Gig Worker Rules in India 2026: Who Counts as an Aggregator, and What Is Actually Due Now

Two separate things happened to gig work in India this year, and almost every summary written since has run them together. One of them is a live obligation that fell due on 21 June 2026 and is now more than two months overdue for most of the businesses it covers. The other is a levy of 1 to 2 per cent of turnover that has been quoted in every headline and is not payable by anybody, because the Central Government has not notified the rate and has not notified a start date.

Telling them apart is the whole job. If you run a platform, one of these needs doing this week and the other does not need a rupee set aside yet. And if you are a small business that pays people per delivery, per task or per visit and has started wondering whether the word gig now applies to you, there is a third answer that matters more than either: the definitions in the Code do not let you choose the label, and the one most likely to fit is the one with the most duties attached.

The two duties, and only one of them has started

Chapter IX of the Code on Social Security, 2020 is the part that deals with unorganised workers, gig workers and platform workers. It contains two distinct machines. Section 113 registers workers. Section 114 funds schemes for them, partly out of a contribution from aggregators. They commenced together and they are running at completely different speeds.

The duty with the deadline is the one that got the least coverage. The duty with no rate and no start date is the one in every headline.

Who is an aggregator, and why the schedule is the second question

Most summaries answer this by reprinting the Seventh Schedule. That is the second gate. The first is the definition, and it does more work.

Read what that requires. There has to be a digital intermediary or a marketplace, and it has to connect a buyer with a seller or service provider who is somebody other than you. A bakery that takes orders through its own app and delivers them with its own riders on its own payroll is not connecting a buyer to a third party seller. It is selling its own goods with its own staff. It has an app, and it is not an aggregator.

A company that lists other independent tradespeople and takes a cut when a customer books one is doing exactly what the definition describes, and the fact that it is small, offline in parts, or run out of one city does not take it out.

The ninth entry is a catch-all

Once you are inside the definition, the Seventh Schedule decides whether the levy provision reaches you, because section 114(4) applies to an aggregator "who falls within a category of aggregators, as are specified in the Seventh Schedule". The nine categories, verbatim:

Entry 9 is the one to notice. The schedule is not a list of named industries with a boundary around it. It is eight examples and a residual category that closes the gap. Nobody who satisfies section 2(2) escapes the schedule by arguing that their business is not quite delivery and not quite logistics.

So the order of questions is: am I an intermediary or a marketplace connecting a buyer to a third party provider, and only then, which entry. Arguing the schedule first is how businesses talk themselves into the wrong answer in both directions.

Gig worker, platform worker, employee: the labels are not yours to pick

This is the section most readers of this site actually need, and it is the one the platform-focused coverage skips, because for a platform the answer is obvious.

Three definitions, all from section 2 of the same Code, all quoted rather than paraphrased because the wording is the point:

Two phrases decide almost every real case. A gig worker earns outside an employer-employee relationship. An employee is employed on wages whether the terms are express or implied.

Calling somebody a gig worker does not make them one

A definition that turns on the absence of an employment relationship cannot be satisfied by writing a different word on the contract. If the relationship exists in substance, section 2(35) is not available, and section 2(26) catches the arrangement through the words "or implied".

The practical test is the ordinary one. Do you set the hours. Do you direct how the work is done rather than only what the result must be. Is the person integrated into your establishment, using your premises, your equipment, your uniform, your reporting line. Can they send a substitute. Can they work for a competitor the same afternoon. None of these is decisive alone and the contract is not decisive either.

If that describes a question you are currently sitting on, the site has the two pieces that follow from it: the PF and ESI compliance checklist for what the employee answer costs, and the appointment letter rules, because the Code closed the three month window for issuing one and that duty starts at ten workers.

The contract worker is a fourth thing again

Worth saying plainly, because the three way split is really a four way split. Somebody supplied to you by a contractor is not a gig worker and not outside employment. Section 2(26) expressly includes a person employed "either directly or through a contractor", and the principal employer carries real exposure for their provident fund. That is a different article and the site has it: what a contractor default costs the principal employer, and the contract labour rules under the Codes.

What is actually due now: registration, and it is late

Section 113 requires every unorganised worker, gig worker and platform worker to be registered, on two conditions: the worker has completed sixteen years of age, and has submitted a self-declaration in the prescribed form. Registration is made against an application including the Aadhaar number, the worker is assigned a distinguishable number, and section 113(3) is the sentence that gives the whole chapter its teeth in the other direction: a registered worker is eligible to avail the benefit of the concerned scheme. Unregistered, no benefit.

The operational duty on the business side comes from the Social Security (Central) Rules, 2026. The following is reported from law firm and trade summaries rather than read from the Rules first hand, and is flagged as such:

• The Rules were notified on 8 May 2026, and rule 48(2) requires an aggregator to share the details of the gig and platform workers engaged through it, on the designated Central Government portal, by API or other electronic modes, within 45 days.
• A Ministry of Labour and Employment circular dated 1 June 2026 fixed 21 June 2026 as the date for completing onboarding and API integration with the eShram portal.
• After that date the duty is continuous, not annual. Every new gig or platform worker is to be registered on the portal in real time or on a daily basis, and exit details are to be shared the same way.
• As at a 29 June 2026 report, roughly 20 aggregators and 10 to 12 lakh workers were on the portal, with the Ministry noting that even the registered aggregators had not put their whole workforce on it. An extension was requested and refused.

What non-compliance actually costs

The summaries say "penalties under section 133" and stop there, which is unhelpful, because section 133 runs from clause (a) to clause (q) with four very different punishment tiers. Failure to make a filing of this kind has no special penalty of its own, so it falls into the residual clause:

Clause (m) is punished under sub-clause (iv): a fine which may extend to fifty thousand rupees. No imprisonment on that route, and no daily continuing penalty of the kind the Industrial Relations Code attaches to standing orders. That is a real exposure and it is not an existential one, and a reader deciding how urgently to act deserves the accurate number rather than an unspecified threat.

The sharper consequence is the one in section 113(3). Workers you never registered are not eligible for the scheme benefits when a scheme finally arrives. The cost of the omission lands on them first and on your relationship with them second.

The levy everybody is quoting, and why it is not a bill yet

Here is section 114(4) in full, because the differences between it and the version in circulation are all in the wording:

And immediately after it, section 114(5), which is the provision that settles the timing and which almost nothing written about this quotes:

So two separate notifications are needed before a rupee is due: one fixing the rate somewhere in the 1 to 2 per cent band, and one fixing the start date. Neither was found, and no scheme has been notified under section 114(1) either, which matters because the contribution funds the schemes rather than existing on its own. The benefits section 114(1) contemplates are life and disability cover, accident insurance, health and maternity benefits, old age protection and creche.

Two per cent of what, exactly

The phrase in circulation is "1 to 2 per cent of gig-related annual turnover". The statute says "the annual turnover of every such aggregator". There is no qualifier limiting it to the gig-related part of the business, and the Explanation narrows it only by excluding tax, levy and cess. The single provision that ties the number to gig spend is the proviso, and it is a ceiling rather than a base: the contribution cannot exceed 5 per cent of what the aggregator paid or is liable to pay to its gig and platform workers.

That matters most to a diversified company. A business whose platform arm is a small fraction of group revenue reads the gloss and computes a small number. It reads the section and finds the base is not obviously limited that way, with only the 5 per cent proviso holding the result down. Platforms have been asking the Ministry to define turnover as the revenue of the unit that engages the workers since at least early 2021, and nothing found resolves it.

This is not a question this article is going to answer. It is a question worth putting to an adviser before anybody models the cost, and worth remembering the next time a summary states the base as settled fact.

The 90 and 120 day test, and the records it assumes

Also reported rather than read first hand: under the 2026 Rules a gig or platform worker qualifies for the social security benefits only on a work threshold in the previous financial year, said to be at least 90 days with a single aggregator, or 120 days across more than one. A day on which the worker earned any income from an aggregator counts as an engaged day, days with several aggregators on the same date count cumulatively, and eligibility is reported to end at age 60.

Look at what that test is made of. It is not a revenue test, a rating test or an hours test. It is a count of calendar days on which a named person earned, held per person, per aggregator, across a financial year. Combine it with the daily onboarding and exit reporting and the shape of the obligation is clear: the Code assumes a business that knows, for every person and every day, whether they worked.

Very few small businesses hold that. They hold a monthly payout sheet, which is the sum and not the series, and a sum cannot be turned back into a count of days. A business that has been paying twenty people per task through a spreadsheet since 2024 cannot answer the 90 day question for a single one of them without reconstructing it from bank transfers.

If you have concluded from the definitions above that your people are employees rather than gig workers, the same record is the one that PF filings, wage slips and the statutory registers all run on. The registers and wage slips piece sets out what has to be in it.

The states are not waiting for the Centre

One thing that makes the dormant central levy less comforting than it sounds. Gig worker welfare is being legislated at state level in parallel, on its own timetable, with its own money.

Karnataka has passed a platform-based gig workers social security and welfare law providing for a cess on aggregators, reported in the range of 1 to 5 per cent per transaction, with the quantum still to be finalised by the state labour department. A per transaction cess is a structurally different animal from a percentage of annual turnover, and a business could face one, the other, both, or neither depending on where it operates.

No table of states here, on purpose. This area is moving, and a list that is right today and wrong in November is worse than an instruction to check. The instruction is: check your own state, and check it again when you open a second one. Central dormancy is not state dormancy.

What to do this week

1. Answer the definition question before anything else. Are you a digital intermediary or a marketplace connecting a buyer to a provider who is not you. If no, you are not an aggregator and none of the aggregator duties apply, whatever your app does.
2. If you are, get onto the portal. The deadline was 21 June 2026 and the exposure grows with the delay rather than being capped at it. Onboarding, API integration, and then daily reporting of joiners and leavers.
3. Do not set money aside for the levy yet, and do not assume the base. No rate, no start date. When a notification comes, read the base it uses rather than the summary of it.
4. If you are not an aggregator, ask the harder question. The people you are paying per task, per delivery or per visit: are they outside an employment relationship in substance, or only on the contract. If the latter, the answer is PF, ESI and an appointment letter, and it has been the answer since November 2025.
5. Start holding the day-level record now, whichever bucket you are in. Every version of this obligation counts days per person. That number can be produced going forward from today and cannot be produced backwards.

Where this came from

Sections 2(2), 2(26), 2(35), 2(60), 2(61), 113, 114, 133 and 141 of the Code on Social Security, 2020, and the Seventh Schedule, were read as bare act text and are quoted above rather than paraphrased wherever the wording carries the argument. The official home of the Codes and of the circulars referred to here is the Ministry of Labour and Employment, and the registration portal is eShram.

Everything attributed to the Social Security (Central) Rules, 2026 is reported from law firm and trade summaries and is labelled as such in the text: the 8 May 2026 notification, rule 48(2), the 45 day window, the 1 June 2026 circular and the 21 June 2026 deadline, the real time or daily reporting, and the 90 and 120 day eligibility test. The Rules were not read first hand for this piece, and where a rule number appears it is because more than one source gave the same one, which is not the same as having read it.

For the wider picture of what commenced in November 2025 and what it changed, see the labour code compliance checklist and the full labour law guide.