The country employs more monks than bankers

The NSB Labour Force Survey 2022 lists “Monastic Education” as a sectoral employment category in its own right — 7,408 employed Bhutanese, primarily ordained monks and nuns in formal monastic institutions under the Dratshang Lhentshog. The category sits between Health (6,069) and the public education system (12,566) by headcount.

The banking sector — Bank of Bhutan, BNB, BDB, T-Bank, Druk PNB, and the digital bank combined — employs approximately 3,250 Bhutanese. The monastic body is 2.3× larger by headcount.

That is not an oddity of how the categories are coded. The monastic body is a constitutional institution under the Dratshang Lhentshog, formally funded, with retirement and welfare arrangements; it is one of the largest single labour-market sectors in the country. Bhutan’s institutional history rests on the Drukpa Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, and the Royal Government’s deliberate policy across successive five-year plans has been to support and expand the monastic body as a cultural-preservation function.

The result, in pure labour-market arithmetic: one of the world’s largest per-capita monastic populations, sitting alongside the country’s smallest banking sector among its regional peers.