Best Employer of Record · Middle EastBest EOR for the Middle East: six priced

Three of these six ledgers are not taxes

The country table prices one employee at each country’s example salary through the three picks, and the statutory column is where the region stops behaving like Europe. In Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, a foreign employee generates almost no contribution to a state fund. Articles 14(1) and 43(1) of the Saudi Social Insurance Law make the annuities and unemployment branches mandatory for Saudi employees and workers, so for a foreign hire the employer pays GOSI 2% for occupational hazards and nothing else; the annuities share (10% since 1 July 2026 for a Saudi first insured from 3 July 2024, 9% for one insured before) and the 0.75% unemployment share a Saudi national costs do not arise. Article 51(2) of the Emirati Labour Relations Decree-Law gives the foreign worker an end-of-service gratuity in place of the pension legislation that applies to a national. Qatar’s retirement law is written, in its own words, for “the Qatari beneficiary”.

What the employer carries instead is an accrual. Twenty-one days of basic wage for each of the first five years in the UAE, three weeks a year in Qatar, half a month a year in Saudi Arabia: money owed to the employee at the end, not money remitted to a fund each month. Two consequences follow, and neither is visible in a percentage. The first is that somebody is holding it. If the provider accrues the gratuity on your invoice, ask what happens to the balance if you move the employee to another provider or to an entity of your own, and whether the accrual is funded or merely booked — the UAE has already answered that question for one jurisdiction, since a DIFC employer must pay at least 5.83% of basic wage into a funded qualifying scheme every month rather than accrue it. The second is that the base is basic wage, not the package.

That is why the UAE and Qatar figures are written as floors rather than totals (Israel’s is a floor for a different reason, below). Neither Emirati nor Qatari law fixes what share of a package basic pay must be, and the gratuity is computed on basic pay alone, so an identical salary split differently produces a different bill. This site models an even split and says so, which turns the UAE’s 5.75% of basic and Qatar’s 5.77% into about 2.9% of the whole package. Move the split to 70% basic and the same hire costs about 4% of package. Qatar contains the contradiction in one article: article 54 settles the gratuity on “the last Basic Wage”, while the minimum it guarantees is expressed in “Remuneration”, which article 1 defines to include every allowance on top. Saudi Arabia is modelled at 90% of gross rather than an even split, because GOSI charges basic pay plus the housing allowance and that is the share Deel’s own Saudi page implies.

Jordan, Israel and Turkey are the region’s ordinary ledgers

They are also the three that make the Gulf figures legible by contrast. Jordan is the Gulf rule reversed. Its employer pays 14.25% of gross to the Social Security Corporation — 11% for old age, disability and death, 2% work injury, 0.75% maternity and 0.5% unemployment — for foreign and Jordanian employees alike, on pay up to JOD 3,733 a month in 2026. Article 32 of the Labour Law then owes an end-of-service award only to a worker who is not covered by social security, so an insured hire accrues none: the contribution replaces the gratuity instead of sitting beside it. Israel reaches 15.2% at $75,000 and about two-fifths of that (6.4 points) is national insurance — 4.51% on the first ILS 7,703 of monthly pay and 7.6% above it. The rest is a compulsory pension at 6.5% and a severance provision at 6%, both of them, again, deferred pay to the employee rather than a state charge, and the severance owed above the provision on a dismissal is why the Israel page treats its figure as a floor.

Turkey runs a conventional social-insurance ledger too: 12% pension, 7.5% general health insurance, 2.25% for the work-accident branch and 2% unemployment, 23.75% of gross with no ceiling in sight at an engineering salary. It carries a discount most comparisons quote and this site does not: article 81(ı) of act 5510 has the Treasury cover part of the employer’s pension share, but only while the employer owes SGK nothing in premiums, fines or interest. Under an employer of record the legal employer is the provider, so you inherit the provider’s compliance record rather than building your own — and the support was cut from four points to two with effect from 1 January 2026. The ledger here carries the undiscounted rate, and a provider that promises you the two points should be asked to put its SGK standing in writing.

Where the fee sits in the invoice

In Saudi Arabia the state adds 6.0%, so a $500 gap between the cheapest and the dearest published fee is 9% of the monthly invoice. In the UAE at $65,000 the statutory charge is about $156 a month against fees of $199 to $699: the provider costs more than the country does, and by a wide margin. In Jordan at $24,000 the statutory charge is about $285 a month, above a $199 fee and below a $699 one. In Turkey at $30,000 the same $500 is 15% of a $3,293 invoice, but the statutory charge is $594 and the arithmetic reverses — the country costs more than the provider.

That is the practical rule for this region. Where the ledger is an end-of-service accrual, shop the fee hard, because the fee is the cost; where it is social insurance, as in Jordan, Turkey and Israel, the fee matters less than the base it is charged on. Both RemoFirst and Rivermate publish “from” prices that they say vary by country, and the Gulf is exactly the kind of market where a starting price and a quoted price diverge, because the visa work behind each hire is real and is not free. Ask for the country figure, not the headline one.

The costs that are not percentages

Nothing on this page prices a work permit, and in the Gulf the permit is the point. A foreign employee is resident on a sponsorship the legal employer holds, which is why the entity that owns the quota is the entity that employs — and why the entity-versus-provider question in Riyadh, Dubai and Doha is not the question it is in Warsaw. Saudi Arabia grades an establishment by the share of Saudis it employs under Nitaqat, and a first foreign hire into a new entity with no Saudi staff is the hardest case that system produces; article 40 of the Labour Law puts the visa, iqama and quota fees on the employer. Saudi Arabia’s 2024 labour amendments also added a definition of “Assignment” to article 2 — the service of providing a worker to work for a person other than the employer, through an establishment licensed for the purpose — which is the first time Saudi law names the arrangement an employer of record relies on.

The lead times follow from the same fact. Deel quotes 15 days to a first Qatari start and 20 days for both Saudi Arabia and the UAE, against one to five business days in Israel. Mandatory health cover is priced per person in every Gulf state on this page, and repatriation sits on the employer. Jordan prices its permit outright: JOD 350 a year for most non-Jordanian workers under its work-permit fee regulation, as the Ministry of Labour’s guide of 20 August 2026 reproduces it, with engineering roles also needing the Jordan Engineers Association’s prior approval. None of those fall as the salary rises, which is the opposite of how the percentage behaves, so for a senior hire the percentage understates the gap and for a junior one it overstates it.

Every rate above is sourced line by line on the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel and Turkey pages, and the rules behind the ledger are set out in the methodology. Two more countries that a MENA search usually means are priced on this site under Africa rather than here: Egypt at +3.7% and Morocco at +15.1%. To price a different salary, a different basic-pay split or more than one hire, use the cost calculator; to compare the provider route against an entity of your own, the EOR vs own entity instrument takes the same inputs.