The cabinet has approved a new pay structure for government officials and employees. The meeting was held this afternoon, Monday, at the Secretariat, chaired by Prime Minister Tareque Rahman.
Meeting sources said that under the new pay structure, the basic salary of officials from grade 1 to grade 10 will rise by up to 100 percent. Meanwhile, the basic salary of government employees from grade 11 to grade 20 will rise by up to 142 percent. Various allowances will also rise proportionally.
Work on issuing the official gazette notification will now begin, which could take one to two weeks.
To recommend implementation of a new pay structure for government employees, a 10-member committee chaired by Cabinet Secretary Nasimul Gani was formed on April 21. That committee finalized the recommendations.
Nearly a dozen years after the eighth pay commission, the interim government formed a 23-member ninth national pay commission on July 27, 2025. The commission submitted its report to then-Chief Adviser Professor Muhammad Yunus on January 21 this year. The commission was headed by former finance secretary Zakir Ahmed Khan.
The Zakir Ahmed Khan commission had recommended keeping the existing 20 grades in place while raising pay and allowances by 100 to 140 percent. It recommended raising the minimum basic salary from 8,250 taka to 20,000 taka. It recommended raising the maximum pay structure from the set 78,000 taka to a set 160,000 taka.
The commission had said that while 131,000 crore taka is currently spent on 1.4 million government employees and 900,000 pensioners, implementing the new structure would require an additional 106,000 crore taka.
However, sources say the Nasimul Gani committee did not recommend an increase rate above 100 percent. The committee had recommended implementing the new pay structure over two years in between — basic salary from July 1 of the current fiscal year, and allowances from July 1 of the following fiscal year.
Finance ministry sources said what has now been prepared for cabinet presentation differs somewhat from the earlier recommendation. That is, the basic salary will indeed be given from July 1, but it will be disbursed in stages.
The finance minister announced on June 11, while presenting the budget in parliament, that the new pay structure for government employees would be implemented from July 1 this year. In his budget speech, he said government employees have been receiving pay and allowances under the same structure for nearly 11 years. During this time, the cost of living has risen significantly due to inflation. He said the new pay structure would therefore be implemented in phases starting July 1.
The current fiscal year’s budget has allocated 141,434 crore taka for pay and allowances, which is 54,572 crore taka more than the revised allocation of the previous fiscal year.