GOSI Contributions in Saudi Arabia: 2026 Rates

The short answer

As at September 2026 there are four answers, not one, and which applies depends on the employee.

All of these are percentages of the contributory wage, which is not the same as the salary you pay.

Two age conditions sit behind the Saudi rows. GOSI's Contributor FAQ makes the annuities branch compulsory for a worker who is under 60 upon initial coverage, and SANED applies where the contributor's age at the date the system applied to them was under 59. A Saudi employee aged 60 or over does not carry the full 11.75% / 9.75%.

The errors we fix are rarely arithmetic. They are classification errors — the right percentage applied to the wrong cohort, or the right percentage applied to the wrong wage.

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Two laws, not one

This page cites two instruments, and the distinction matters before any article number below will make sense.

• The 1421H law — the Social Insurance Law issued by Royal Decree M/33 of 3/9/1421H. Still in force for existing subscribers.
• The 1445H law — the Social Insurance Law issued by Royal Decree M/273 of 26/12/1445H, effective 3 July 2024, governing those with no prior contribution periods.

The 1445H law renumbers everything. The substance of the 2% occupational hazards rate, the power to double it, the 2%-per-month delay fine and the SAR 45,000 ceiling survives in both — but the article numbers do not, and a reader on the new system who follows an old citation lands on the wrong instrument. Where the two diverge, both numbers are given below.

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Who must be registered, and when

Both registration deadlines come from GOSI's Employer FAQ:

• The establishment must register within two weeks of the date its head office meets the requirements of coverage. Registration is through GOSI Online; GOSI states the GOSI Online Account Registration Form is printed, approved by the authorised person — the establishment supervisor — and submitted to a GOSI office before the account is opened.
• Each worker must be notified within the first fifteen days of the month immediately following the month in which the worker joined. The same fifteen-day window applies when a worker leaves, and GOSI's registration page names the leaver notification as Form No. (3/insurance).

Adding, excluding and transferring contributors is then transacted inside the establishment's own GOSI Online account. That screen is the first place in the process where the cohort and nationality questions below have to be answered correctly, because the rate follows from them.

One practical trap for non-Saudi hires: GOSI states that non-Saudi subscribers cannot be added retroactively. They are added with the current month date or the current day date. If you miss the window on an expatriate hire you cannot backdate the entry — the entry carries the current date and the gap is not recoverable.

Failing to register, or submitting incorrect data, is not a rounding issue, and the fine depends on which law governs the establishment:

Both ceilings multiply by the number of subscribers the violation concerned. A registration failure across thirty employees is not one fine.

You will see "SAR 5,000 per unregistered employee" quoted on several English payroll blogs. That was the original figure in Article 62 of the 1421H law, raised to SAR 10,000 by Royal Decree M/55 of 10/5/1438H. Those blogs are quoting a superseded text — and SAR 10,000, the corrected figure, is still only the lower of the two ceilings now in force.

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The three branches, and what each one is for

GOSI is not a single deduction. It is three separate branches, and the reason the headline percentages look arbitrary is that they are sums.

Add them up and the existing-system Saudi figures stop looking arbitrary:

• Employer: 9% + 2% + 0.75% = 11.75%
• Employee: 9% + 0.75% = 9.75%

Only the pension component moves between the two systems. Occupational hazards stays at 2% and SANED at 0.75% each side in both.

Annuities. Article 4 of the 1421H law applies the pensions branch mandatorily to Saudi workers under 60 at initial coverage. Non-Saudis are outside it, other than GCC nationals — see below.

Occupational Hazards. Article 4 of the 1421H law applies this branch to all workers without distinction as to sex or nationality. Article 18(1) sets it at 2% of the subscriber's wage, payable by the employer; Article 29(1) of the 1445H law restates the same 2%, يتحملها صاحب العمل.

SANED. Article 3 of the Unemployment Insurance Law, Royal Decree M/18 of 12/3/1435H, applies it mandatorily to Saudi workers, with the worker under 59 when it starts applying and participation suspended at 60. Article 7 originally set 2%, split 1% each side; as amended by Royal Decree M/160 of 11/11/1441H the rate may sit anywhere between 0.5% and 2%, set by decision and split equally. It currently sits at 1.5% — 0.75% on the employer and 0.75% on the beneficiary — with effect from 1 January 2022, announced by GOSI itself.

The 2% that can become 4%

The rate is not fixed at 2% in all circumstances. GOSI's Contributor FAQ states that the occupational hazards rate "may be increased to double the amount for employers who refuse to abide by the instructions issued by the competent authorities." Both laws carry the power: Article 18 of the 1421H law, and Article 29(1) of the 1445H law, which permits an increase بما لا يتجاوز الضعف by decision of the Board, for a defined period, for employers who refuse to comply with instructions on subscriber safety and health.

For a workforce that is largely non-Saudi, occupational hazards is your entire GOSI bill, so a doubling is not a marginal increase — it is the whole line. If your sites receive safety directions from the competent authority, the doubling belongs in your risk register alongside the direction itself.

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Saudi and non-Saudi employees

For a non-Saudi, non-GCC employee, the employer pays 2% of the contributory wage and the employee pays nothing. No pension deduction, no unemployment deduction.

This is not a discount — it reflects that the expatriate employee is not accruing a Saudi pension or unemployment entitlement. Under the scheme, a non-Saudi injured worker receives "a lump sum compensation, for once" rather than an ongoing monthly benefit.

What the difference costs, on one package: take SAR 10,000 basic plus SAR 2,500 housing paid in cash, a contributory wage of SAR 12,500.

Moving one seat on that package from an expatriate to a Saudi hired today costs SAR 1,343.75 a month, SAR 16,125 a year, per head, before any salary change — the line item to model when you cost a Saudization push, separate from the Nitaqat band consequences themselves. And the two Saudi tracks differ from each other by SAR 125 a month, SAR 1,500 a year per head, which is what getting the cohort wrong costs, per employee, per year.

The 2% also has a wage floor, and it is not the same floor as the pension floor. See below.

GCC nationals are on neither track

A Kuwaiti, Bahraini, Emirati, Omani or Qatari employee is non-Saudi and is not on the 2%-only expatriate treatment. Under the Unified Law of Insurance Protection Extension to GCC Member States Citizens, approved by Royal Decree M/63 of 26/11/1426H, GOSI states that the GCC worker "enjoys all the benefits provided by the Annuities Branch of the Social Insurance Scheme, as being enjoyed by the Saudi worker in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia." There is an employee-side deduction, and the employer carries a pension share.

The rates are set by the worker's home state, not by Saudi Arabia, so there is no single GCC percentage to publish and we are not going to invent a blended one. GOSI maintains a separate guide per nationality. Taking the Emirati guide as the worked case: the employer deducts 5% of the contributory wage from the worker and pays its own share as prescribed by the work-location state's law, not exceeding the rate prescribed by the worker's home state — 15% is the referenced UAE requirement, with the worker covering the difference where the work-location rate is lower. The contributory wage is defined differently too: basic salary plus housing, social and cost-of-living allowances, with a floor and ceiling in dirhams. Work-injury cover follows the work-location state, so the Saudi 2% occupational hazards line still applies.

Read the guide for the nationality you are employing before you set the payroll line. The contributory-wage rules in the next section are the Saudi ones and do not describe a GCC contributor.

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The 2024 reform: two tracks, one payroll

The 1445H law took effect 3 July 2024. It did not replace the old system. It created a second one alongside it.

Who is on the new track: only those with no contribution periods before 3 July 2024 — new entrants to the labour market, civilian, in both the public and private sectors. Anyone who had contributed to the civil retirement system or the social insurance system before that date stays on the previous system, at the previous rates. The test is the employee's contribution history anywhere, not their start date with you.

The new track's pension contribution starts at 9% each side and rises by 0.5 percentage points per side per year, from the second year of implementation to the fifth, reaching 11% each side — a cumulative 2-point increase.

How that table is built matters. The shape of the schedule — the cohort, the 0.5-point annual step from the second year to the fifth, the cumulative 2 points, the 9%-to-11% range — is what Argaam and Lockton report. The 1 July step date is GOSI's own, in the Saudi Press Agency release announcing that the provisions began applying on Tuesday 1 July 2025. The employer and employee totals in the middle columns are arithmetic on the components: pension, plus 2% occupational hazards for the employer, plus 0.75% SANED each side. No single source publishes that year-by-year split, and we are not going to imply one does.

Three things follow that are easy to get wrong.

In year one the two tracks cost exactly the same. Both were 11.75% / 9.75% until 30 June 2025. That is why the divergence was invisible for a full year, and why some payroll configurations set up in 2024 were never revisited. They were correct when built and silently wrong from July 2025.

A single flat rate is now wrong for part of every mixed workforce. Publishing "GOSI is 11.75% employer" is wrong for everyone on the new track. Publishing "12.75%" is wrong for everyone on the old one. The test is mechanical: if your payroll system holds the Saudi GOSI rate in a single field, it cannot be right for both cohorts. Check whether that rate is an employee-level attribute or a company-level constant. If it is a constant, that is the defect.

On the step date, sources differ. GOSI's own announcement dated the increase to 1 July. Lockton's summary describes the rates increasing "by 0.5% each year from 3 July from 2025 to 2028", tracking the law's anniversary rather than the payroll month. In practice the July payroll month is the one that changes. We have used 1 July above because that is what GOSI announced.

Note also that the retirement-age changes under M/273 reach a wider cohort than the contribution-rate changes do. Lockton puts the line at 50 Hijri years — 48.5 Gregorian — or 20 years of contributions on 3 July 2024: those at or above it are unaffected by the reform, and those below face a graduated increase in statutory retirement age while remaining on the old contribution rates. Do not read the rate table as a map of who the reform touched.

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What counts as the contributory wage

The percentage is the easy part. The base is where the errors live.

The contributory wage is the basic wage plus housing allowance paid in cash. Where housing is provided in kind rather than in cash, GOSI values it at the equivalent of two months' basic salary.

And one inclusion that is routinely missed. GOSI's Employer FAQ states that "the commission, the percentage of the sales value, and the percentage of the profit are considered as basic wage notwithstanding that such amount may be paid alone or in addition to a fixed wage." Commission is in. A payroll that excludes it under-contributes for every commissioned salesperson, and produces exactly the GOSI-against-file mismatch the wage protection section below warns about.

It is the gross amount before any deduction for taxes, fees, debts, instalments or disciplinary penalties. Excluded are allowances granted for the nature, risk or place of the work, overtime, grants, annual bonuses and benefits in kind.

In practice: basic in, housing paid in cash in, commission and sales or profit percentages in; transport allowance out, mobile allowance out, overtime out, annual bonus out.

The floor and the ceiling

GOSI's Contributor FAQ states three limits, not one:

"the minimum wage under the Annuities Branch is S.R. 1,500, and S.R. 400 for Occupational Hazard Branch, while the maximum wage is S.R. 45,000"

What this means operationally: if a Saudi employee's basic-plus-housing falls below SAR 1,500, contributions are still calculated on SAR 1,500. The SAR 400 floor governs a low-wage non-Saudi workforce — at SAR 300 basic with no housing, you still contribute on SAR 400. And on a SAR 60,000 package you contribute on SAR 45,000, not SAR 60,000, so the effective employer cost as a percentage of total payroll falls as salaries rise above the cap.

One caveat on the two floors, and it is the same caveat this page applies to the FAQ elsewhere. Those riyal figures are published on the page describing the existing system. The ceiling is safe either way — Article 8(2) of the 1445H law restates SAR 45,000 outright. The floors are not restated: Article 8(1) requires contributions to be calculated on no less than الحد الأدنى للأجور أو الرواتب الذي تحدده الجهة المختصة, the minimum wage set by the competent authority, with no riyal figure in the law. We could not find a separately published new-system floor. See "What is not published", below.

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Monthly filing and what late payment costs

Contributions are due, and must be paid, within the first fifteen days of the month immediately following the month for which they are due. That fifteen-day window is GOSI's own operative deadline, stated on its Employer FAQ. Its statutory basis under the 1421H law is Article 19(5); the 1445H law does not carry the figure, because Article 9(1) requires payment خلال المهلة التي تحددها اللائحة — within the period set by the implementing regulation.

Miss it and both laws impose a delay fine of 2% of the contribution due, for each month of delay: Article 19(5) of the 1421H law, and Article 9(3) of the 1445H law (غرامة قدرها (2 %) من الاشتراك المستحق عن كل شهر تأخير).

Two things limit the exposure, and only one of them is automatic:

• Automatic: delay fines stop accruing once they reach 100% of the contributions they relate to. The exposure is capped at doubling the original liability — not unbounded, but not trivial either. You can model this.
• Discretionary: an employer who is cooperative with GOSI may be exempted from all delay fines for justifiable reasons where the delay is not more than ten days. Beyond that, the Governor may exempt a cooperative employer up to 50%, and a higher rate requires a decision of the GOSI Board. You cannot model this, and you cannot plan around it.

We could not establish from any GOSI page we opened which service or office the exemption is requested through, or what the establishment has to evidence. That gap is recorded below rather than filled with a guess.

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How GOSI interacts with WPS and Qiwa

GOSI is not a standalone filing. The wage you register with GOSI is one of three wage records the government cross-reads, and they are expected to agree.

• Qiwa holds the electronic employment contract, including the contracted wage and the job title.
• GOSI holds the contributory wage — basic, housing in cash, commission.
• Mudad carries the Wage Protection System file showing what you actually paid, to which IBAN.

The allowed submission period for wage protection files was reduced from 60 days to 30 days with effect from 1 March 2025, announced by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development on 3 February 2025; the ministry stated that 91% of establishments were already submitting within 30 days of the due date. The due date itself, the two processing stages and the documented causes of a bounced file are set out on our wage protection system and Mudad page, which is sourced to Mudad's own FAQ — this page does not need to own them.

What this page is the authority on is the wage record underneath. A salary change has to be made in all three places in the same cycle. Changing the Qiwa contract without updating the GOSI registered wage produces a file that reconciles against neither — and so does a contributory wage that leaves commission out. That mismatch is our operational experience of what bounces, not a published rule.

The downstream consequence of unpaid contributions is not confined to GOSI. GOSI's certificate service is built to show the reasons a certificate cannot be issued, which tells you the block exists — but we could not locate a published schedule of which other government renewals a missing GOSI certificate stops. The MHRSD side of that question, where the suspension list is published, is on our government relations portals and deadlines page, and cleaning up an establishment file that has already been blocked is government relations work.

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What is not published

Five things we looked for and could not find on an official source. We would rather say so than estimate.

• No published tariff inside the penalty ceilings. Article 62 of the 1421H law and Article 59 of the 1445H law set maximums, not prices. We could not locate a schedule setting the amount within the ceiling for a given violation, so treat SAR 10,000 or SAR 50,000 as the worst case per worker, not the expected assessment.
• No published route for the delay-fine exemption. GOSI states the ten-day exemption, the Governor's 50% and the Board's authority above it. No page we opened says which service the request goes through or what evidence it takes.
• No published minimum contributory wage under the 1445H law. Article 8(1) points at the competent authority's minimum wage rather than a riyal figure. SAR 1,500 and SAR 400 are the published existing-system floors; no new-system equivalents appear to have been issued.
• No published dependency schedule for the GOSI certificate. That an unclean certificate blocks things is visible in the service itself. Which renewals, in what order, is not set out anywhere we could find.
• No official English page rendering the live contribution rates. GOSI's contribution section is a service catalogue; it lists procedures and does not state rates in a form that can be cited or archived. The readable official English source is the GOSI FAQ, linked below, which describes the existing system — which is why the M/273 schedule above is sourced separately.

One caution on the GOSI FAQ itself: it states the Annuities branch as 18% (9% + 9%). That is correct for the existing system and incorrect for anyone on the new track. The FAQ has not been restructured around the two tracks. Where an English summary and the Arabic law text diverge we have followed the Arabic text at laws.boe.gov.sa. Two such divergences are flagged above: the FAQ's 18% annuities figure, and the step date.

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Frequently asked questions

What are the GOSI employer and employee contribution rates in Saudi Arabia in 2026? For a Saudi national with contribution periods before 3 July 2024: employer 11.75%, employee 9.75%. For a Saudi national with no contribution periods before that date: employer 12.75%, employee 10.75%, effective 1 July 2026 and running to 30 June 2027. For a non-Saudi, non-GCC employee: employer 2%, employee nil. GCC nationals are on none of these — see below.

What does an employer pay to GOSI for a non-Saudi employee? For a non-Saudi who is not a GCC national, 2% of the contributory wage, for Occupational Hazards only, paid entirely by the employer, with no employee-side deduction. For a GCC national, the annuities treatment follows the worker's home-state scheme under the Unified Law of Insurance Protection Extension and there is an employee-side deduction; the Saudi 2% occupational hazards line still applies.

An employee has transferred to us from another Saudi employer. Which track are they on? It turns on whether they hold contribution periods anywhere before 3 July 2024 — under either the civil retirement system or the social insurance system — not on their start date with you and not on when you registered them. A Saudi who contributed in 2015, left the workforce and is re-registered by you in 2025 has prior periods and stays on 11.75% / 9.75%.

Is commission included in the GOSI contributory wage? Yes. GOSI's Employer FAQ treats commission, the percentage of the sales value and the percentage of the profit as basic wage, whether paid alone or on top of a fixed wage. The contributory wage is basic plus housing allowance paid in cash plus those elements; housing provided in kind is valued at two months' basic salary. Transport allowance, overtime, grants and annual bonuses are excluded.

We have had a Saudi employee on the wrong track since July 2025. What is the exposure? The shortfall is contributions that fell due and were not paid, so the 2% per month delay fine attaches, capped once the fines reach 100% of the contributions concerned. We could not locate a published GOSI procedure specific to correcting a cohort misclassification, and the ten-day cooperative exemption will not reach a fourteen-month error.

What is the GOSI wage ceiling, and is there a minimum? The maximum contributory wage is SAR 45,000 per month, restated in Article 8(2) of the 1445H law. There are two published minimums, both from the existing-system FAQ: SAR 1,500 under the Annuities branch and SAR 400 under Occupational Hazards. The 1445H law expresses the floor by reference to the competent authority's minimum wage instead of a riyal figure.

What are the GOSI deadlines each month? Everything is counted in fifteens. A joiner is notified within the first fifteen days of the month after they joined; a leaver in the same window, on Form No. (3/insurance); and the month's contributions are paid in that same window. Late payment attracts 2% of the contribution due for each month of delay. Non-Saudi subscribers cannot be added retroactively.

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What SCPL does about it

The practical output of this page is a short audit: confirm your payroll system holds two Saudi tracks and not one, and holds the track as an employee-level attribute; confirm any GCC nationals are on their own home-state scheme rather than the 2% line; confirm your contributory wage is basic plus cash housing plus commission and nothing else; confirm nobody sits below SAR 1,500 or SAR 400 in the calculation; confirm the GOSI wage, the Qiwa contract and the Mudad file agree.

SCPL runs that filing cycle for companies operating in Saudi Arabia as part of GOSI, WPS and Mudad compliance and payroll outsourcing, and the cohort audit itself sits inside HR outsourcing where the employee records live. We act on your government portals as your authorised agent; you remain the legal employer of your staff throughout. SCPL does not hold a licence for internal labour outsourcing (تعهيد القوى العاملة) under MHRSD Ministerial Resolution 60339 and does not supply labour — that is a separately licensed activity, and the distinction is set out here. Head office Dammam, second office Riyadh.

If you want a second read on which of your employees sit on which track, get in touch.

Related reading: end of service benefits and how they are calculated, and what payroll outsourcing actually covers for an SME.

If you are an employee checking your own deduction rather than an employer running payroll, the rates above apply to you, but GOSI is the right place to query your own record. SCPL works with companies, not individuals. Our own vacancies are at /careers.

This page summarises published regulation as read on 20 September 2026 and is not legal or tax advice. Rates step up again on 1 July 2027. Verify against GOSI's current position before acting.

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Official sources

• GOSI — Contributor FAQ — branch rates, age conditions, the SAR 1,500 / SAR 400 / SAR 45,000 limits, the doubling, the non-Saudi lump sum.
• GOSI — Employer FAQ — the contributory wage including commission, the registration and payment windows, the delay-fine cap and exemptions, no retroactive addition of non-Saudis.
• GOSI — Registration — GOSI Online account opening, joiner and leaver notification, Form No. (3/insurance).
• GOSI — The Insurance Protection Extension and the Emirati Workers guide — M/63 of 26/11/1426H, GCC annuities treatment, the 5% deduction and the employer share rule.
• GOSI — SANED rate reduction to 1.5% — 0.75% each side from 1 January 2022.
• Social Insurance Law 1421H (M/33), Bureau of Experts — Articles 4, 18, 19 and 62, the last as amended by M/55 of 10/5/1438H.
• Social Insurance Law 1445H (M/273), Bureau of Experts — Article 8 (base and ceiling), Article 9 (payment period and delay fine), Article 29 (occupational hazards and the doubling), Article 59 (SAR 50,000, multiplied per subscriber).
• Unemployment Insurance Law, Bureau of Experts — M/18 of 12/3/1435H, Article 3 and Article 7 as amended by M/160 of 11/11/1441H.
• Saudi Press Agency — GOSI begins applying the announced provisions from 1 July 2025 — the step date, in GOSI's own voice.
• Argaam — GOSI to increase pension contributions for new employees — the cohort and the 0.5% annual step. It publishes no year-by-year employer/employee split.
• Lockton — Saudi Arabia introduces new social insurance reforms — the "from 3 July" reading, and the retirement-age threshold.
• MHRSD — wage protection file upload period reduced to 30 days — announced 3 February 2025, effective 1 March 2025, with the 91% figure.