Eswatini minimum wage
Eswatini has NO single national minimum wage. Minimum wages are set industry by industry by Regulation of Wages Orders, made by the Minister for Labour and Social Security by legal notice under section 11 of the Wages Act, 1964 (Act No. 16 of 1964) on the recommendation of the Wages Council appointed for that industry under section 6. Each Order prescribes a First Schedule of 'basic minimum wage' rates by occupation, on its own basis (per hour, per day, per shift, per week or per month), and each revokes the previous year's Order for the same industry.
| Current value | structured — see the API |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2024-12-06 |
| Official source | Eswatini Government Gazette Vol. LXII No. 93B, Mbabane, Friday 6 December 2024, Part C — Legal Notices Nos. 171-181 of 2024, being eleven Regulation of Wages Orders, 2024 made under section 11 of the Wages Act, 1964 (Act No. 16 of 1964) by the Acting Minister for Labour and Social Security; each Order provides 'This Order shall come into force on the date of publication in the gazette' |
| Last verified | 2026-07-24 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
THE STRUCTURAL NULL IS REAL AND POSITIVELY ESTABLISHED: Eswatini has no national minimum wage and no statute that could contain one. The Wages Act, 1964 (Act No. 16 of 1964) provides for a Wages Advisory Board and for wages councils 'for the regulation of minimum wages and conditions of employment of employees'; section 6 lets the Minister appoint a council for a trade or industry and section 11 lets the Minister give effect to a council's proposals by making a wages regulation order by legal notice. Every minimum wage in Eswatini is therefore an industry instrument, and an occupation not covered by any order has no statutory floor. Do NOT synthesise a single headline figure from these rates — they are on four different bases (hour, day, 12-hour shift, week, month), the retail order is additionally split urban/rural, and mining and security are graded schemes. FLOOR, FOR ORIENTATION ONLY: the lowest single figure in the 6 December 2024 set is the Retail/Hairdressing 'Barber man' rate of E1,034.40 a month outside urban areas; the lowest hourly figure is E7.62 (school Cleaner); the widest-reaching household floor is the domestic-worker rate of E1,453.21 a month / E12.13 an hour. SCOPE: eleven industries were gazetted on 6 December 2024. Other industries have their own orders on their own cycles and are NOT in this gazette — building and construction, hotel and catering, road transportation, forestry, textile and apparel, manufacturing and processing, and media each have (or are awaiting) separate orders. DO NOT SERVE AS FACT — 2025/2026 ROUND IN PROGRESS: the Minister of Labour and Social Security, Phila Buthelezi, has announced reviewed 2025/2026 Wages Regulation Orders with cost-of-living adjustments negotiated in the wages councils, reported as agriculture 6%, building and construction 8.5%, domestic employees 7% (3.5% for those already above the minimum), forestry 10%, funeral undertakers 4%, hotel and catering 8.5%, handicraft manufacturing 8.5-10%, mining and quarrying 8-10%, motor engineering 6%, retail/wholesale/hairdressing 6%, road transportation 5.5%, schools support staff 4.5%, security services 5%, and textile and apparel 7.39-12%, with the media, manufacturing-and-processing and textile-and-apparel orders still outstanding. Fifteen of eighteen orders are said to have been published, but NO 2025 or 2026 wages gazette could be found on any government host at confirmation, so those percentages are not served and the 6 December 2024 rates remain the last verified figures. Re-check before relying on the rates above for a 2026 payroll. WHAT THE ORDERS ALSO FIX (not just money): normal hours (45 hours a week in most industries; 72 hours over six days for security guards and school watchmen), overtime, annual and sick leave, maternity leave and paid nursing breaks, compassionate leave (37 working days for a widow, 10 for a widower, 7 for a parent), uniforms and protective clothing, redundancy, and a Second Schedule form of written particulars of employment. A no-reduction clause is standard: an employee already earning more than the order prescribes may not be cut to the minimum. Most orders bar deductions for housing, accommodation, food or transport supplied by the employer. ACCESS: gov.sz serves the wages gazettes as text-extractable PDFs under /images/LABOUR/ and they are the only reliable route — the Ministry's 'Labour Gazettes' index page (https://www.gov.sz/index.php/policy-documents/legal-notice-regulation-of-wages) lists mostly DRAFT orders, not the gazetted ones, and does not show the December 2024 gazette at all. Earlier consolidated wages gazettes are at /images/LABOUR/WAGES-REGULATIONS-2022--Gazette-No.-102B-JULY--01-2022-REGULATIONS-OF-WAGES.pdf and /images/LABOUR/2023-industry-gazettes.pdf. EswatiniLII (eswatinilii.org), which hosts the Wages Act 1964 itself, is behind a Cloudflare interstitial and returns HTTP 403 to fetchers.
Get it programmatically
curl https://afriref.dev/v1/sz/minimum-wage
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://afriref.dev/v1/sz/minimum-wage/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://afriref.dev/provenance/sz/minimum-wageOther Eswatini series: policy interest rate · VAT rate · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates