Eswatini Sectoral minimum wages (Regulation of Wages Orders)
Eswatini Sectoral minimum wages (Regulation of Wages Orders): no single figure applies. The reason is set out below, cited to the governing instrument. Last checked against the official source on 6 Sep 2026.
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 | 4 figures held on this page |
|---|---|
| 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 | 2026-09-06 |
| 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. RE-CHECKED 2026-08-07, STILL UNGAZETTED ANYWHERE PUBLIC: the gov.sz Labour Gazettes page lists nothing newer than 2024 (Wayback snapshots through 8 March 2026 agree, and the Wayback CDX shows no 2025/2026 wages gazette was ever uploaded under /images/LABOUR/); EswatiniLII’s gazette archive ends 2017 and gazettes.africa’s Eswatini collection likewise. Three search traps recorded for the next attempt: the new orders are reportedly styled as 2025 Orders even though announced February 2026, so searches for “2026” instruments may miss them; Eswatini gazettes are print-first and gov.sz uploads lag by months to years, so absence online is weak evidence of absence in law; and a mid-2025 round ALSO happened outside our eleven gazetted industries (media report Building/Construction, Hotel and Manufacturing orders effective 25 April 2025, and a Textile and Apparel Order 2025 published July 2025 — a 52-page scanned copy of that gazette circulates on independentnews.co.sz but is image-only and carries no machine-readable Legal Notice numbers; those industries were never part of this series’ value). RESOLUTION ROUTE: the instruments exist on paper — obtain the gazette from the Ministry of Labour and Social Security or the government printer; each order carries its own Legal Notice number and commencement provision. Re-check by 2026-09-07. 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
# $0.005 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: Central Bank of Eswatini discount rate · VAT standard rate · VAT registration threshold · Public holidays · CPI inflation (year-on-year) · Company income tax rate · Withholding tax rates · Statutory late-payment interest · Personal income tax bands · Statutory social-insurance contributions
The same figure elsewhere: Ethiopia · Gabon · Ghana · Kenya · Lesotho · all 34