Household income survey 2026: Why we need to tackle a data blind spot on what Indian homes earn

For decades, India has relied on its household consumption expenditure as the primary measure of welfare, poverty and inequality. While it is still important, it could be supplemented with new approaches that capture certain aspects of a rapidly transforming economy driven by technology and services in which households may have increasingly diversified sources of income.

Accurate, disaggregated and timely information on household income can help answer key policy questions, such as the reach of welfare transfers, burden of taxation, drivers of inequality and the vulnerability of different groups. Access to such data can enable governments to navigate policy decisions with clarity, grounding debates in evidence and driving more effective outcomes.

India’s attempts to measure income are not new. In the early 1980s, the National Sample Survey Organization experimented with income modules, but these efforts were eventually discontinued on account of a few conceptual and operational challenges.

Yet, our economy has since changed fundamentally and so have the tools available for measurement. A renewed effort through the upcoming Household Income Survey 2026 (HIS) reflects both the evolution of India’s statistical needs and the readiness of our system to take on this complex task.

To ensure conceptual and methodological integrity, the ministry of statistics and programme implementation (MoSPI) constituted a technical expert group (TEG) comprising economists, survey methodologists, statisticians and practitioners with long experience in income measurement and related fields. The group has been guiding the National Statistics Office (NSO) on the sampling design, questionnaire, architecture, operational protocols and piloting