Over 80% of domestic workers worldwide remain informal, ILO estimates show

More than four in five domestic workers worldwide still work informally, often without effective labour and social protection, despite progress in reducing informality in many countries, according to new estimates from the International Labour Organization (ILO).

The ILO released the estimates in a statistical brief in Geneva on Tuesday (October 27, 2026), 15 years after the adoption of the ILO Domestic Workers Convention.

India’s wage gap widened

In India, domestic workers’ nominal wages increased, but wages for other employees rose considerably faster, the brief said.

The ILO said this pattern was visible in several influential countries in the Americas and Asia and the Pacific.

“India is an important example: domestic workers’ nominal wages increased, but the wages for other employees rose considerably faster,” the brief said.

The report, citing data for both 2019 and 2025, noted a widening relative wage gap.

“Country-level evidence suggests that domestic workers’ wages often increased, but generally less rapidly than those of other employees, notably in India,” it said.

The comparison also showed a difference in earnings between domestic workers and other employees globally.

Domestic workers earned, on average, 61.2% of the monthly wage of other employees, according to the ILO.

The ratio was 73.1% for men and 55.3% for women, while it fell to 58.1% among domestic workers in informal employment.

These figures show the wage gap reported by the ILO across gender and employment-status categories, while the country-level evidence points to a slower pace of wage growth for domestic workers in India and several other countries.

Informality remains widespread

An estimated 80 million people aged 15 and over were employed as domestic workers worldwide, up from 75.6 million in 2019, according to the ILO Statistical Brief.

The increase in the number of domestic workers did not translate into a larger share of employment for the sector globally.

“Domestic work nevertheless remains relatively stable as a share of employment, accounting for 2.2% of total employment and 4.4% of employees,” the report said.

The ILO said the global increase largely reflected broader employment growth in specific regions rather than a specific expansion of domestic work relative to other occupations.

Informality declined or remained stable in 91 of the 140 countries with comparable data for 2019 and 2025.

Those countries accounted for nearly 70% of domestic workers worldwide, the ILO said.

However, the remaining 49 countries, representing around 30% of domestic workers, recorded an increase in the proportion of informality.

Millions remain without protection

Despite the progress across many countries, an estimated 66.5 million domestic workers, or 83.1% of the global domestic workforce, remained in informal employment without effective labour and social protection.

The ILO said the global figures largely reflected the growing concentration of domestic workers in countries where informality remained persistently high.

It added that the figures did not indicate a widespread deterioration in working conditions across the sector.

The report’s findings therefore place the wage trend alongside the continuing protection gap: domestic workers’ pay increased in places such as India, but often more slowly than the wages of other employees, while a large majority of domestic workers worldwide remained outside effective labour and social protection.

Source: The Hindu