Every owner asks "what will this cost me?" before every hire — and the honest answer is always more than the monthly salary. Between end-of-service gratuity quietly accruing from day one, the employment visa and labour card, and mandatory medical insurance, a hire's real annual cost usually runs well above salary × 12. This calculator adds all of it up, so you can budget for the whole picture, not just the headline number.
True Cost of Employment Calculator
See the real annual cost of a hire, beyond the salary.
One hire is easy to budget. A growing team isn't.
This calculator is built for sizing up one hire at a time. The moment you're running this math across five, twenty, or fifty employees — with salaries, tenures, and renewal dates all different — it stops being a spreadsheet you can keep in your head. That's exactly the kind of ongoing payroll and provisioning work our Accounting & Bookkeeping service handles for growing UAE teams.
Frequently asked questions
Beyond the monthly salary itself: the end-of-service gratuity accruing against their tenure every year, the employment visa and labour card (issued for 2-3 years but worth budgeting as an annual cost), and mandatory or expected medical insurance. Larger employers may also have MOHRE-related fees and other overheads on top of these.
Gratuity is a real liability building up from day one of employment, not a cost that appears out of nowhere the day someone resigns. Treating it as part of this year's cost of employing someone — not just a future bill — gives a much more accurate picture of what a hire is actually costing you right now.
A Mainland employment visa typically runs around AED 5,500 covering the establishment card share, entry permit, status change, medical test, Emirates ID, and stamping — valid for around 2 years, so roughly AED 2,750/year amortized. Free zone visas run AED 4,000–6,000 depending on the authority, similarly amortized over their validity period.
In Dubai, employer-provided health insurance is a legal requirement for every employee and their dependents. Other emirates increasingly expect it too, and it's needed either way to complete visa issuance. A basic plan typically runs AED 700–1,500 per year per employee, though this varies by insurer, coverage tier, and emirate.
No — it's a snapshot based on the current basic monthly salary you enter. If a salary changes, or you want to model a raise or bonus scenario, simply re-run the numbers with the updated figure.