Festive Season Temporary Staff in India: Attendance, Wages and the Exit That Starts a Two-Day Clock

A dark store in Coimbatore takes on twenty two pickers for the six weeks between Navratri and the week after Diwali. The store manager recruits them himself, mostly through people the existing staff know. There is a WhatsApp group. There is a diary at the packing table with names down the left and ticks across the top. Everybody is paid in the first week of December and everybody goes home.

That arrangement has worked for years, and this year it is the single largest piece of undocumented employment the business will create. Not because anything about it is unusual, but because since 21 November 2025 there is no version of it that the law recognises. There is no seasonal worker in the four labour codes. There is no six week exemption. There is no headcount below which the register stops mattering.

This is a practical guide to running that six weeks properly: what has to exist before the first shift, what the attendance record has to be able to prove, and the ending that decides whether you have two working days to settle forty people or until the 7th of next month.

Why this is a bigger cohort this year than last

TeamLease published its festive workforce report on 13 August 2026, built from anonymised employment records of sixty thousand frontline associates. It projects temporary hiring up fifteen to twenty per cent year on year across retail, e-commerce, quick commerce, logistics, FMCG and consumer durables. Warehouse pickers, packers and dark store personnel remain the largest single hiring categories, with in-store promoters, retail associates and cashiers close behind.

Two numbers in that report matter more to a small employer than the headline does.

• Only 40.5 per cent of the demand is in the tier I metros. Tier II accounts for 26.5 per cent and tier III markets for 33 per cent. The businesses doing most of this hiring are in Coimbatore and Bhubaneswar and Jaipur, and they do not have an HR department. The person enrolling twenty two people is the person who also has to get the store open.
• Frontline salaries are projected up eight to ten per cent, while effective take-home rises five to eight per cent. The gap between those two figures is not inflation. It is statutory deduction, which is another way of saying that the social security attaching to these roles is now visible in the pay slip.

"Temporary" is not a category in Indian employment law

This is the misunderstanding everything else grows out of. Owners speak of temporary staff as though it were a status, like a permanent employee but with the obligations switched off. It is not a status. It is a description of duration, and duration is not a thing Indian employment law grants relief for.

There are three real shapes a festive hire can take, and they are distinguished by who employs the person, not by how long the work lasts.

The third row is where a lot of wishful thinking lives. Calling a picker who reports to your store manager, works your roster and uses your equipment a “gig worker” does not make them one. If you direct the work, you are the employer, and the label on the WhatsApp message is not evidence of anything. The second row has its own trap, which we set out in full in principal employer PF liability for contract workers: using a contractor moves the paperwork, not the risk.

For most festive hiring by a small business, the honest answer is the first row. You found them, you roster them, you pay them. They are your fixed term employees, and the whole of the rest of this article is about that.

What has to exist before the first shift

The instinct with a six week hire is to sort the paperwork out once the rush settles. Two of these three things cannot be done that way, because the obligation attaches at or before the moment the person starts.

The appointment letter comes first, and the wording is deliberate. Rule 6 of the OSH (Central) Rules, 2026 says no employee shall be employed in any establishment unless an appointment letter has been issued to such employee in the format given below. That is a precondition, not a deadline. Sixteen numbered fields, and for a festive hire the one that decides everything downstream is field (viii), Type of Employment: regular, fixed term, or contractual. We went through all sixteen, including the five most templates have never carried, in the appointment letter guide.

PF and ESI attach from day one. Neither scheme has a probation period, a waiting period, or a minimum length of service. A picker on wages below the fifteen thousand rupee threshold is a member from the date of joining, and if they have worked anywhere before they already have a UAN which you must use rather than generate a second one. ESI applies on the same day, on the twenty one thousand rupee wage ceiling. The PF and ESI checklist has the thresholds and the monthly dates, and the free PF and ESI calculator does the arithmetic on a single wage.

The attendance register is the same register. Form IX, the Attendance Register-cum-Muster Roll prescribed by the Code on Wages (Central) Rules, 2026, has columns for daily attendance, in-time, out-time, overtime, shift and place of work. It has no column for employment type, because the register does not care. A six week picker occupies a row of exactly the same shape as a picker of eleven years. We covered Form IX and its two companions column by column in the statutory registers guide.

Parity is not a guideline, it is the definition

Section 2(o) of the Industrial Relations Code, 2020 defines fixed term employment, and the definition itself carries the conditions. A fixed term worker has parity with a permanent worker doing the same or similar work in hours of work, wages, allowances and other benefits. They are eligible for all statutory benefits available to a permanent worker proportionately to the period of service rendered, even where that period is shorter than the qualifying period the statute would otherwise require.

Read the second half of that slowly, because it inverts the usual assumption. The ordinary logic of a qualifying period is that a short engagement escapes it. For fixed term employment the qualifying period is set aside and the benefit is given pro-rata instead. Gratuity is the single stated exception and it needs one year, which is why a six week hire will not reach it. We traced that shift, and what it means for a business that renews fixed term contracts, in gratuity for fixed-term employees.

The ending decides the deadline

Here is the part almost nothing written about seasonal hiring covers, and it is the part with a date attached.

Section 17(2) of the Code on Wages, 2019 provides that where an employee has been removed, dismissed, retrenched, has resigned, or has become unemployed because the establishment closed, the wages payable are to be paid within two working days. It carries no minimum service requirement. A worker of six weeks is inside it exactly as a worker of six years is.

But section 2(zh) of the IR Code excludes two things from the definition of retrenchment: the termination of service as a result of non-renewal of the contract of employment on its expiry, and the termination of service as a result of completion of the tenure of fixed term employment. Neither of those is a removal, a dismissal, a resignation or a closure either. So a contract that runs to the end date written in it and simply stops does not start the two day clock at all. The ordinary wage period deadline applies instead: for a monthly wage period, before the expiry of the seventh day of the following month, under section 17(1)(iv). We took section 17 apart limb by limb in the salary payment deadline guide, including the three limbs that are not the 7th at all.

Now put the two together against how festive engagements actually finish.

• The volume held up and the contract ran out. Their last day was the date on the letter. Not retrenchment, not a termination. You have until the 7th.
• The rush died on the 2nd and you told twelve of them not to come back. That is not the expiry of a term, it is you ending the engagement early. Two working days, for all twelve, on wages you have not yet calculated.

Note what is not being claimed here. Retrenchment compensation under section 70 requires a year of continuous service, and a six week worker does not have it, so no compensation is owed either way. The exposure is not a payout. It is a deadline you did not know had started, on a group of people whose attendance record is the weakest you own.

The record is the part that actually fails

Every obligation above resolves, in the end, into one question: on 3 December, can you produce for each of twenty two people the days they worked, the hours on each day, which site they were at, and what was owed?

The diary at the packing table cannot answer it, and not because anybody was dishonest. It fails in ordinary ways:

• The tick has no time in it. Form IX wants in-time and out-time. A tick records that somebody came, which is the one thing nobody disputes.
• Somebody else made the tick. A supervisor filling the sheet from memory at 9pm is the normal case, not the exception, and it is indistinguishable on paper from a picker marked present who was not there.
• The godown has its own sheet. A picker who spent Tuesday at the overflow godown appears on two sheets, or on neither, and the reconciliation happens in December.
• The sheet is at the store and the settlement is at head office. Two working days is not enough time to send a photograph of a page to somebody who then types it into Excel.
• Nobody agreed the total. The first time the worker sees the number of days you think they worked is the day you pay them, which is the day they are leaving.

This is the ordinary reason festive settlements go wrong, and it has nothing to do with intent. Reconstructing six weeks of attendance for twenty two people, across two sites, from a paper record, inside forty eight hours, is not a task that can be done accurately. It can only be done approximately, and approximate is what a wage dispute is made of.

What a phone-based record changes here

Nothing in the previous section argues for buying software. It argues for a record that is made at the moment of the event, by the person the event happened to, with a time and a place already in it. On a festive cohort that happens to rule out every method except a phone, because the phone is the only thing each of those twenty two people is already carrying and the only thing that does not need to be bought, mounted, powered or moved to the godown.

Four properties are what actually matter for a six week hire, as opposed to the feature list generally:

1. Enrolment measured in minutes, not days. Twenty two people arriving over three days is the shape of the problem. If adding one takes ten minutes of somebody’s attention, the cohort is enrolled after the season has ended.
2. The punch carries a place. A picker who worked Tuesday at the godown has that on the record without anybody reconciling two sheets, which is what makes the multi-site total trustworthy on the last day rather than the following week.
3. It works where the signal does not. A godown at the back of an industrial estate is the normal environment for this work. A punch that fails because there are no bars is a paper record with extra steps, so it has to queue on the phone and sync later.
4. The total is visible to the worker while the season is running. This is the one that prevents the December argument. If a picker can see their own day count in week three, the disagreement happens in week three, when it is a five minute conversation instead of a settlement dispute.

And then the wages have to come off the same record rather than off a second transcription of it, because a six week engagement gives you no time to reconcile two systems and the register and the wage sheet are supposed to be the same numbers anyway.

What does this cost, and is it worth it for six weeks?

A six week plan that fits around the season

None of this needs a project. It needs the paperwork to happen in the right order, which is mostly a matter of doing two things before the season instead of during it.

If you are rostering the cohort across shifts as well as sites, the roster half of this is the subject of its own guide: managing shifts without WhatsApp, Excel or a whiteboard. And if your festive hires are working nights, the OSH consent and transport duties in the night shift article apply to a six week hire exactly as they do to anybody else.

Questions employers ask about festive hiring

Do I really need to put a six week worker into PF?
Yes, if their wages are within the threshold. There is no minimum service period in the scheme, and no probation exemption. The obligation attaches on the date of joining. The only workers outside it are those whose pay at the time of joining exceeds the fifteen thousand rupee limit and who were never previously members.

Can I pay festive staff a lower rate than my permanent staff doing the same job?
No. Section 2(o) of the IR Code puts a fixed term worker at parity with a permanent worker doing the same or similar work on hours, wages, allowances and other benefits. Duration is not a permitted basis for a lower rate.

My contract says six weeks and it ended. Do I have two working days to pay them?
Not on that fact alone. Expiry of a fixed term is excluded from retrenchment by section 2(zh), and it is not a removal, dismissal, resignation or closure either, so section 17(2) is not engaged. The ordinary deadline for your wage period applies. The answer changes if you ended it early.

What if I never gave them a written contract?
Then you have no fixed term employment to rely on, because section 2(o) requires one. There is no term to expire, so every ending is a termination and section 17(2) applies. This is the most common way a business ends up on a two day clock without knowing it.

Can I keep the festive cohort on a separate register?
You can keep them in a separate section for your own convenience, but Form IX is the establishment’s register and it has no employment-type column. The register the inspector asks for is one register, and a cohort missing from it is missing from it whatever else you also keep.

If I take some of them on permanently in January, does the festive stint count?
It counts as service, and the record of it is the one you kept in October. This is the practical reason to keep it properly even for six weeks: about one in four of these associates moves into a longer assignment, and the continuous service question is decided by a record you made when nobody thought it mattered.

Sources

Read directly. The Ministry of Labour and Employment’s labour codes pages for the four codes and their commencement on 21 November 2025. The PRS Legislative Research review of the Code on Wages (Central) Rules, 2026, read in full, for the notification of G.S.R. 343(E) on 8 May 2026 and the scope of those rules. Sections 16, 17(1)(iv) and 17(2) of the Code on Wages, 2019 and sections 2(o), 2(zh) and 70 of the Industrial Relations Code, 2020 are cited from the text of those Codes; the PRS bill track page for the Industrial Relations Code carries the Code as passed. Rule 6 of the OSH (Central) Rules, 2026 is quoted from the gazette text at G.S.R. 345(E) of 8 May 2026. Scheme thresholds are the EPFO and ESIC published figures. The festive hiring projections are from the TeamLease festive workforce report of 13 August 2026 as reported by HRKatha; the tier split, the sixty thousand record sample and the eight to ten per cent salary figure are taken from that reporting rather than from the report itself, which is not published in full.

Not claimed. No state Shops and Establishments variation is asserted here, and several states impose their own registers and their own notice requirements on top of the central rules; your own state’s rules are the document that settles your position. No retrenchment compensation figure is given, because a six week worker has no continuous service to qualify for one. Registrations and returns move through the Shram Suvidha Portal. Nothing here is legal advice.