Total employee cost calculator
What an employee costs a month and a year, with the end-of-service and annual leave provisions separated out — the two costs that are real, owed, and not cash. Every other line on this page is a figure you enter, and the result marks which is which rather than presenting your budget as though the law had set it.
Enter the wage and your own costs and the total appears here — monthly and annual, with the end-of-service and leave provisions separated out and every line marked as either statutory or yours.
Questions this raises
- What does an employee really cost in the UAE?
- The wage plus two statutory provisions and whatever the employer spends on visas, insurance, flights and recruitment. The provisions are the ones usually left out: end-of-service at 21 days of basic wage a year, which is about 5.8% of basic, and annual leave at 30 calendar days a year, which is about 8.2% of the wage.
- Is there an employer social security contribution in the UAE?
- Not for foreign employees. UAE and GCC nationals are enrolled in the pension and social security scheme, which does carry an employer contribution — this calculator does not cover it, and says so rather than showing a zero.
- Why include a gratuity provision if nobody has left?
- Because it is earned as service accrues, not when somebody resigns. It is owed whether or not it has been set aside, and a company that has never provisioned for it discovers the liability all at once — usually in a year when several long-serving people leave together.
- Is annual leave really a cost if no money moves?
- Yes, on both counts. Thirty days a year are paid and not worked, which is capacity you are buying and not receiving, and any balance the employee still holds when they leave becomes cash on the settlement.
- Where do the visa and insurance figures come from?
- From you. Nothing legislates them — a visa costs what the authority charges for your activity and a premium costs what your insurer quotes — so those boxes start empty rather than prefilled with a plausible-looking number that would end up in your budget under our name.
One employee is arithmetic; ninety is a liability
The gratuity provision on one salary is a rounding error. Across a workforce, with everybody at a different point in their service and some of them past the five-year band break, it is a balance-sheet number that nobody can reconstruct in a spreadsheet. Real Workforce carries it per employee from the salary history, so the figure is calculated rather than estimated.
Related: the gratuity calculator works one employee’s end-of-service in full, with the bands shown separately.