PSA-10 survey results after new wage order

TheMonitorMindanaoToday.com | PSA-10 survey results after new wage order 

By: Uriel Quilinguing

CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY– The Philippine Statistics Authority is set to release this year results of the 2025 Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES), showing the region’s living conditions of its residents, after a two-trance 39-peso daily wage increase on January 16 and May 1, this year.

“The results of the surveys will be released this year,” PSA 10 Regional Director Janeth Aves said in a forum here on Wednesday, January 14, referring to the 2025 FIES as well as its rider, the January 2026 Labor Force Survey.

For the first time, PSA has set the biggest-ever sample size of 180,000 respondents for the 2025 FIES across 17 regions in the country, way beyond the usual 50,000 households .

In the region, these ongoing surveys are undertaken by over a hundred PSA-trained statistical researchers tasked to conduct house-to-house interviews on over a thousand household sample size in urban and rural areas of the five provinces.

The initial visit of FIES enumerator to interview the respondents with a questionnaire that was encoded in a tablet, intended to collect information on family income sources, consumption patterns, and expenditure items, was from July 8 to 31 to cover the first semester (January to June) of 2025.

With the same questionnaire and household, statistical researchers would do the final visit from January 9 to 31 this year, but this time to generate information from July to December period or the second semester of 2025.

Aves said: “It would take about six hours to finish the questionnaire, so every enumerator can possibly interview only three households in two days.”

The pieces of information generated from FIES are crucial for poverty measurement and analysis, updating the consumer price index weights, and formulating evidence-based socio-economic polices and development plans, according to a Philippine Institute of Development Studies (PIDS).

The PIDS also lauded the PSA for the semestral recall method and the use of one shuttle-type of questionnaire for two visits because the practice could improve the quality of data because memory bias on the part respondent is minimized.

Urban and rural classification of households in each province, as principal domains of the survey, makes the formation more reflective of the realities on the ground, the state’s main socio-economic policy think tank cited.

But lawyer Proculo Sarmen, legal counsel of the Federation of Free Workers (FFW), minced no words in saying that Wage Order No. RX-24 which the Regional Wages and Productivity Board (RTWPB) in Northern Mindanao issued in December 2025, does not reflect what laborers need for decent living condition.

Sarmen said PSA data that were factored in, in the formulation of new wage order were several years back, and one of these was the 2021-2022 FIES results. Northern Mindanao’s poverty threshold was P13,873 per month in Northern Mindanao was computed from 2021 generated data.

Once fully granted on May 1, 2026, minimum wage earners in the private sector would be entitled to P500 for a day’s work which translates to P13,000 gross monthly income — no deductions for Social Security System, PhilHealth, and Pag-IBIG premiums–after working for 26 days.

P13,000 is way below the P14,519 average salary of full-time workers that the PSA computed in its 2024 Occupational Wage Survey as well as in the Integrated Surveys on Labor and Employment that the Philippine Information Agency 10 reported on December 5, 2025.

“The data from the PSA are very significant,” said Dr. Helmae Tapanan, vice president for academic affairs of the City College of Cagayan de Oro, during the forum when asked if academic researchers find information from the PSA relevant. “PSA-10 would respond to our requests for data within two to three days.” (Uriel Quilinguing)

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