Who has the biggest salary bill? TCS.

What the chart shows

In the year to March 2026, TCS spent ₹1,54,994 crore on its people across its whole group: salaries, bonuses and benefits. That is the biggest staff bill of the 5,257 listed companies whose yearly results we hold, ₹59,900 crore more than Infosys.

Next: Tech Mahindra, ₹30,479 crore. 4 of the top 5 are IT companies. SBI and HDFC Bank are the banks in the ten.

What this is: the total each company's yearly accounts charged for its staff (salaries, bonuses, pension and provident fund payments, other benefits). For a company that owns others, it is the whole group's, including staff abroad. What it is not: pay per employee, or the number of people a company employs. A big bill can mean many people, well-paid people, or both. It is not a judgement on any company.

How it is measured

A staff bill here is what a company's own yearly accounts charged for its people in the year to March 2026: salaries and wages, bonuses, payments into provident and pension funds, gratuity and other staff benefits (the line "employee benefit expense"; banks call it "payments to and provisions for employees"). For a company that owns others, the figure is the whole group's (consolidated), including staff in companies it owns abroad; a company without group accounts is counted on its own (standalone). Where a year has more than one version on file, the latest is used.

Banks and insurers file their yearly results in a different format, so their figure is read from the staff-cost line of their results for the year to March 2026, and is used only when their four quarters add up to the full year (SBI and HDFC Bank in the ten). Tata Motors (cars) is Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles, the car business left after the Tata Motors split, including Jaguar Land Rover; its figure for the year does not include the truck and bus business, which now files on its own. 5,257 listed companies show a staff bill for the year. As a check against reading errors, a company is ranked only when its figure is no bigger than its total expenses and, where it reported one the year before, between half and twice that figure; 4,863 are ranked and 394 are set aside, none as big as the 10th figure here.

Of the companies that show no figure for the year, 74 can be shown to sit below the ten: for each, twice its figure for the year before, its total expenses, or twice a full year at the pace of its latest quarters is smaller than the 10th figure (the last check covers 20 companies, mostly ones whose year ends in December, such as Hexaware Technologies, Varun Beverages, Crisil). On the companies' own accounts alone (not their groups'), TCS is also first: ₹1,12,142 crore, ahead of Infosys at ₹73,239 crore. No total is given: a group's figure includes the companies it owns (L&T's includes LTIMindtree), so a sum could count one staff bill twice.

A staff bill is not pay per employee and not a head count: a big bill can mean many people, well-paid people, or both. It says nothing about whether a company is good, cheap or well run.

Using this chart