LN 62 of 2025 until the 2026 notice is gazetted, then expect it to be backdated to 1 April 2026. ACCESS — THIS IS THE WORST SERIES IN THE FILE. The Ministry of Labour and Employment website (labour.gov.ls) is unusable: its TLS certificate is EXPIRED (SEC_E_CERT_EXPIRED), its own /legaldocuments and /documents pages return 404, its asset and canonical URLs point at an unrelated developer domain (adamwills.io), and its WordPress instance has been compromised — /wp-json/wp/v2/pages returns page after page of injected foreign-language online-casino spam. Do NOT point a source-watcher at labour.gov.ls. LesothoLII (lesotholii.org) is behind a Cloudflare bot wall that returns HTTP 403 to every non-browser client, and its newest wages instrument is the 2024 notice, not the 2025 one. The working route used here is the scanned gazette that LesLII redirects to on archive.gazettes.africa, which is text-extractable; note however that gazettes.africa's Lesotho collection currently holds nothing for 2026 (its year list jumps from 2025 straight to nothing), so the 2026 notice will not appear there for some time.

Get it programmatically

curl https://afriref.dev/v1/ls/minimum-wage
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://afriref.dev/v1/ls/minimum-wage/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://afriref.dev/provenance/ls/minimum-wage

Other Lesotho series: policy interest rate · VAT rate · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates