What is the average internship stipend in India?

The median is ₹12,000 per month across 3,178 postings where the employer stated a monthly figure. The 25th percentile is ₹8,562 and the 75th is ₹18,000. By function it ranges from ₹17,500 in data and analytics to ₹10,000 in design and marketing.

Can I use the Hopin Hiring Index data in my own article or research?

Yes. The aggregates are published under CC BY 4.0, free to reuse commercially or non-commercially with attribution and a link to hopinjobs.com/hiring-index. The underlying CSV files are downloadable from that page.

Where does the Hopin Hiring Index data come from?

From 20,392 internship postings across 14,004 companies collected mostly between April and July 2026, of which 98.3% were picked up from public posts on LinkedIn rather than from company career pages. It therefore describes the hidden job market rather than being a census of Indian internships.

Open data

The Hopin Hiring Index

What Indian companies actually pay interns, who is actually hiring them, and how those employers actually want to be contacted. Built from 20,392 internship postings across 14,004 companies.

Free to reuse with attribution. The numbers on this page are the ones we would want someone to check us on, so the raw aggregates are downloadable and the method is written down.

First issue, August 2026 · covering April to July 2026

₹12,000

Median monthly internship stipend, from 3,178 employer-stated figures

14,004

Companies hiring interns across 20,392 postings

53.3%

Of postings come from companies hiring exactly one intern, ever

23.2%

Of internships are remote. 70.8% are on-site.

Why this exists

When we were applying in third year, nobody could tell us what a normal stipend was. Everyone had a story about a friend who got ₹40,000 and nobody had a number. India runs on an enormous fresher hiring market and almost none of it is measured in public.

We run a job tracker, so we ended up with the data by accident. Publishing it costs us nothing and it is the only thing we have that a student, a journalist or a placement cell cannot get anywhere else. So here it is, with the workings shown.

The reports

Issue 01 · Overview

What off-campus hiring in India actually looks like

The headline report. Median stipend, city-by-city pay, and the finding that 78% of companies hiring interns post exactly once and never come back.

Issue 02 · Pay

Data pays ₹17,500. Design pays ₹10,000.

Stipends broken down by function. The gap between the best and worst paid function is about 75%, and it is wider than the gap between companies.

Issue 03 · Employers

There is no biggest employer in Indian internships

The 64 largest employers hold 6.3% of the market. Companies hiring a single intern hold 53.3%. Why a target-company list is the wrong strategy.

Issue 04 · Channels

44% want a DM. Only 24% have a form.

Two thirds of postings carry a recruiter's email address. Most students spend their effort on the one channel with the most competition.

Issue 05 · Remote

Remote internships pay like a tier-two city

Remote is 23.2% of the market and pays a median ₹10,000 against Bengaluru's ₹18,000. Which functions actually go remote and which barely do.

Download the data

Every aggregate behind those reports, as CSV. Licensed CC BY 4.0 — use it commercially or otherwise, just credit Hopin and link back so people can check the method.

CSVStipend by function CSVStipend by city CSVStipend distribution CSVHiring concentration CSVWork type and remote share CSVApplication channels

Method, and what we refuse to publish

The corpus. 20,392 internship postings aimed at candidates in India, across 14,004 companies, collected mostly between April and July 2026.

Stipends are employer-stated only. Our system fills in an estimated range when an employer states nothing, and 16,387 postings carry one of those estimates. Every one is excluded. Stipend figures come from the 3,178 postings where a monthly amount came from the employer, parsed to rupees per month, ranges averaged to the midpoint, values under ₹500 or over ₹3,00,000 dropped as typos. A city or function needs a minimum sample to appear at all — 40 stated stipends for a city, 50 for a function.

We do not publish a trend line. We could draw one, and it would show postings rising steeply across these months. It would be false. Our collection volume grew over the period, so the line would mostly show us getting better at collecting rather than the market getting bigger. We will publish trends when we have two issues collected the same way, and not before.

Where this is skewed. 98.3% of these postings came from public posts on LinkedIn rather than company career pages. That is the part of the market Hopin was built to find, but it means this describes the hidden job market rather than being a census. Campus drives, referral hires and roles that only ever appear on a company's own site are largely absent. It affects the application-channel numbers most and the stipend numbers least.

Known flaws. Company names are normalised imperfectly, so two spellings of one firm count twice — that nudges the one-off-employer share up and the concentration down. Role labels arrive from several scrapers with overlapping taxonomies and we merged the obvious duplicates by hand.

Citing it

Use this: Hopin Hiring Index, August 2026, hopinjobs.com/hiring-index. If you are writing something and want a cut we have not published — by city, by function, by month — email us and we will run it. We would rather the number existed than that we owned it.

If you spot an error, tell us and we will fix it in place and say that we did.