ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is rapidly transforming into a salary dependent society as the share of employees in the national workforce has surged to 60 percent, marking a significant shift away from traditional self-employment.
According to a comprehensive Gallup Pakistan report released on Thursday, which analysed Household Income and Expenditure Surveys (HIES) from 2000 to 2025, the proportion of salaried earners has risen sharply from 47 percent in the late 1990s.
This transition, driven largely by urbanisation and evolving economic landscape, reflects a fundamental change in how the average Pakistani sustains their livelihood.
This rise in wage-based labour has come at the direct expense of independent work and family-run enterprises. The data shows that self-employment has dwindled from 28.5 percent to 21.8 percent over the same period, while the share of contributing family workers has fallen from 20.8 percent to 13.5 percent.
Analysts suggest this decline points to a broader move from self-reliance to a dependency on corporate and institutional payrolls, potentially signaling a weakening of the small-scale entrepreneurial spirit that has historically underpinned the local economy.
The most striking revelation of the report is the persistent stagnation of the employer class, which has remained fixed at approximately 1 percent of the workforce for nearly three decades. This highlights a critical “job creator” deficit, where the number of individuals starting businesses and hiring others is not growing in tandem with the labor pool. The resulting imbalance creates a fragile middle class that, while expanding in numbers, remains highly susceptible to macroeconomic volatility, inflation and stagnant firm productivity.
Experts warn that without a parallel rise in entrepreneurship, the current trajectory places the workforce at risk during economic downturns.
The report concludes that there is an urgent need for policy interventions that foster innovation and support small businesses to ensure a more resilient and balanced economic structure. Moving forward, the focus must shift from merely providing jobs to creating an environment where more Pakistanis can transition from being employees to becoming job creators themselves.
