When Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb presented Pakistan's federal budget in the National Assembly on June 12 and announced tax cuts across four salaried income slabs, the headlines wrote themselves: relief for the salaried class, surcharge abolished, a 7 percent pay raise for government employees. On paper, it looks like the budget Pakistan’s middle class has been waiting for years.

On the ground, the picture looks different. The slab revisions, notified under the Finance Bill 2026, apply to people earning above Rs2.2 million a year — a respectable income, but well above what most salaried Pakistanis earn. Anyone earning less than roughly Rs183,000 a month saw no change in their tax rate at all. For a large share of the middle class — schoolteachers, junior bank staff, mid-level government employees, small shopkeepers — the headline relief simply does not reach them. Pakistan has no single official threshold for 'middle class'; estimates range from roughly Rs50,000 to Rs400,000 a month depending on the survey. But the households this piece is concerned with sit closer to the lower end of that range — salaried earners well above subsistence, yet far short of comfort.

Even where it does........

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