Minimum wage to be increased from January 2017

Come 2017, minimum wage for the private sector will be increased from $35,000 to $42,500 for private sector employees. This was disclosed by Minister of Social Protection, Volda Lawrence.

Minister Lawrence who was speaking about some the achievements of her ministry for 2016 said the decision arose from the tri-partite talks in which the employees were represented by their unions and the employers by Consultative Association of Guyanese Industry Limited (CAGI).

“We have been able to move forward at the tri-partite level where we’ve been able to come up with a minimum wage for the private sector which we did not get any negativity from and I’m very happy about the way in which we approached that, in that we had both employees being represented by the unions and they did their surveys and we had the employers being represented by the CAGI” the Minister said.

It was previously announced that the minimum wage will be increased to $44,200 per month.

For government workers, 2017 will see the income tax threshold being lifted to $60,000 and workers earning less than $180,000 dollars will now be pay personal income tax at a rate of 28% from the previous 30%.