Minimum Wage by Region (Philippines)

There is no national minimum wage in the Philippines

This is the single biggest source of confusion around Philippine wages. Republic Act 6727, the Wage Rationalization Act, handed rate-setting to regional boards rather than to Congress. Seventeen Regional Tripartite Wages and Productivity Boards, coordinated by the National Wages and Productivity Commission under DOLE, each issue their own wage orders on their own schedule. BARMM goes further and runs an entirely separate board of its own.

That means three things in practice. First, a rate you read about in the news is almost always the Metro Manila rate, which is the highest in the country and doesn't apply anywhere else. Second, two workers doing identical jobs in neighbouring provinces can have different legal wage floors. Third, a board generally cannot issue a new order within twelve months of its last one, so regions drift out of sync with each other and the gap between the top and bottom rate keeps moving.

Within a single region, the rate can also split by sector (agriculture versus non-agriculture), by establishment size (retail and service shops with few workers usually pay a lower floor), and in some regions by city or municipality tier. The calculator above walks through all three layers.

The Metro Manila situation, explained

NCR is currently the messiest region to compute, because two wage orders have been in play at once.

If you're computing back pay or checking a payslip for a cutoff before 26 September 2026, the legally operative floor for that period is contested — NCR-26's ₱695 is what most employers actually applied while NCR-27 was frozen. From the 26th onward, ₱755 is the number your payroll system should be using, and it flows through into overtime, night differential, holiday pay and 13th month accrual, all of which are computed off the basic daily wage.

One NCR quirk worth knowing: the lower tier here covers retail and service establishments with 15 or fewer workers. Most other regions draw that line at 10. A Metro Manila shop with 16 staff pays the full non-agriculture rate.

Current daily minimum wage, all regions

Highest general non-agriculture rate per region, with the wage order it comes from. Where a region splits by area or establishment size, the calculator above has the full breakdown.

Turning a daily rate into a monthly salary

Minimum wage is always expressed as a daily figure, but most workers are paid semi-monthly or monthly. The conversion depends on how many days your employer pays for in a month, which in turn depends on your work schedule and whether rest days are paid.

The two shortcuts in common use are 26 days for a six-day work week and 22 days for a five-day work week. Both are approximations of DOLE's equivalent monthly rate formulas, which divide the number of paid days in a year by twelve. If your payslip uses a divisor like 26.08 or 21.75, that's why — it's the same idea carried out to the decimal.

Worked examples

Minimum wage earners are exempt from income tax

Under the TRAIN law, a statutory minimum wage earner pays no income tax on the minimum wage itself, and the exemption extends to holiday pay, overtime pay, night shift differential and hazard pay. That's a meaningful difference at the wage floor.

It does not mean zero deductions. SSS, PhilHealth and Pag-IBIG employee contributions are still withheld, so your net take-home pay will always sit below the gross daily rate multiplied by your days worked. Note also that earning a wage above the floor, even by a small margin, takes you out of MWE status entirely and back into the regular withholding tax brackets.

Two boundary rules employers get wrong

Cotabato City follows BARMM, not Region XII

Cotabato City sits geographically inside North Cotabato, which is Region XII territory, but the city is the seat of the Bangsamoro government and is covered by the BARMM wage order instead — at a lower rate than the region surrounding it. The barangays that transferred from North Cotabato into BARMM's Special Geographic Area in 2019 follow BARMM's rates too.

The Negros Island Region has no wage board yet

NIR exists in law, but its wage board has not been constituted and has issued no wage order. Until it does, Negros Occidental including Bacolod stays under Region VI, while Negros Oriental including Dumaguete, and Siquijor, stay under Region VII Class B. Don't assume the new region means a new rate.

If you're being paid below the floor

Paying below the applicable minimum wage is a labor standards violation, not a private matter between you and your employer, and it carries fines and potential criminal liability for company officers. Statutory deductions bringing your net below the gross floor is normal and lawful; a basic rate set below the floor is not.

Start by asking HR or payroll which wage order and category they're applying — genuine errors happen, especially around tranche dates and establishment-size thresholds. If it isn't corrected, you can bring it to your nearest DOLE regional or field office, or request mediation through the Single Entry Approach, which is free and designed to settle claims like this within thirty days.