Pakistan Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

WHAT A PAYROLL ENGINE GETS WRONG IN PAKISTAN. 1. PAKISTAN HAS TWO PARALLEL SCHEMES AT TWO LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT AND AN EMPLOYER OWES BOTH. EOBI is FEDERAL and pays old-age pension; the provincial Employees' Social Security Institution pays medical care, sickness, maternity, injury benefit and death grant. They are complements covering different risks, not alternatives. An engine that models one and drops the other is missing either 6% or 6% of the minimum-wage base — and models very commonly drop the provincial one. 2. NEITHER SCHEME IS COMPUTED ON ACTUAL SALARY. Both compute on a notified MINIMUM WAGE, which makes them behave as FLAT PER-HEAD CHARGES rather than as percentages of payroll. A chief executive and a machine operator attract identical contributions. An engine that applies 5%, 1% and 6% to actual gross pay will over-contribute enormously for anyone above the minimum wage — which is most of the formal workforce. This is the single most consequential Pakistani error and it goes in the expensive direction. 3. THE TWO SCHEMES MAY BE COMPUTED ON TWO DIFFERENT MINIMUM WAGES ON THE SAME PAYSLIP. Minimum wages are set provincially. Punjab notified PKR 40,000 a month with effect from 1 July 2025 by gazette notification of 8 September 2025; the figure of PKR 37,000 remains widely cited in EOBI contexts as the federal minimum wage. So the provincial contribution and the federal contribution can sit on different bases for the same employee, and the widely-quoted EOBI amounts of PKR 1,850 employer and PKR 370 employee are 5% and 1% of PKR 37,000, not of PKR 40,000. 4. THE NOTIFICATION LANDS MONTHS AFTER IT TAKES EFFECT. Punjab's notification is dated 8 September 2025, was gazetted on 9 September 2025, and takes effect from 1 JULY 2025 — a two-month retroactive window in which the operative minimum wage was already in force but not yet published. Pakistan therefore has the same publish-late problem as China's contribution base, and an engine that waits for publication will under-contribute for the intervening months. 5. THE PROVINCIAL RATE AND WAGE LIMIT VARY BY PROVINCE. Punjab's PESSI is served here at 6% employer-only. Sindh (SESSI), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan each administer the same 1965 Ordinance with their own rates and wage limits; a 7% rate and a separate maximum contributory salary have both been reported for one or more provinces, and these have moved. PUNJAB IS THE NAMED REFERENCE PROVINCE and its figures must be substituted for the correct province in production. Model province as a mandatory rate dimension for Pakistan. 6. THE EMPLOYEE PAYS ONLY ONE THING, AND IT IS SMALL. The employee's entire statutory social-insurance deduction is the 1% EOBI share of the minimum wage — a few hundred rupees a month, identical for every employee in the country. The provincial scheme is 100% employer-borne. Pakistan therefore has one of the lightest employee-side burdens in this dataset and one of the flattest. 7. EOBI IS GATED ON HEADCOUNT. An establishment with fewer than five employees is outside EOBI altogether. This is an establishment-level test, not an employee-level one, so a five-person business crossing the threshold acquires the obligation for its whole workforce at once. 8. THE WORKERS WELFARE FUND AND THE WORKERS' PROFIT PARTICIPATION FUND ARE NOT PAYROLL CONTRIBUTIONS. Both are assessed on company income or net profit, fall due annually, and are deducted from nobody's pay. They are real employer costs and belong in a cost-of-employment model, but converting them into payroll percentages is a fabrication. Both were devolved to the provinces by the Eighteenth Amendment, separately re-enacted province by province, and the resulting federal-provincial overlap has been heavily litigated. 9. THERE IS NO UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE AND NO GENERAL HEALTH-INSURANCE CONTRIBUTION. Pakistan has no unemployment insurance branch at all. Health cover for insured workers comes through the provincial social security institutions' own hospitals and dispensaries, funded by the employer's 6% — it is not a separate health premium, and there is no employee health deduction. Provincial health-card schemes are tax-funded and non-contributory. Do not create branches for either. 10. GRATUITY AND PROVIDENT FUND ARE SEPARATE AND LARGELY CONTRACTUAL. Gratuity or provident fund entitlements arise under the standing orders and industrial-relations legislation and under individual contracts, not as a universal statutory payroll contribution rate. They are outside this record. SUB-NATIONAL VARIATION: FUNDAMENTAL, NOT INCIDENTAL. The social security institution, its rate, its wage limit and the minimum wage that supplies the contribution base are ALL provincial. Only EOBI is national, and even EOBI's base is a minimum wage that varies by province. Serving a single national Pakistani rate set is wrong for every province including this one. Model PK-PB / PK-SD / PK-KP / PK-BA as genuine rate dimensions. WHAT WE DO NOT PUT A NUMBER ON, DELIBERATELY. SINDH, KHYBER PAKHTUNKHWA AND BALOCHISTAN SOCIAL SECURITY RATES AND WAGE LIMITS — not served. Reported figures conflict and have moved; I did not reach any provincial institution's own current notification for those three provinces. Their existence and the fact that they differ from Punjab is disclosed so nothing is silently missing, but no figure is given. THE PESSI WAGE LIMIT AS A DISTINCT NUMBER — not served. Punjab's minimum wage of PKR 40,000 is served from the gazette, but I could not reach PESSI's own current contribution notification to confirm whether a separate maximum contributory wage applies on top of it. WORKERS WELFARE FUND AND WORKERS' PROFIT PARTICIPATION FUND PERCENTAGES — all rate fields null. They are profit levies, not payroll rates, and the applicable provincial statute and threshold differ by province. THE EOBI INSURABLE-WAGE FIGURE AS A CONFIRMED NUMBER — deliberately stated as a range rather than a single value. See the sourcing caveat. ALREADY LEGISLATED, NOT YET IN FORCE / WATCH LIST. (1) THE MINIMUM WAGE IS THE THING THAT MOVES, AND EVERYTHING ELSE FOLLOWS IT. Because both contributions are computed on a minimum wage, a minimum-wage notification changes every Pakistani contribution amount without any change to a contribution rate. Punjab's current notification runs from 1 July 2025; provincial notifications typically follow the June federal budget and are gazetted in the following months, so expect the next Punjab notification for 1 July 2026 to have been gazetted around September 2026 — as at this record's date that had not been confirmed, and the PKR 40,000 figure served may already have been superseded with retroactive effect. THIS IS THE HIGHEST-PRIORITY RE-VERIFICATION ITEM. (2) Provincial social security rates are set by provincial notification and have moved recently in at least one province. (3) The devolution of EOBI to the provinces has been repeatedly proposed and contested since the Eighteenth Amendment; a transfer would fragment the one remaining national scheme. SOURCING CAVEATS, STATED PLAINLY. The Punjab minimum wage is PRIMARY and exact: the gazette notification was rendered and read directly, and its operative wording, notification number, both dates, the superseded notification and all three wage figures are quoted above. The EOBI contribution rate of 5% employer and 1% employee is confirmed from EOBI's own published financial documentation, which states it in terms. THE WEAK POINT IS THE EOBI INSURABLE-WAGE BASE: EOBI's own website was unreachable (the server refused the connection and presented an invalid TLS configuration), so I could not read the current insurable-wages notification. Secondary sources consistently state that EOBI computes on the minimum wage and most give PKR 37,000, producing PKR 1,850 employer and PKR 370 employee — but Punjab's own gazette shows PKR 40,000 in force provincially from 1 July 2025, and the sources do not resolve which figure EOBI currently applies. The base is therefore served as a range with the discrepancy exposed rather than a single number chosen arbitrarily. THE PESSI 6% RATE is from the Punjab Employees' Social Security Institution's own published overview describing the Provincial Employees' Social Security Ordinance 1965 requirement, read via search results after the PESSI server refused a direct connection; a 7% figure circulates for at least one province and I could not verify which. Employee and employer shares are stated separately: the employee figure is what leaves the payslip, the employer figure is cost of employment and is not a deduction.

Get it programmatically

curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/pk/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/pk/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://asiaref.dev/provenance/pk/social-contributions

By subdivision

ISO 3166-2 — 4 subdivisions held. A subdivision that does not appear below has NOT been researched, and must not be read as having no value: where a subdivision genuinely has none, it is listed with an explained null and a citation for the absence.

Other Pakistan series: SBP Policy (Target) Rate · General Sales Tax (GST) · VAT registration threshold · Minimum wage (unskilled worker, monthly) · Public holidays · CPI inflation (year-on-year) · Corporate income tax rate · Withholding tax rates · Statutory late-payment interest · Personal income tax brackets

The same figure elsewhere: Philippines · Qatar · Saudi Arabia · Singapore · South Korea · all 28