Gulf salary data by role and city
Bands by experience, the skills that carry a real premium, and the employers hiring for each role. Built from live listings rather than self reported surveys, last updated 10 September 2026.
How these bands were built
Most salary pages on the internet are one number with a national average attached to it. That number is close to useless to a graduate, because it hides the two things that decide an offer: which experience band the employer is hiring into, and which specific skills move a candidate from the bottom of that band to the top of it. These pages are built the other way around. Each role and city combination is broken into five experience bands, from fresh graduate to lead, and each band carries a floor, a ceiling and a median rather than a single figure.
The figures are triangulated across Glassdoor city salary pages, September 2026, GulfTalent salary reports, September 2026, Payscale Saudi Arabia and UAE, Careery Job Scout, live listings, 90 days to 10 September 2026. Where published survey data and live listings disagree, the live listings settle it, because a listing is an offer someone is currently prepared to make rather than a salary someone remembered a year later. On top of the bands, each page lists the skills that carry a measurable monthly premium in that city, quoted as the difference against an otherwise identical CV in the same band. Some skills that appear on every job description are worth nothing extra and are marked as baseline, which is more useful than pretending everything on a requirements list is a lever.
Every figure is monthly, because that is how Gulf offers are quoted. Saudi offers state a basic salary with housing and transport added on top, while UAE offers are normally a single all inclusive monthly figure. The pages keep those two conventions separate and say which one applies, so a Riyadh number and a Dubai number are never silently compared as though they measured the same thing.
What is covered, and what is deliberately missing
The cluster currently covers Data Analyst and Software Engineer roles across Riyadh, Jeddah, Dubai, plus country level comparison pages for Saudi Arabia and the UAE. That is 6 city pages and 4 country comparisons, no more. A page is published only when Job Scout returns high salary confidence with at least 25 live listings and three named employers in the sample window.
Everything below that bar is absent on purpose. It would be trivial to generate a page for every job title in every Gulf city and fill the gaps with a national average and a plausible looking range, and that is exactly what makes most salary pages unusable: the reader cannot tell which numbers came from a real sample and which were interpolated. Here, if a combination is missing, it is missing because the evidence was too thin to publish, and new pages appear only when the underlying sample clears the bar. The same rule applies to the employer tables: an employer is named only where the listing sample actually contained roles from that employer.
Read a band as a position, not as a promise. It tells you roughly where an offer for your level should land and which specific gap is holding you at the bottom of it. Once you know the gap, CV and Job Match shows how your CV reads against a real posting for that role, and Course Path turns the skills listed on each page into courses with a cost and a length attached. That is the whole arc: CV, to target job, to skill gap, to course.
City pages
- Data Analyst in RiyadhMid level median SAR 14,000 a month
- Data Analyst in JeddahMid level median SAR 12,500 a month
- Data Analyst in DubaiMid level median AED 13,800 a month
- Software Engineer in RiyadhMid level median SAR 19,000 a month
- Software Engineer in JeddahMid level median SAR 17,500 a month
- Software Engineer in DubaiMid level median AED 17,500 a month
Country comparisons
Common questions
Are these figures monthly or annual?
Monthly. Gulf offers are quoted per month, so every figure on every page in this cluster is a monthly figure, and the bands are quoted the same way across cities so they can be compared directly.
Do the numbers include housing and transport allowances?
It depends on the country, and the pages say so individually. Saudi offers quote a basic salary first, with housing and transport added on top, so the figure in the hand is meaningfully higher than the basic. UAE offers are normally quoted as one all inclusive monthly figure with housing and transport already folded in. Never compare a UAE all inclusive number directly against a Saudi basic.
Where does the data come from?
Figures are triangulated across Glassdoor city salary pages, September 2026, GulfTalent salary reports, September 2026, Payscale Saudi Arabia and UAE, Careery Job Scout, live listings, 90 days to 10 September 2026. No single source is treated as authoritative: a band is published where the sources agree closely enough to be useful, and the live listing sample is what settles a disagreement.
Why is my city or my role not on this list?
Because it did not clear the publication bar. A page is published only where Job Scout returns high salary confidence with at least 25 live listings and three named employers in the sample window. Combinations below that bar are deliberately absent rather than estimated, because a salary page built on eight listings is worse than no page at all.
How often is this updated?
The current data set was built from the 90 days to 10 September 2026, and that is the date carried in the page metadata. A refresh replaces the whole sample rather than nudging individual numbers, so the bands always describe one coherent window of the market.
How should I use a band when negotiating?
Anchor on the band for the level you are being hired at, not on your last salary. Quoting your previous pay hands the employer the number for free. Name the level your experience places you in, name the figure at the top of that band, and let them counter downwards. If a premium skill listed on the role page is missing from your CV, you are negotiating at the bottom of the band by default.