Riyadh vs Dubai: What It Actually Costs to Live and Work in Each

Riyadh, for almost every household — by 12 to 21 per cent of gross pay. A senior executive on $420,000 keeps roughly $88,000 more per year in Riyadh than in Dubai. A family of four on $180,000 keeps about $21,000 more; a single professional on $96,000 about $13,500 more. Neither city taxes employment income, so riyadh vs dubai cost of living is decided by rent, schooling, social insurance, healthcare rules and consumption tax — and virtually all of the gap is one line: housing.

Nobody publishes this properly because the sites owning the search term publish gross prices, not net positions. Numbeo and Expatistan aggregate what users say a cappuccino costs. Neither models a SAR400 ($107) monthly levy per dependant, a Dubai employer’s duty to insure the employee but not the family, or the five-year rent freeze capping Riyadh rents since 25 September 2025.

This page is strictly city-level personal and employer cost. The country-level scoreboard — GDP, sovereign wealth, oil, diversification — is Saudi Arabia vs UAE; Kingdom-wide living costs sit in cost of living in Saudi Arabia. This one asks what happens to one household’s money, and one employer’s payroll, in each of two cities.

Last verified: 31 July 2026.

The short version. No personal income tax in either city. Riyadh housing runs at roughly half Dubai’s for equivalent family accommodation and is frozen until September 2030 [S3]. Dubai charges a 5 per cent municipality housing fee on residential rent through the utility bill [S6]. Saudi VAT is 15 per cent against the UAE’s 5 per cent [S15]. Expatriates pay zero Saudi social insurance; UAE expatriates pay a token unemployment premium and accrue gratuity, not a pension [S5][S7]. School fees favour Dubai. Petrol is 44 per cent dearer in the UAE and floats monthly while Saudi pump prices are capped [S11][S12].

Is Riyadh Cheaper Than Dubai?

Yes — and the size of the gap depends almost entirely on how much of the budget goes on rent. The Riyadh vs Dubai cost of living question is, at bottom, a housing question: equivalent family accommodation in Riyadh costs roughly half what it costs in Dubai, before the 5 per cent municipality fee.

The General Authority for Statistics (GASTAT) put Saudi headline inflation at 1.8 per cent year on year in June 2026, with actual rentals for housing up 4.4 per cent — apartments 5.27 per cent, villa floors 6.61 per cent [S1]. Housing was the largest single contributor at 0.7 percentage points: roughly two-fifths of all Saudi inflation that month was rent. That reads like a Riyadh cost problem and is closer to the opposite — rent is rising fastest in a country whose largest city has its rents legally pinned, which tells you where the pressure has gone.

One warning before splicing those figures onto older ones: GASTAT rebased the consumer price index to 2023 = 100 from August 2025, so series across that break are not continuous. Our GCC inflation benchmark carries the regional series.

Riyadh vs Dubai Cost of Living: The Net-Income Table

Three household profiles, identical gross pay in both cities, every line stated. This is a model, not a survey: change an input and the answer changes, which is why every input is visible.

The assumptions

Housing and schooling are frequently employer-paid at senior levels. Where they are, the personal comparison collapses and the employer comparison below is the relevant one.

Profile one: single professional, $96,000 gross

Riyadh advantage $13,488, or 14.1 per cent of gross; the housing-plus-fee gap alone is $7,734. The “travel out” line is not padding — single expatriates in Riyadh buy weekend flights where Dubai residents buy nights out.

Profile two: family of four, $180,000 gross

Riyadh advantage $21,276, or 11.8 per cent of gross. Two lines run against Riyadh: the dependants’ levy costs $3,840 where Dubai charges a few hundred dollars in visa fees, and schooling is $9,879 cheaper in Dubai for two children at an equivalently rated school. Riyadh wins anyway, on a $22,515 housing gap.

Profile three: senior executive, $420,000 gross

Riyadh advantage $88,133, or 21.0 per cent of gross — of which $82,583 is housing and the municipality fee. The counter-intuitive result matters most: the Riyadh advantage grows with seniority, because housing scales with income and housing is where the cities differ most. The assumption that Dubai’s lower VAT makes it cheaper for high earners fails on arithmetic — the 10-point differential would have to apply to $881,000 of taxable consumption a year to erase an $88,000 gap.

Do You Pay Income Tax in Saudi Arabia or the UAE?

No, in both. Neither jurisdiction levies personal income tax on employment income — which is the last useful thing the tax comparison offers, because the deductions that do exist sit elsewhere and diverge sharply.

Social insurance. Saudi Arabia’s General Organization for Social Insurance (GOSI) charges a combined 21.5 per cent on Saudi nationals under the pre-July-2024 system — employee 9.75 per cent (9 per cent pension, 0.75 per cent SANED unemployment) and employer 11.75 per cent (9 per cent pension, 2 per cent occupational hazards, 0.75 per cent SANED). Those enrolled after 3 July 2024 sit on an escalating schedule that reached 23.5 per cent combined from July 2026 [S5]. None of it applies to expatriates. A non-Saudi employee contributes nothing; the employer pays only the 2 per cent occupational hazards premium — which is what makes 11.75 per cent reconcile, and why the occasional 1.5 per cent citation for that branch cannot be right.

The UAE mirror is smaller but not nil. Pension coverage under the General Pension and Social Security Authority applies to Emiratis and other GCC nationals only; expatriates instead pay the mandatory Involuntary Loss of Employment premium, in force since 1 January 2023 — AED5 ($1.36) a month on basic salary of AED16,000 or below, AED10 ($2.72) above it, plus VAT [S7]. In place of a pension they accrue end-of-service gratuity.

Consumption tax is the real gap. Saudi VAT has been 15 per cent since 1 July 2020, tripled from 5 per cent as a pandemic measure and never reversed; UAE VAT has been 5 per cent since 1 January 2018 [S15]. Residential rent is exempt in both, so the differential bites on everything else. See VAT in Saudi Arabia, income tax in Saudi Arabia and the Saudi taxation overview.

Housing: One City Froze Rents, the Other Capped Renewals

Since 25 September 2025 a royal order has fixed rents on residential and commercial property inside Riyadh’s urban area for five years [S3][S4]. It is the most consequential fact for anyone comparing the two cities and it appears in essentially no cost-of-living summary.

The mechanics decide who benefits. Rent is fixed by the property’s status on that date: space already let holds at the rent then in effect; space previously let but now vacant re-lets at its last contract value registered on the Ejar platform; space never let is priced by agreement and then frozen [S3]. Leases Kingdom-wide renew automatically unless either party gives 60 days’ notice, and inside Riyadh a landlord may refuse renewal only for tenant default, a certified structural defect or his own residential use.

Dubai’s instrument differs in kind. Decree No. 43 of 2013 caps increases at renewal on a sliding scale against the Land Department’s rental index: nil where the rent sits within 10 per cent of the index average, then 5, 10, 15 and 20 per cent as it falls further below [S8]. A Smart Rental Index replaced the older calculator from 1 January 2025. Crucially, the cap binds the renewal and not the new letting.

That produces the asymmetry that matters to a mover. In Dubai the sitting tenant is protected and the incomer pays the market: portal data circulating in 2026 puts average new four-bedroom villa contracts near AED377,000 ($102,655) against renewal averages near AED252,000 ($68,618), a mobility premium of roughly 50 per cent. That is broker data, not Land Department data, but the direction follows mechanically from Decree 43. In Riyadh the freeze reaches the re-letting too, so a mover taking previously let space inherits the frozen rent rather than a new-lease price.

So a quoted Riyadh rent for new stock is a new-lease rent, not a market rent, and does not describe what the occupied majority of the city pays. Whether the freeze survives to 25 September 2030 undistorted is the open question: when price cannot ration a tight market, availability does.

The commercial mirror is instructive. Riyadh Grade A office rents ran SAR2,483 ($662) per square metre a year in the strongest submarket in the second quarter of 2026, up 7 per cent, against Dubai prime rents JLL put near AED3,864 ($1,043) — yet Riyadh outranks Dubai on JLL’s global fit-out cost index, the highest-placed Middle East city [S2][S13]. Prime vacancy: Abu Dhabi 0.1 per cent, Riyadh 0.5 per cent as of Q2 2025, Dubai 0.7 per cent. See our Riyadh office market analysis and the GCC housing benchmark.

A transparency asymmetry runs underneath all of it. Dubai publishes contract-derived values through the Land Department’s index; Saudi Arabia registers leases on Ejar but publishes an index, not levels. No official Saudi source states what a Riyadh flat costs in riyals — which is why every Riyadh rent figure here, and on every competing page, is portal data.

How Much Do You Need to Live in Riyadh?

About $38,000 a year as a single professional, and about $135,000 as a family of four with two children in a good international school — before saving anything, on the assumptions above.

Composition matters more than the total. For the single household, rent is 52 per cent of outgoings; for the family, rent and school fees together are 61 per cent, with fees alone larger than rent. So a Riyadh package should be negotiated on housing and schooling allowances, not on base: an employer-funded school place is worth $24,000 at 2026 tier-one fees. See minimum wage in Saudi Arabia for the statutory floor, which covers Saudi nationals and not expatriates.

Schooling and Healthcare: Where the Family Maths Turns

These two lines carry the family comparison, and they point in opposite directions.

Schooling favours Dubai, mainly on supply. Tier-one international schools in Riyadh ran roughly SAR49,000 to SAR118,000 ($13,100 to $31,500) across year groups in 2025-26 at the British International School Riyadh and the American International School Riyadh. Dubai’s range is far wider — from about AED9,000 ($2,450) at budget-curriculum schools to AED97,415 ($26,525) at Dubai College and above AED110,000 at the dearest, with a 2026-27 average near AED42,000 ($11,436) [S9]. At the top the cities are comparable; at the median Dubai is materially cheaper, because it has hundreds of private schools while Riyadh’s international tier is thin. Riyadh’s constraint is availability rather than price: the best-regarded schools are waitlisted.

Dubai’s Knowledge and Human Development Authority publishes every school’s fees and inspection rating, and regulates increases through an Education Cost Index tied to that rating; for 2026-27 it suspended the index and froze fees [S9]. Saudi Arabia has no published fee register. Both cities now administer the price of a major household line — Riyadh on rent, Dubai on school fees — and only one publishes the data. See international schools in Saudi Arabia and the statute that will govern private and foreign schools from January 2027.

Healthcare favours Riyadh, on who is obliged to pay. Both mandate cover. Under Saudi Arabia’s Cooperative Health Insurance Law the employer must insure the expatriate employee and their dependants, as a condition of the residency permit. Dubai’s Health Insurance Law No. 11 of 2013 obliges the employer to insure the employee only; where the plan is not voluntarily extended, the visa sponsor — the employee personally — buys cover for spouse, children and domestic workers [S10]. Abu Dhabi requires employers to cover a spouse and up to three children; Dubai does not. For a family of four that is a transfer of roughly $5,400 a year from employer to household. See health insurance in Saudi Arabia and the GCC healthcare benchmark.

Transport, Utilities, Groceries and the Alcohol Line

Transport. Both cities now have metros and the pricing is close. The Riyadh Metro, fully operating since 2025, charges SAR4 ($1.07) for a two-hour standard pass, SAR20 for three days and SAR140 ($37) for 30 days, covering metro and bus [S16]. The gap opens on cars: Riyadh remains a driving city with a metro layered on top, and Dubai adds Salik road tolls.

Fuel is the sharper difference, and it has a mechanism behind it. Saudi pump prices are capped — 91 octane at SAR2.18 ($0.58) per litre, 95 at SAR2.33 ($0.62), under a cap in place since July 2021 [S11]. UAE prices are set monthly against global benchmarks: Special 95 was AED3.29 ($0.90) in July 2026, 44 per cent above the Saudi grade, and AED3.83 in June — a 14 per cent swing in a month [S12]. The 2026 oil shock passes through to UAE motorists and not to Saudi ones, and no static price table captures that.

Utilities. Saudi residential electricity runs at 18 halalas per kilowatt-hour below 6,000 kWh a month and 30 above, among the cheapest metered tariffs anywhere. Dubai’s DEWA slab tariff is higher, carries a fuel surcharge, and is the collection channel for the 5 per cent Dubai Municipality housing fee — levied on the annual Ejari rent of properties occupied by non-UAE nationals and split across twelve bills [S6]. On a AED200,000 villa that is AED10,000 ($2,723) a year arriving on a utility bill. Riyadh has no equivalent, and it is among the most commonly missed lines in Dubai budgets.

Groceries and dining run on similar underlying prices with two offsetting distortions: Saudi Arabia’s 15 per cent VAT pushes the Riyadh basket up, Dubai’s restaurant market pushes its own up harder.

Alcohol is a genuine cost line and needs stating accurately. Alcohol is prohibited in Saudi Arabia — sale, purchase, possession, consumption, production and import — and has been since 1952. There is no licensed venue, no hotel exemption and no duty-free allowance. The circulated claim that roughly 600 venues would be licensed from 2026 originated in an unsourced trade-blog post in May 2025 and was denied by Saudi sources within days; it was never true, and our page on alcohol in Saudi Arabia traces the claim and the denial. In Dubai alcohol is legally available to licensed and permitted consumers and is a real recurring expense — $3,600 to $12,000 a year in the model against zero in Riyadh.

What It Costs an Employer, Not a Household

The section corporate readers need, and the one no consumer comparison carries.

The Saudi worker levy has been withdrawn where it bit hardest. The per-head monthly charge on foreign workers — the one instrument that demonstrably suppressed expatriate hiring — was suspended for industrial establishments in January 2020 and formally cancelled for licensed industrial facilities on 17 December 2025. What remains is the levy on non-industrial employers, and separately the SAR400 per dependant per month charged to the resident, not the employer [S17]. See Nitaqat and labour law and Saudisation.

Emiratisation is now the more expensive compliance failure. A UAE firm of 50 or more staff missing its 2026 target pays roughly $29,400 a year for every unfilled Emirati role, on an escalator that began at AED6,000 a month in 2023 [S18]. Nitaqat’s penalties are administrative rather than monetary — services get blocked — which is harder to model and potentially costlier mid-expansion. Our GCC localisation benchmark sets both against the region.

The Pillar Two asymmetry inverts the usual framing. The UAE’s free-zone 0 per cent is already floored at 15 per cent for groups with EUR750m or more of consolidated revenue, by its domestic minimum top-up tax under Cabinet Decision No. 142 of 2024. Saudi Arabia has not legislated an equivalent — PwC’s Worldwide Tax Summaries entry for the Kingdom, reviewed 29 July 2026, records none [S14]. So an RHQ’s 0 per cent is not floored at home, while the top-up remains collectable abroad under an income inclusion or undertaxed profits rule. “Dubai is the low-tax option” is no longer true for the largest groups, and neither is “Riyadh’s 0 per cent is safe.” Mechanics in our regional headquarters programme guide; hiring routes in the Saudi vs UAE vs Qatar market entry guide.

One office-cost note corrects a repeated figure: no consultancy publishes a Riyadh service-charge series. The SAR200–500 per square metre numbers on brokerage sites trace to a source found mis-dating JLL data elsewhere. The absence is the finding — two Riyadh buildings cannot be compared on headline rent alone.

Are Salaries Higher in Riyadh or Dubai?

Reported yes for senior roles, but no official series confirms it. Neither government publishes expatriate pay by seniority, so any precise premium is a survey run by firms that also sell recruitment.

What the modelling establishes is the threshold, which is more useful. To match Riyadh on net position a Dubai package must exceed it by the Riyadh advantage: roughly 14 per cent at $96,000, 12 per cent at $180,000 and 21 per cent at $420,000. Below those margins Dubai loses on arithmetic whatever the headline offer says.

The demand evidence is indirect but consistent. Savills recorded foreign occupiers at roughly 90 per cent of Riyadh office enquiries in the second quarter of 2026, clustered in the 500 to 1,000 square metre band — the footprint of a compliance-sized regional office rather than an operating hub [S2]. Whether that demand is bidding enough to clear a 12 to 21 per cent hurdle is not something published data answers.

Is It Worth Moving From Dubai to Riyadh?

On cost, usually yes, provided the package holds. The move buys a materially lower housing bill, a rent freeze running to September 2030, employer-funded family healthcare and capped fuel. It costs a 10-point VAT increase on everything except rent, SAR400 a month per dependant, a thinner and dearer school market at the top, and the absence of alcohol.

The honest verdict: the answer does not flip on income — it flips on what the household spends money on. Because the Riyadh advantage concentrates in housing and housing scales with seniority, the more senior the move the more it favours Riyadh. Dubai wins where housing is small relative to consumption, where the household is childless and highly discretionary — or, the realistic case, where the Dubai offer is simply 12 to 21 per cent larger.

Can you buy a home in either city?

Now, in both, on very different terms. Dubai has permitted foreign freehold in designated areas since 2002, with a 4 per cent Land Department transfer fee and a 10-year Golden Visa attached to AED2m ($545,000) of property. Saudi Arabia’s regime is new: Royal Decree M/14 of 14 July 2025, in force 22 January 2026, Executive Regulation approved 23 June 2026, nine designated Riyadh zones. The non-Saudi disposal fee is capped at 5 per cent by the law but set at 2 per cent by the Executive Regulation for Riyadh, Jeddah, Makkah and Madinah — a combined cost with the 5 per cent real estate transaction tax of about 7 per cent, not the 10 per cent usually quoted; see foreigners buying property in Saudi Arabia. One supply-side instrument has no Dubai equivalent: the Saudi white land tax began charging on 1 January 2026 at 2.5 to 10 per cent of assessed land value.

Family visas, residency and driving licences

Both cities let a resident sponsor a spouse and children against a salary threshold; Saudi Arabia adds the SAR400 monthly levy per dependant and Dubai imposes no equivalent. Long-term residency exists in both: Saudi premium residency at SAR100,000 ($26,667) a year or SAR800,000 ($213,333) once for the permanent grant, against the UAE’s 10-year Golden Visa. Both convert driving licences without a test from approved countries; failing that, both require an expensive local course. Women have been able to drive in Saudi Arabia since 24 June 2018. See the Saudi work visa guide.

Why This Matters for Vision 2030

Riyadh’s cost position is a policy output, not an accident. The regional headquarters rule created the demand; the Riyadh office market absorbed it; rents rose; the state froze them. The freeze is the state conceding that its supply-side tools would not act fast enough — it landed one month after the white-land-tax zone map and three months before the first invoice.

That matters because the Kingdom’s proposition against Dubai is affordability plus procurement access, not lifestyle. If the freeze expires into an under-supplied market in September 2030 and rents reprice five years of suppressed growth at once, the affordability half disappears in one lease cycle. The expatriate population Riyadh depends on is mobile by definition, and its mobility is priced against a city 900 kilometres away that spent 20 years building the alternative. See the Riyadh investment profile.

Risks, Contradictions and Open Questions

Every Riyadh rent figure here is crowd-sourced, and that is structural, not a lapse. Until a Saudi authority publishes rent levels rather than an index, no like-for-like official housing comparison is possible, and every riyadh vs dubai cost of living page claiming one rests on portal listings.

The model is a model. Three profiles cannot represent a labour market, and the results are most sensitive to the housing assumption: hold Dubai rent at the renewal average rather than the new-contract average and the family gap narrows by roughly a third.

The dependants’ levy is reported, not documented. SAR400 per dependant per month is the level reached in July 2020 under the 2017 escalation schedule and no repeal has been published, but exemptions exist — premium residency holders among them — and periodic reports of a review circulate without confirmation.

Employer-paid housing breaks the comparison. Where a package includes accommodation and school fees, the household comparison collapses to consumption and Dubai’s 5 per cent VAT wins — so which city is cheaper depends on a contract term, not a country.

Riyadh’s school market is the weakest-evidenced section here. There is no Saudi equivalent of the KHDA register, no published waitlist data, and the fee figures come from school websites and aggregators.

Saudi Arabia’s Pillar Two position could change without notice. One live page in this corpus describes a Saudi qualified domestic minimum top-up tax from fiscal 2026; independent sources and PwC’s July 2026 review do not support it. If ZATCA legislates one, the asymmetry above reverses.

What to Watch Next

GASTAT’s monthly CPI releases. Whether actual rentals decelerate below June 2026’s 4.4 per cent. If they do not while Riyadh is frozen, the pressure has moved to Jeddah and Dammam.

KHDA’s 2027-28 fee decision. Dubai froze fees for 2026-27 by suspending the Education Cost Index; whether it returns decides whether Dubai’s schooling advantage holds.

Savills’ Q3 2026 Riyadh report, expected October 2026. The clearest read on whether the commercial half of the freeze is suppressing supply.

Any ZATCA announcement of a Saudi DMTT. It would neutralise the RHQ 0 per cent for exactly the largest groups the programme was built to attract.

25 September 2030. The Riyadh freeze expires and every lease pinned at a 2025 rent reprices into whatever market exists then. On current supply, severely.

Related Vision 2030 Context

• Cost of living in Saudi Arabia — the Kingdom-wide picture
• Saudi Arabia vs UAE — the macro scoreboard
• Riyadh office market rents and vacancy — the commercial half of the freeze
• Saudi regional headquarters programme — the rule that created the demand
• Can foreigners buy property in Saudi Arabia? — the 2026 ownership framework
• Saudi white land tax 2026 — the supply-side instrument
• Alcohol in Saudi Arabia in 2026 — the legal position and the false “600 venues” claim
• GCC housing benchmark — regional residential markets
• Saudi Arabia vs UAE vision benchmark — Vision 2030 against We the UAE 2031

Sources

• [S1] Arab News, Saudi Inflation Steady at 1.8% in June, Despite Rising Rents: GASTAT, news report on General Authority for Statistics data, July 2026. https://www.arabnews.com/node/2650967/business-economy
• [S2] Savills, Riyadh Office Market Report — Market in Minutes, Real Estate KSA, Q2 2026, research report, 2026. https://pdf.euro.savills.co.uk/uae/dubai/mim---riyadh-q2-2026-vs2-lr.pdf
• [S3] King & Spalding, Saudi Arabia Introduces Rent Controls and Automatic Lease Renewal, client alert, 2025. https://www.kslaw.com/news-and-insights/saudi-arabia-introduces-rent-controls-and-automatic-lease-renewal
• [S4] Al Arabiya English, Saudi Crown Prince Orders Freeze on Riyadh Rent Hikes for Five Years, news report, 25 September 2025. https://english.alarabiya.net/News/saudi-arabia/2025/09/25/saudi-crown-prince-orders-freeze-on-riyadh-rent-hikes-for-five-years
• [S5] General Organization for Social Insurance (GOSI), Coverages and Contribution Rates, official portal, accessed 31 July 2026. https://www.gosi.gov.sa/GOSIOnline/Coverages&locale=en_US
• [S6] Government of Dubai, Dubai Municipality Housing Fee, official emirate portal, accessed 31 July 2026. https://www.dubai.ae/
• [S7] ILOE Insurance Pool (Dubai Insurance Company), Involuntary Loss of Employment Insurance Scheme, official scheme site, accessed 31 July 2026. https://www.iloe.ae/
• [S8] Government of Dubai Legal Affairs Department, Decree No. (43) of 2013 Determining Rent Increase for Real Property in the Emirate of Dubai, legislation, 2013. https://dlp.dubai.gov.ae/Legislation%20Reference/2013/Decree%20No.%20(43)%20of%202013%20Determining%20Rent%20Increase%20for%20Real%20Property.pdf
• [S9] Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA), Education Directory and School Fees Framework, official regulator data, accessed 31 July 2026. https://web.khda.gov.ae/en/Education-Directory
• [S10] Dubai Health Authority, Health Insurance Law of Dubai — Employer Information Pack, official guidance. https://www.isahd.ae/content/docs/employer%20information%20pack%20v4.4%20011014%20(1).pdf
• [S11] Aramco, Retail Fuels — Current Saudi Arabia Prices, official product page, accessed 31 July 2026. https://www.aramco.com/en/what-we-do/energy-products/retail-fuels
• [S12] Gulf News, UAE Petrol, Diesel Prices for July 2026 Announced, news report on UAE Fuel Price Committee data, 30 June 2026. https://gulfnews.com/business/energy/uae-petrol-diesel-prices-for-july-2026-announced-1.500590426
• [S13] JLL, Global Office Fit-Out Costs Guide 2026, research guide, April 2026 (Q1 2026 data). https://www.jll.com/content/dam/jllcom/en/global/documents/reports/research-reports/26-guides-global-office-fit-out-cost-guide-2026.pdf
• [S14] PwC, Worldwide Tax Summaries — Saudi Arabia, tax reference, reviewed 29 July 2026. https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/saudi-arabia
• [S15] Federal Tax Authority (UAE), Value Added Tax, official regulator, accessed 31 July 2026. https://tax.gov.ae/en/taxes/vat.aspx
• [S16] Argaam, Riyadh Metro Tickets Start From SAR 4, news report on Royal Commission for Riyadh City tariffs. https://www.argaam.com/en/article/articledetail/id/1772486
• [S17] Fragomen, Saudi Arabia: Levy on Dependent Family Members Implemented, immigration alert. https://www.fragomen.com/insights/levy-on-dependent-family-members-implemented.html
• [S18] Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation (UAE), Emiratisation Targets and the Nafis Programme, official portal, accessed 31 July 2026. https://www.mohre.gov.ae/en/home.aspx