Metro Manila Minimum Wage 2026: current rate, wage orders, and keeping employees compliant

The current Metro Manila minimum wage

As of 2026, the Metro Manila (National Capital Region) minimum wage is ₱695 per day for non-agriculture establishments (Sector A) under NCR Wage Order No. 26. The Sector B rate (agriculture, retail and service establishments with 15 or fewer workers, and manufacturing with fewer than 10 workers) is set separately in the same wage order.

Minimum wage rates in the Philippines are not national. They are set by the Regional Tripartite Wages and Productivity Board (RTWPB) for each region under the Wage Rationalization Act (RA 6727). The NWPC publishes the rates and consolidates them nationally; the RTWPB sets each region's own figure through hearings and consultations.

Verify the current NCR rate against the latest NWPC bulletin before applying it to payroll. Wage orders change and this blog post is a snapshot as of its publication date.

What ₱695 looks like in practice

The "monthly equivalent" calculation depends on the divisor the employer uses to convert the monthly salary back to a daily rate. See how to compute the daily and hourly rate for the full methodology.

Who the Metro Manila minimum wage covers

The NCR minimum wage applies to all private-sector employees working in Metro Manila, regardless of:

• Employment status. Regular, probationary, casual, project-based, and part-time employees are all covered.
• Pay method. Daily-paid and monthly-paid employees are both covered; the monthly figure must at least equal the minimum daily rate multiplied by the applicable divisor.
• Position. The minimum wage is a floor. Managerial and supervisory employees may have different overtime treatment under Article 82 of the Labor Code, but basic wage coverage still applies.

Who is exempt?

• Government employees (covered by Civil Service compensation)
• Household (kasambahay) workers (covered separately by RA 10361)
• Workers in retail and service establishments regularly employing fewer than 10 workers can be exempt from certain monetary benefits, but the minimum wage coverage itself still applies

How wage orders work

A wage order is a legally binding adjustment to the regional minimum wage. The process:

1. Petition or motu proprio review. Labor organizations file a petition, or the RTWPB reviews rates on its own initiative.
2. Public hearings. The board holds hearings with labor and management representatives.
3. Issuance. The board issues the wage order with the new daily rate per sector and the effective date.
4. Publication. The order is published in a newspaper of general circulation.
5. Effectivity. The order takes effect 15 days after publication, unless the order itself specifies a different date.

A new wage order typically includes multiple tranches, meaning the rate rises in steps over several months. Employers must apply each tranche from its own effective date.

Historical NCR rate changes (recent)

(Rates shown are the final tranche of each year's order. Confirm against the exact wage order text, which has intermediate tranches with earlier effective dates.)

What employers must do when a new wage order lands

Three concrete steps:

1. Identify affected employees. Every employee whose daily rate (or monthly rate converted to a daily figure) is below the new floor must be adjusted from the effective date.
2. Compute the differential. For affected employees, the differential is the gap between the old rate and the new floor, multiplied by the days worked from the effective date forward.
3. Issue new employment contracts or contract addenda reflecting the new rate, and update government report bases (SSS monthly salary credit, PhilHealth premium base, Pag-IBIG compensation) that climb with the new daily rate.

Doing this manually in a spreadsheet is error-prone. Missing a single affected employee by the effective date exposes the employer to a wage differential claim going back to the day the wage order kicked in, plus DOLE compliance orders.

How OneHRIS tracks and applies new wage orders automatically

OneHRIS has a built-in Regional Minimum Wage tracker under Settings. The workflow:

1. Add the wage order. Enter the region, effective date, new daily rate per sector, and a source note (link to the NWPC bulletin or wage order PDF).
2. Preview affected employees. The system lists every employee whose current rate is below the new floor, showing the current daily equivalent, new daily rate, and new monthly basic salary side by side.
3. Generate draft contracts. One click creates a draft contract for each affected employee. The drafts flow through the normal contract approval workflow in Contracts → Pending Approvals.
4. Review the Salary Scale Distortion Report. When a wage order raises the minimum wage, the gap between salary grades can compress. The distortion report shows every pair of grades where the gap shrank and offers three options to restore it (preserve percentage differential, preserve peso differential, or no action). Applying an option generates additional draft contracts for the higher-grade employees.

The full product walkthrough is at set a regional minimum wage and update affected contracts.

Why this matters for compliance

The 15-day gap between a wage order's publication and its effective date is short. The gap between the effective date and the first affected payroll run can be even shorter. An HRIS that leaves this to manual Excel work risks underpayment on the first affected pay cycle, which is where DOLE compliance claims typically originate.

Automating three things removes that risk:

• Automatic detection of every employee below the new floor
• Automatic generation of draft contracts for approval
• Automatic update of the SSS, PhilHealth and Pag-IBIG contribution bases that climb with the new daily rate

For Philippine SMBs running payroll in-house, this is the difference between staying compliant across a wage order change and finding out six months later during an audit.

Related reading

• Set a regional minimum wage and update affected contracts - the full OneHRIS product walkthrough
• Minimum wage in the Philippines: how to find the rate that applies - the statutory primer
• How to compute the daily and hourly rate - the methodology for converting monthly salary to a daily figure
• Employer and employee shares of government contributions - how a wage order changes the SSS, PhilHealth and Pag-IBIG bases

Want to see how the Regional Minimum Wage tracker works on real employee data? Book a 30-minute demo and we will show the end-to-end wage-order workflow on your own payroll data.