Labour force survey to be monthly exercise with larger sample size

New Delhi: The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) will now be released monthly and include rural areas in addition to urban areas in quarterly results, the statistics ministry said on Wednesday.

Under the new PLFS design, the sample size has increased to 2,72,304 households, marking a rise of 2.65 times from households covered upto December 2024. "The enhanced sample size is expected to provide reliable estimates of labour market indicators with improved precision," the ministry of statistics and programme implementation said.

Districts will also be covered under the new sample design, as they have been made the primary geographical unit for selecting first stage units within a state or union territory in both rural and urban areas. In the remaining parts, the NSS region has been made the primary unit. "This will ensure presence of sample observations from most of the districts in the PLFS sample, which will improve the representativeness of the estimates generated," according to MoSPI. The new monthly bulletin will cover employment indicators like labour force participation rate, worker population ratio, and unemployment rate based on the current weekly status (CWS) approach.