Paid vs Unpaid Internships: What Students Should Know

So stop asking "paid or unpaid?" Ask what you're getting for your time, and whether anyone is taking advantage of it.

Paid internship or unpaid internship: the real difference

With a paid internship you get a stipend, a fixed monthly amount for working while you learn. Don't confuse it with a salary. There's normally no PF or other benefits, and it's often lower than what a full-time fresher earns.

Unpaid means no stipend at all. You're trading your time for experience, a certificate, a recommendation or a contact.

When an organisation pays you, it has usually budgeted for you, planned your work and expects something back. That's why paid roles tend to teach more. Tend to. There are plenty of exceptions both ways.

When an unpaid internship is worth it

Say yes to an unpaid role when most of these hold:

• It's short: four to eight weeks, or a few hours a week during semester. Months of unpaid full-time work is a different matter.
• The tasks are named: before day one, you know what you'll work on, and it connects to what you want to do later.
• There's a supervisor: one named person hands you work and checks it.
• You'll have something to show: a report, a dataset, a set of designs, a published article, a research credit.
• You couldn't get it another way: research with a professor, a policy internship with a government body, work at a well-regarded NGO.

Take a second-year BA Economics student in Guwahati. She's offered an unpaid four-week internship at a state research institute, cleaning survey data and writing a two-page summary that her supervisor reviews. Worth doing. Now suppose the same student is offered three unpaid months as a "marketing intern", which turns out to mean posting a startup's flyers in WhatsApp groups. She should turn it down.

Some respected government internships are unpaid by design. NITI Aayog's internship guidelines, for instance, say plainly that its internship carries no stipend. Students still apply for what they learn and for the line it puts on a resume.

First-years have the best case for going unpaid, since hardly any paid roles take first-years at all. If that's where you are, our guide on getting an internship in your first year lists where to look.

When to say no to an unpaid internship

Some unpaid roles are free labour with a nicer name. Walk away in any of these cases:

• The "internship" is a full-time job in disguise: fixed long hours, targets, and work a paid employee would otherwise be doing.
• Nobody can tell you what you'll learn or who'll supervise you.
• There's no end date, or the end date keeps moving.
• You're selling on commission and they're calling it an internship.
• Travel and food cost more than your family can manage. No experience is worth going into debt for.

Red flags in any internship, paid or unpaid

A few warning signs have nothing to do with the stipend. They point to fraud.

Paying to intern: a registration fee, training fee, kit charge or certificate fee. The AICTE National Internship Portal's student pages state that no organisation offering an internship through it may charge you these fees. Hold every other offer to the same rule.

A promised stipend that's "released after completion": small firms sometimes do this honestly. Pair it with a deposit or a target you can't hit, though, and it's a trap.

An offer without any interview, from a personal email address: that's how scams work, and real internships don't.

Our guide to spotting fake job offers and internship scams goes through these patterns in detail and tells you where to report them.

How much is a typical internship stipend?

Nobody has a reliable national figure for stipends by field, so be wary of anyone quoting one exact number. The things that push a stipend up or down are fairly consistent, though.

Field: technical roles such as software development and data analysis tend to pay more than content, social media, NGO or research roles. Finance and consulting internships at larger firms sit towards the top end too.

City: the same role generally pays more in a big metro than in a smaller city, partly because rent and food cost more there.

Organisation size: big companies with formal internship programmes pay a fixed stipend set in advance. Startups are all over the place. NGOs and research roles are more often unpaid, or cover expenses and little more.

Year of study: final-year and postgraduate interns get paid more than first and second-years.

Government schemes are the exception, because they publish their amounts. The PM Internship Scheme, for example, pays interns a fixed monthly amount plus a one-time grant on joining, and Press Information Bureau releases announce the figures. Amounts and eligibility have changed from one round to the next, so check the official PM Internship Scheme website for the current amount in the round you're applying to.

With company internships, your best benchmark is the market itself. Pull up several current listings for the same kind of role in your city, for example on our Internships page, and compare.

How to decide between two offers

A BCom student in Jaipur has two offers on the table. The paid one is at a local trading firm and is mostly data entry. The unpaid one is with a CA firm, helping on audit work under a named senior.

For each offer, write down what you'll actually do each week, who checks your work, what you'll walk away with, the stipend and your travel cost. If the unpaid one builds the skills you want for your first job and you can afford it, it may well be the better pick. If money is tight at home, taking the paid one is a perfectly sensible decision; look for skill-building work in your next break.

Either choice can be right. Picking without asking these questions is the mistake.

Your next step

Before you reply to your next internship offer, ask for three things in writing: your tasks, your supervisor's name, and the stipend amount or a line confirming there isn't one. You'll find openings to compare on our Internships page.