Vanuatu minimum wage
Vanuatu's single national minimum wage rate, expressed per hour, for regular hours of work (up to 8 hours a day / 44 hours a week under the Employment Act [CAP 160]). It is NOT set in the Employment Act itself: it is fixed by Order made by the Minister responsible for labour (Internal Affairs) under the Minimum Wage and Minimum Wages Board Act [CAP 182], on the recommendation of the Minimum Wages Board / Tripartite Labour Advisory Council, and published in the Official Gazette. Upratings are ad hoc, not annual.
| Current value | structured — see the API |
|---|---|
| In force from | — |
| Official source | Minimum Wage and Minimum Wages Board Act [CAP 182] and the Minimum Wage and Minimum Wages Board Regulations (Orders 56 of 1987, 27 of 1991, 5 of 1995, 43 of 2005), Consolidated Edition 2006 — the only text of the rate-setting instrument published by the Vanuatu Department of Labour. It is obsolete: it still states VT 20,000 per MONTH inside and outside municipalities |
| Last verified | 2026-07-23 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
STRUCTURAL NOTE — NO VERIFIABLE CURRENT VALUE, DELIBERATELY NULL. Vanuatu does have a national minimum wage; the problem is that no CURRENT figure is obtainable from a primary source. What is established: (1) the rate is set by Order under the Minimum Wage and Minimum Wages Board Act [CAP 182], not under the Employment Act [CAP 160] — the brief that commissioned this file said 'order under the Employment Act', and that is wrong; the Employment Act [CAP 160] consolidated text carries hours, overtime, leave and penalties but NO wage rate. (2) The National Employment Policy 2025–2030 (Department of Labour, https://dol.gov.vu/images/documents/policies/NATIONAL_EMPLOYMENT_POLICY_2025-2030.pdf) confirms the Minimum Wages Act as one of the governing labour laws and the Tripartite Labour Advisory Council as the consultative body, but states no rate. (3) The only rate text the Department of Labour publishes is the 2006 consolidation cited above, which is decades stale (VT 20,000/month), plus special categories that may still stand in amended form: seasonal copra cutters at 13.5% of the VCMB hot-air/sun-dried copra price, seasonal cocoa cutters at 6% of the VCMB 1st-grade cocoa price, and student-holiday and young-person workers at a separate lower daily rate. (4) The Department of Labour's own 'Employment Act Cap 160 Entitlement Calculations' brochure (https://dol.gov.vu/images/brochures/Employment_Act_Cap_160_Calculations.pdf) works all of its overtime and sick-leave examples at '220vt per hour' — that is the rate set by Order in 2019 and is now out of date; it is evidence of how stale the official material is, not a current figure. DO NOT SERVE AS FACT: press and labour-database reporting is consistent that the Minister of Internal Affairs signed an Order in May 2023 raising the national minimum wage from VT 220 to VT 300 per hour with effect from 1 June 2023 (a 36% increase), and that no further uprating has taken effect since. VT 300/hour is probably correct, but it rests entirely on secondary reporting: the enacting Order is published only in the Official Gazette, and every Gazette PDF on dol.gov.vu (No. 49 of 2019 dated 17 Sept 2019; No. 45 of 2020 dated 24 June 2020) is a SCANNED IMAGE with zero extractable text, as is the Department's 'minimum wage proposal' PDF. Under the official-primary-source rule this file serves null rather than an unverifiable number. ACCESS PROBLEMS TO RECORD: employmentvanuatu.gov.vu — the Department of Labour's public-facing employment portal, which search engines still index as carrying the 'Know your Rights' minimum-wage page — returns HTTP 404 for every path including its root; it is effectively dead. dol.gov.vu is up but has no minimum-wage page (/index.php/minimum-wage 404s). PacLII's Vanuatu Consolidated Legislation index returns 403 to automated fetchers, and ILO NATLEX returns 403. TO RESOLVE: the 2023 Order needs OCR of the relevant Official Gazette issue, or a direct request to the Department of Labour Industrial Relations Unit (Port Vila, +678 33130). Once obtained, set value 300, unit VUV per hour, effective_from 2023-06-01, and move VT 220/hour into history.
Get it programmatically
curl https://ausref.dev/v1/vu/minimum-wage
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://ausref.dev/v1/vu/minimum-wage/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://ausref.dev/provenance/vu/minimum-wageOther Vanuatu series: policy interest rate · VAT rate · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates