Is an Unpaid Internship Legal in India?

Is an unpaid internship legal in India, online or in person?

Nothing in Indian law obliges an organisation to pay an intern, outside registered apprenticeship, so an unpaid internship is lawful, and running it over video calls changes nothing about that. The duty to pay a minimum wage attaches to an employee, and both the Code on Wages, 2019 and the older Minimum Wages Act, 1948 define that word as a person employed for hire or reward. Somebody working for no reward sits outside the definition.

The point is checkable in minutes. Open the Code on Wages, 2019 (Act No. 29 of 2019) as published in the Gazette of India and the text of the Minimum Wages Act, 1948 hosted by the Chief Labour Commissioner, then search either file for “intern” or “trainee”. Neither word appears in either statute. India’s wage law was drafted around employment, and an internship is not automatically employment.

The regulator for technical education says the same without hedging. The AICTE Internship Policy: Guidelines and Procedures, issued by the All India Council for Technical Education, calls an internship a structured, short-term, supervised placement and records that it “may be compensated, non-compensated or some time may be paid”.

The same reasoning covers unpaid work labelled volunteering instead, since neither word carries a statutory meaning of its own. The guide to the legal difference between volunteering and an internship works that comparison through for a school student.

Which Indian law decides whether an intern must be paid?

The Code on Wages, 2019, Act No. 29 of 2019. Section 5 is one sentence: “No employer shall pay to any employee wages less than the minimum rate of wages notified by the appropriate Government.” Everything turns on the word employee, which section 2(k) defines as somebody “employed on wages by an establishment” to do skilled, manual, technical, clerical or other listed work “for hire or reward”.

Two gates stand before any wage floor can reach you. There must be wages, which section 2(y) defines as remuneration payable to a person in respect of his employment, and there must be hire or reward. A placement where nothing is promised and nothing is paid crosses neither gate. Section 2(k) also carves out, inside brackets, “an apprentice engaged under the Apprentices Act, 1961”, which points at where the genuine stipend obligation lives.

The 1948 Act worked the same way with one extra filter. Its section 2(i) limited an employee to somebody employed for hire or reward “in a scheduled employment in respect of which minimum rates of wages have been fixed”, so the occupation had to sit on a government schedule before any rate applied.

Section 69 of the Code repeals that Act, along with the Payment of Wages Act, 1936, the Payment of Bonus Act, 1965 and the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976.

One caveat. Section 1(3) of the Code says it commences on a date the Central Government notifies, and that date has passed. LiveLaw reported that the Centre brought the four labour codes into operation with effect from 21 November 2025.

The rules underneath them ran late. A LiveLaw analysis published on 24 February 2026 records that the central rules were still being finalised at that point, with the Centre telling the Delhi High Court they would be ready by the end of that month. Several government pages, the Chief Labour Commissioner’s among them, still describe the 1948 Act as operative, so you will meet both versions online.

The stipend answer does not move either way, because the hire-or-reward test is worded almost identically in the two statutes.

Which interns are guaranteed a stipend by law?

Registered apprentices, and almost nobody else; medical interns train under a separate rulebook that sets no national stipend figure. Under the Apprentices Act, 1961 the apprentice and the employer sign a contract of apprenticeship, an Apprenticeship Adviser registers that contract, and a prescribed minimum monthly stipend follows from the registration. The rates sit in Rule 11 of the Apprenticeship Rules, 1992, as amended in 2019.

Category of apprentice	Minimum monthly stipend
School pass-out, class 5 to class 9	₹5,000
School pass-out, class 10	₹6,000
School pass-out, class 12	₹7,000
National or State Certificate holder (National Trade Certificate or equivalent)	₹7,000
Technician (vocational) apprentice, vocational certificate holder, sandwich course student from a diploma institution	₹7,000
Technician apprentice, diploma holder in any stream, or sandwich course student from a degree institution	₹8,000
Graduate apprentice or degree apprentice	₹9,000

Four features of that figure decide what it is worth in practice:

• It is a flat national amount tied to your qualification, not a share of your state’s minimum wage, so it does not change between Kerala and Bihar.
• It rises by 10% in the second year of training and by a further 15% in the third.
• For a fresher during basic training, Rule 11(1AAAA) sets what the establishment pays at 50% of the prescribed stipend for a period of up to three months; where basic training and on-the-job training run at the same time, the full amount is payable.
• Rule 11(3) requires each month’s stipend to reach the apprentice’s bank account by the tenth day of the month that follows.

Several government and portal summaries still circulate the pre-2019 percentage-based rates, so read Rule 11 itself rather than a summary page.

The Act also has a narrow catchment. Under Rule 7B of the Apprenticeship Rules, 1992, an employer needs four or more workers to be eligible to engage apprentices at all, and engagement becomes obligatory only at thirty or more workers, in a band of 2.5% to 15% of total strength.

Section 3 of the Apprentices Act, 1961 sets the minimum age at fourteen, and at eighteen for designated trades related to hazardous industries. A six-week unpaid content internship at an eleven-person startup is nowhere near this machinery.

Medical internship is the one other placement with a rulebook of its own. The compulsory rotating internship runs under the National Medical Commission (Compulsory Rotating Medical Internship) Regulations, 2021.

Deciding an internship fee dispute on 3 June 2025, the High Court of Kerala recorded that there is no legislation, Central or State, governing internships in India, and set out paragraph 5 of the National Medical Commission circular of 19 October 2022, which leaves the amount of stipend payable to interns to be fixed by the appropriate authority for the institution, university or State. There is a rulebook there, but no national figure. Internships that form part of a professional degree course sit outside this page.

Does an unpaid intern keep any legal protection?

Yes. One statute reaches an unpaid intern with full force: the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013. Its section 2(f) defines an employee to include a “probationer, trainee, apprentice or called by any other such name”, and says so expressly “whether for remuneration or not, or working on a voluntary basis”. Being unpaid subtracts nothing there.

Read the Act as gazetted on 23 April 2013 and four limits appear.

• It protects women. The complaints machinery is built around an aggrieved woman, so a male or non-binary intern falls outside it.
• Where you complain depends on the employer. Section 4 requires every employer to constitute an Internal Committee, and section 6 sends the complaint to the district Local Committee in two cases: where an Internal Committee “has not been constituted due to having less than ten workers”, and where “the complaint is against the employer himself”. At a small organisation run by its founder, the second route matters as much as the first.
• Three months, plus three. Section 9 requires a complaint in writing within three months of the incident, or of the last incident in a series, extendable by up to three further months for reasons recorded in writing. That clock runs whether or not you were paid.
• Workplace is defined by place, not by platform. Section 2(o) reaches wider than an office: clause (v) covers any place visited by the employee arising out of or during the course of employment, and clause (vi) covers “a dwelling place or a house”. No clause names video calls or messaging platforms, so whether a purely online placement is covered has been argued from those clauses rather than settled by the text.

Do hours, leave, insurance and PF reach an unpaid intern?

Hours and leave can, through state shops and establishments law, which in some states defines an employee more widely than wage law does. Provident fund and state health insurance do not, because both turn on wages. Student insurance is the one cover worth chasing, and the AICTE Internship Policy puts it on your institution.

The state Acts do not all draw the line where wage law does. The Delhi Shops and Establishments Act, 1954 defines an employee at section 2(7) as a person wholly or principally employed about the business of an establishment, whether for wages or other consideration, and expressly includes an apprentice.

Wording of that kind can pull a person under training inside the hours, weekly-holiday and leave provisions of a state Act. The definitions differ between states, so read the Act that covers the workplace you are joining rather than a national summary.

The AICTE Internship Policy: Guidelines and Procedures records that, as per the AICTE approval procedure, institutions are required to ensure insurance of all their students, and it does not make that cover turn on who arranged the placement. Ask your college what its student insurance covers before you start.

Provident fund and state health insurance follow the same wage test as the Code on Wages. The Employees’ Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952 defines an employee as a person employed for wages, and applies to a factory in a Schedule I industry or to any other establishment employing twenty or more persons.

The Employees’ State Insurance Act, 1948 uses the same wage-based definition, with a factory threshold of ten or more persons. A stipend-free intern sits outside both schemes for the reason wage law does not reach them. Where a placement genuinely pays wages and the organisation crosses those thresholds, ask whether contributions are being made.

When does an unpaid internship stop being lawful?

At the point where the arrangement stops matching its label. Four situations do that: a stipend promised in writing that never arrives, being asked to pay the organisation, a role that runs as payroll with no training content, and work done below the lawful age for that kind of work.

Money decides the first of them, so the statutory meaning of wages matters. Section 2(y) of the Code on Wages, 2019 defines wages as all remuneration expressed in money, including basic pay, dearness allowance and retaining allowance, and excludes bonus, house rent allowance, conveyance allowance, overtime, commission and gratuity. That definition never uses the word stipend, so a monthly payment promised for work has to be argued into it rather than found there.

1. A promised stipend goes unpaid. Once an organisation agrees to pay for work, both gates come into play at once: money promised in respect of the work, and hire or reward under section 2(k). Section 5 of the Code on Wages becomes arguable rather than plainly inapplicable. Whether a token stipend crosses those gates has not been settled by a clear Indian ruling. A ₹1,500 monthly “stipend” for full-time hours is a weaker position for an employer than paying nothing at all, because it concedes that money is owed for the work.
2. You are asked to pay them. Registration fees, refundable security deposits, kit charges and paid certificates reverse the direction of the relationship. That pattern is worked through in the guide to internships that ask you to pay.
3. The label is standing in for a payroll. Fixed shifts, individual targets, a reporting manager, client deliverables and no training content describe an employee. Indian courts have not settled a bright-line test for when a stipend-free intern is in substance an employee, so treat this as a risk the employer runs rather than a right you can enforce quickly.
4. You are below the lawful age for that work. Age limits sit in child and adolescent labour law, not in wage law, and they bite whether or not money changes hands. The guide to whether a 16- or 17-year-old can legally intern in India covers where that line falls.

What proof does an unpaid online intern have?

Saved email, dated exports of your own work, and the chat history. That is the whole file. An unpaid online placement produces no payslip, no bank trail, no attendance register and no employment record, so nothing exists afterwards except what you kept while it was running.

The law itself does not move when the work goes remote. The Code on Wages defines an establishment as “any place where any industry, trade, business, manufacture or occupation is carried on and includes Government establishment”, and neither wage statute conditions anything on where the worker sits. A remote unpaid intern and an unpaid intern at a desk in the office hold the same position.

What changes is everything around the law. Nobody can walk in to see whether the premises exist, which puts the weight on checks you run before accepting; the signals that mark a fake internship offer are the ones to run first. Whoever signed your offer may sit in another state, which complicates where a civil suit could be filed and how far you would travel to file it.

Keep the artefacts as you go rather than at the end: the offer letter as you received it, the joining and closing messages, weekly task assignments, and a dated copy of every deliverable you submitted.

Where the placement also has to earn academic credit, your university’s requirements sit on top of all this and ask for records the law does not. The guide to whether an online internship counts toward a UGC credit requirement covers what has to be produced for that.

There is no separate online rulebook. None of the wage statutes uses the phrase, and the AICTE Internship Policy does not set remote internships up as a category with rules of their own. If a regulator has published anything treating them differently, it is not in the documents cited on this page.

What should an unpaid internship offer letter say about money?

Either the words “unpaid” or “no stipend”, or else the exact amount, the frequency and the date each payment lands. Silence about money is the clause that produces the arguments, and with nothing being paid, the document you accepted is the only artefact of the whole arrangement.

Two further lines are worth settling before you sign:

• Whether any costs are reimbursed at all, such as data, software you are told to buy, or travel to an offline event, and who approves them. An unpaid intern paying expenses out of pocket has money moving in the wrong direction.
• Whether the organisation will sign your college’s forms and issue a completion certificate, if your programme demands them.

Dates, hours, the named supervisor and confidentiality terms matter as much on an unpaid placement as on a paid one, and the guide to checking an internship offer letter before you accept takes those clause by clause.

Where an organisation publishes its stipend terms on a page anyone can read, rather than promising them in a chat window, that is the better sign, because it is the same answer given to everyone.

What can you do when a promised stipend goes unpaid?

Treat it as a contract claim and start inside the organisation, because the labour machinery is built for employees and workers. Since the Code on Wages came into force, the counter for wage claims is the authority appointed under its section 45, which hears “the claims which arises under the provisions of this Code”, and those claims still belong to employees.

Section 57 shuts out a civil suit only for sums that could have been recovered under the Code, which leaves an unpaid intern’s contractual claim unbarred. The realistic sequence is short.

1. Send one written demand that quotes the clause, attaches the offer letter and sets a date. Address it to a published contact address rather than a personal number, so that a record exists.
2. If nothing happens, escalate to somebody senior to your supervisor.
3. Tell your college’s training and placement cell, which has influence you do not, particularly where the organisation wants interns from your campus next year.

After that, a promise of money is a civil claim. The LiveLaw analysis of the labour codes published on 24 February 2026 sets out what that means: people classified as employees but not as “workers” are pushed towards ordinary civil courts instead of labour tribunals, an outcome the piece reports that many lawyers call the Civil Court Impasse.

For a few thousand rupees that route rarely repays the cost of walking it, which is why the written offer matters far more than the remedy. If money moved in the other direction and you paid something, the matter stops being a wage dispute and becomes a possible fraud, where a police complaint is the appropriate step rather than a labour claim.