Data pays ₹17,500. Design pays ₹10,000. Internship stipends in India by function.
Every stipend conversation we have with students is about the company. Which company pays well, which one is stingy, did you hear what so-and-so got at that startup.
We ran the numbers by function instead, and the spread is much wider than the spread between companies. Whether you go into data or into design changes your stipend by about 75%, and almost nobody seems to talk about that.
This is 2,642 internship postings where the employer stated a monthly figure themselves. Estimates our own system generated are excluded, as always.
| Function | Postings | 25th pct | Median | 75th pct |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Data & analytics | 111 | ₹10,000 | ₹17,500 | ₹25,000 |
| Software engineering | 487 | ₹10,000 | ₹15,000 | ₹24,000 |
| Operations | 140 | ₹10,000 | ₹15,000 | ₹20,000 |
| Finance & accounting | 95 | ₹10,000 | ₹13,500 | ₹20,000 |
| Sales & business development | 448 | ₹8,000 | ₹12,000 | ₹16,373 |
| Human resources | 444 | ₹8,000 | ₹10,000 | ₹15,000 |
| Marketing & growth | 708 | ₹7,500 | ₹10,000 | ₹15,000 |
| Design | 209 | ₹7,500 | ₹10,000 | ₹15,000 |
Data pays 75% more than design
₹17,500 against ₹10,000. Same length of internship, same level of student, same country.
We want to be careful about what that means, because the obvious reading is wrong. It is not that data people are better. It is that fewer students can do the work, so employers compete for the ones who can. Design and marketing have enormous supply at the fresher end - every campus has a hundred people who can make a poster and run an Instagram page - and a market with that much supply pays what it pays.
The number of postings tells the same story from the other side. Marketing has 708 stated stipends in our data and the lowest median. Data has 111 and the highest. The functions with the most openings pay the least, because the most openings means the most competition for each one.
The floor is the same everywhere. The ceiling is not.
Look at the 25th percentile column. It barely moves - ₹7,500 to ₹10,000 across every single function. If you are at the bottom of any of these markets you are getting roughly ₹8,000 to ₹10,000 regardless of what you do.
The 75th percentile is where they separate: ₹25,000 for data, ₹24,000 for engineering, ₹15,000 for design. So the choice of function does not really change your first internship. It changes your third one.
What we would tell a second-year
- If you are choosing between functions and money matters, the data is unambiguous. Data and engineering pay more, and they pay more because they are harder to enter.
- If you already love design or marketing, do not switch for ₹5,000 a month. The gap at the fresher end is real but small in absolute rupees, and being good at a thing you like beats being mediocre at a thing you picked off a table.
- If you are in marketing or HR, expect ₹10,000 and treat anything above ₹15,000 as a genuinely good offer rather than a disappointment. Two thirds of postings in those functions are below it.
- Whatever function you are in, the first internship pays about the same. Optimise it for what you will learn, not for the stipend.
You can see what is open right now across all of these on our live list of off-campus internships, and the full method is in the first Hiring Index report.
How we counted
2,642 internship postings, drawn from 20,392 collected mostly between April and July 2026, where the employer stated a monthly stipend themselves. The 16,387 postings carrying a stipend range our own system estimated are excluded from every figure here.
Figures are parsed to rupees per month, with ranges averaged to their midpoint and anything under ₹500 or over ₹3,00,000 dropped as a typo. Functions are our own grouping: the source data carries overlapping labels from different scrapers, for example "Software Engineering" and "Engineering", which we merged before calculating. A function needs at least 50 stated stipends to appear, which is why several are missing.
The one caveat that matters most: 98.3% of these postings were picked up from public posts on LinkedIn rather than from company career pages. That is the slice of the market Hopin was built to find, but it means this describes the hidden job market rather than every internship in India. Campus drives and roles that only appear on a company's own careers site are largely absent.
Numbers here are recomputed each time we publish, so a later issue may differ from this one. If you find something wrong, tell us and we will correct it in place and say that we did.
Cite this
Free to reuse with a link. Hopin Hiring Index, August 2026. “What internships actually pay by function”, hopinjobs.com/blog/internship-stipend-by-function-india. Raw aggregates are on the Hiring Index page.
Cheering you on,
- Diti & Rishit