Saudi Arabia Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

NATIONALITY IS THE PRIMARY SWITCH, AND IT IS BINARY. A non-Saudi private-sector employee has NO GOSI payroll deduction whatsoever — employee share 0.00% across every branch. The employer alone pays 2% occupational hazards. Both the annuities branch (Art. 14(1): "All Saudi employees… All Saudi workers") and SANED (Art. 43(1): "all Saudi workers working in the Kingdom") are restricted to Saudi nationals; only occupational hazards (Art. 28) reaches "All employees who work in the Kingdom" and "All workers who work in the Kingdom". An engine that applies a 9.75%/10.75% employee deduction to expatriates — the majority of the private-sector workforce — is catastrophically wrong. Conversely, an engine that skips the employer 2% for expatriates understates employer cost. TWO PARALLEL SAUDI SYSTEMS RUN INDEFINITELY, KEYED ON THE EMPLOYEE NOT THE DATE. From 3 July 2024 there are two annuities rates in simultaneous operation. A Saudi whose first-ever contribution period (under the Social Insurance Law OR the Civil Pension Law) started on or after 3 July 2024 is on the new, escalating scheme; anyone with a prior unexhausted period, or already pensioned, stays on the frozen legacy 9%+9% forever (Clause Second). This is a permanent per-employee attribute captured at hire and carried for the whole career — it cannot be derived from the current hire date, because a 2015 entrant who changed jobs in 2025 is still legacy. Note the trap that periods deemed lapsed still count as prior periods (Clause Second(1)), while a Saudi who previously took a lump-sum settlement for a prior period is treated as having no prior period and DOES fall under the new system. Combined current rates: legacy Saudi = 9.75% employee / 11.75% employer (21.5% total); new-system Saudi = 10.75% employee / 12.75% employer (23.5% total); non-Saudi = 0.00% employee / 2.00% employer. TWO ENACTING INSTRUMENTS THAT ARE NOT THE SAME TEXT — THE SHARPEST CITATION TRAP IN THIS RECORD. The Law is promulgated by Royal Decree No. M/273 dated 26/12/1445H, which approves Council of Ministers Resolution No. 1022 of the same date. The published compilation contains BOTH, and their Clause Third differs. The Resolution's Clause Third runs to seven paragraphs; the Decree's runs to five. Clause Tenth of the Resolution states expressly that a Royal Decree was drafted to provide for Clauses First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth and Tenth of the Resolution and Clause Third(1, 2, 3, 4 and 7). Consequences: (a) the phased annuities rate is in BOTH, at Clause Third(1)(a)-(e) and Third(2), so citing the Royal Decree for annuities is correct; (b) the operative 1.5% SANED rate is at Clause Third(6) of the RESOLUTION ONLY, and citing the Royal Decree for it is wrong — the Decree's Clause Third does not mention unemployment insurance at all; (c) Resolution Clause Third(5) (the 180-month period for Art. 16(2)) is likewise Resolution-only, and Resolution Third(7) is renumbered as Decree Third(5). CONSOLIDATED-TEXT TRAP, TWICE OVER, IN THE SAME STATUTE. (1) Art. 15(1) reads "The annuities branch contribution shall be 22 percent… the employer shall bear 11 percent and the contributor shall bear 11 percent." That 22% is NOT operative and will not be until 1 July 2028. (2) Art. 44(1) reads "Contributions to the unemployment insurance branch shall be 2 percent… the employer shall bear 1 percent and the contributor shall bear 1 percent." Also not operative: Resolution 1022 Clause Third(6) sets SANED at 1.5% (0.75/0.75) on the Law's effective date. Anyone who reads the articles of the Law without reading the enacting clauses will overstate the Saudi employee deduction by 1.25pp and the employer by 1.25pp today. The articles are the ceiling authority; the enacting clauses are the operative rate — both must be reported together. CEILING IS MONTHLY AND AGGREGATE ACROSS EMPLOYERS, NOT ANNUAL. Art. 8(2) fixes SAR 45,000 per MONTH. There is no annual ceiling and no year-to-date accumulator: the cap is applied afresh each month, so a bonus month is capped in that month and is not recouped later. Do not synthesise SAR 540,000/year and run an annual-aggregation model. Worse, Executive Regulation Art. 19 applies the SAR 45,000 as a limit on the SUM of contributory wages across ALL employers of a multi-employer contributor, with each employer's contributory wage reduced proportionally — a genuine multi-employer proration most engines do not implement. The ceiling is not indexed automatically; Art. 8(3) requires a Council of Ministers resolution on a Board proposal after review of wage levels and actuarial studies, so it does not move annually the way most OECD ceilings do. SAR 45,000 has been the figure under both the 1421H and the 1445H laws. CEILING VS FLOOR VS AGE-50 CAP VS SAUDIZATION THRESHOLD — FOUR DIFFERENT NUMBERS, ROUTINELY CONFLATED. (i) SAR 45,000 caps the base. (ii) Branch FLOORS differ: SAR 1,500/month for annuities and only SAR 400/month for occupational hazards, both GOSI's published figures originating in the legacy regime — so a low-paid expatriate's 2% is floored at SAR 400 while a low-paid legacy Saudi's pension base is floored at SAR 1,500. (iii) A separate ANTI-SPIKING rule caps the base's growth, not its level: GOSI publishes that in every insurance year the increase in the contributory wage of a contributor who has reached age 50 may not exceed 10% of the wage registered in the previous insurance year, with anything above that not subject to contribution deduction. This is a legacy-regime rule (it is not restated in the 1445H Executive Regulation) and it changes the computed contribution for older incumbents. (iv) Entirely distinct is the SAR 4,000/month Nitaqat Saudization figure, which determines whether a Saudi counts as a full head for quota purposes — NOT a contribution floor and NOT a ceiling. The two do touch at exactly one point: GOSI has announced that an employer may raise a Saudi over 50 earning under SAR 4,000 straight to SAR 4,000 without being bound by the 10% cap. Treating SAR 4,000 as a general contribution floor remains a classic Saudi payroll error. CONTRIBUTORY WAGE IS A NARROW, DEFINED BASE — NOT GROSS PAY, BUT NOT ALWAYS BASIC-PLUS-HOUSING EITHER. Executive Regulation Art. 17: basic wage or salary - with commission, percentage of sales and percentage of profits deemed of the same status (Executive Regulation Art. 17(a)) - plus cash housing allowance at the agreed value, or in-kind housing valued at two months' basic wage (cash at agreed value, or in-kind housing valued at two months' basic wage). Transport allowance, overtime, bonuses, mobile and other allowances are OUTSIDE the base for a worker on a fixed monthly wage. BUT Executive Regulation Art. 18(2) provides that for a worker paid by the piece, by a share of profits or by a percentage of sales, the monthly contributory wage is the monthly average of his actual earnings over his actual period of work in the preceding year (for a new entrant, the average wage of a comparable worker in the same or a similar establishment). Commission is therefore inside the base for commission-paid staff — a blanket "commission is excluded" rule understates contributions for sales populations. Art. 20 confirms contributions are computed on the gross contributory wage before any deduction for taxes, fees, debts, instalments, administrative penalties or fines. Art. 21 bars correction of the contributory wage after the wage-reporting deadline in Art. 6 has passed. DEDUCTIBILITY IS MOOT, NOT FALSE. Saudi Arabia levies no personal income tax on employment income for any individual, Saudi or expatriate — ZATCA operates no wage-withholding regime and there is no PAYE. GOSI is therefore the only statutory payroll deduction, and net pay for an expatriate equals gross contractual pay less the (nil) GOSI. tax_deductible is returned null throughout because there is no income tax computation for the contribution to be deductible against — a structural absence, not an unknown, and it must not be rendered to a buyer as "not deductible". REMITTANCE MECHANICS. Art. 9(1): the employer pays the full amount — his own and the contributor's share — and bears sole responsibility to GOSI, recovering the employee share by deduction each time he pays the wage. Late payment attracts a fine of 2% of the due contribution per month or part month (Art. 9(3)) — that 2% is a PENALTY and is easily mistaken in extraction for the 2% occupational-hazards rate; they are unrelated numbers. Art. 9(4), and Executive Regulation Art. 35 as cited in GOSI's own guide, suspend the accrual of qualifying contribution periods and the insurance cover itself if contributions go unpaid, so arrears damage the employee's entitlement, not just the employer's balance; GOSI suspends after six months of unpaid contributions and requires payment within two months of a reactivation request. SCOPE EXCLUSIONS. Art. 6 leaves coverage of several categories to Board decision rather than applying the branches automatically: diplomatic and international mission staff; agricultural, forestry and herding workers; seafarers and fishermen; domestic workers; non-Saudis on temporary or seasonal visas of 60 days or less; home-working craftsmen; and sports club players and coaches. Domestic workers in particular are a large population that a general "Saudi Arabia employer cost" figure should not be applied to. Art. 5 allows mandatory products to be extended by Council of Ministers resolution to self-employed Saudis and to non-Saudi workers beyond occupational hazards — watch this as the route by which expatriates could one day acquire a real deduction. GCC nationals working in Saudi Arabia are handled under the GCC Unified Insurance Protection Extension and are insured under their HOME state's scheme, not at Saudi rates — see refused. NON-GOSI EMPLOYER COSTS. Two compulsory employer obligations sit outside GOSI and are returned as nulls-and-explain branches rather than omitted: the MHRSD expatriate labour levy and CHI cooperative health insurance. Neither is a wage-percentage contribution; both are material to employer cost per expatriate head and dwarf the 2% occupational-hazards contribution. SUB-NATIONAL VARIATION: none — GOSI contribution rates, the SAR 45,000 monthly ceiling, the SAR 1,500 and SAR 400 floors and the age-50 10% wage-increase cap are uniform across all thirteen regions of the Kingdom. There is no regional, sectoral or employer-risk-rated variation in the occupational-hazards rate (unlike most accident-insurance schemes), and no city- or zone-specific rate. Free zones and special economic zones (e.g. KAEC, NEOM, the Special Integrated Logistics Zone) do not carry different GOSI rates. The only establishment-level variation anywhere in this record is outside GOSI: the MHRSD expatriate labour levy is tiered on whether non-Saudis outnumber Saudis in the establishment, and CHI health-insurance premiums are commercially priced per head. WHAT WE DO NOT PUT A NUMBER ON: EXPATRIATE LABOUR LEVY AMOUNT. No number is put on the MHRSD expatriate labour levy. The SAR 800/month (expatriates outnumber Saudis) / SAR 700/month (they do not) tiering, the SAR 100/year work-permit fee, the SAR 400/month dependant fee and the sectoral exemptions appear consistently across professional and press sources, but no MHRSD or Umm al-Qura primary instrument could be reached: www.hrsd.gov.sa returned HTTP 403, my.gov.sa returned HTTP 403 and istitlaa.ncc.gov.sa returned ECONNREFUSED. The branch is returned with rate_employer null rather than omitted, because silently dropping it would materially understate Saudi employer cost for expatriate headcount. COOPERATIVE HEALTH INSURANCE PREMIUM. No rate, percentage, floor or ceiling is given, and this is the correct answer rather than a gap: the obligation is to purchase a policy meeting CHI's Unified Policy minimum benefits, and premiums are commercially priced per insured head by licensed insurers according to age, gender, medical history and network tier. There is no national premium. Separately, the legal detail of the obligation itself is unverified — chi.gov.sa returned ECONNREFUSED (185.169.35.38:443) on every path attempted, and the Saudi consultation platform hosting CHI's employer-obligation policy also refused connection — so the Cooperative Health Insurance Law's Royal Decree number and its compulsory scope rest on secondary sources and no article number is cited. ARTICLE NUMBERS OF THE LEGACY LAW AND ITS REGULATION. No article numbers are cited for the Social Insurance Law, Royal Decree No. M/33 dated 3/9/1421H, or for its Registration and Contributions Regulation, which still govern the majority of Saudi employees. laws.boe.gov.sa (Bureau of Experts at the Council of Ministers) refused connection again this session (ECONNREFUSED 66.9.136.215:443). The legacy VALUES themselves — 18% annuities split 9%/9%, 2% occupational hazards employer-only, 1.5% SANED split 0.75%/0.75%, the SAR 45,000 ceiling, the SAR 1,500 and SAR 400 floors and the age-50 10% wage-increase cap — ARE verified on GOSI's own published pages, the administering authority's own rate material; but the section numbers that fix them will not be invented. OCCUPATIONAL-HAZARDS PENAL LOADING. No rate is given for the increased occupational-hazards contribution under Art. 29(1) for employers who refuse to comply with safety and health instructions. The Law caps it at not more than double (so at most 4%), but the actual figure and duration are set case by case by decision of the GOSI Board of Directors. There is no national rate to publish. GCC NATIONALS. No rates are given for GCC nationals employed in Saudi Arabia. Under the GCC Unified Law for Extending Insurance Protection, a GCC national working in another member state is insured under his HOME country's scheme, with the Saudi employer paying the employer share that scheme requires. The applicable rates, ceilings and floors are therefore Bahraini, Kuwaiti, Omani, Qatari or Emirati — not Saudi — and vary by the worker's nationality. The mirror case is a Saudi working elsewhere in the GCC, who stays on the Saudi legacy terms (18%, 9%+9%, SAR 1,500-45,000, age-50 10% cap) per GOSI's own extension guide. Publishing a single Saudi number for the inbound GCC population would be wrong. NEW-SYSTEM WAGE FLOOR. No numeric floor is asserted for the new system. Art. 8(1) requires only that the contribution basis not be less than "the minimum wage or salary determined by the competent authority", and neither the Law nor the Executive Regulation states a figure. The SAR 1,500 and SAR 400 floors returned are GOSI's published figures originating in the legacy regime and are flagged as such. EXECUTIVE REGULATION PROVENANCE. Articles 17, 18(2), 19, 20 and 21 of the Executive Regulation were read on a legal-publisher mirror (qanoonsa.com), not on a government gazette, because the Saudi government hosts that would carry it refused this fetcher. Article 35 is cited only because GOSI's own guide cites it by number. Their content is corroborated by GOSI's published material where it overlaps, but the mirror is the reason this record does not claim gazette-level provenance for the Regulation. ALREADY LEGISLATED, NOT YET IN FORCE: ANNUITIES, NEW-SYSTEM SAUDI CONTRIBUTORS ONLY — dates now proven, not inferred. GOSI's own guide "الزيادة التدريجية لنسب الاشتراكات وتعليق مدد الاشتراك" (https://awareness.gosi.gov.sa/pdf/Contributions.pdf) carries a dated table: 3 July 2024 — no increase — 9% contributor / 9% employer; 1 July 2025 — +0.5% — 9.5% / 9.5%; 1 July 2026 — +0.5% — 10% / 10% (current); 1 July 2027 — +0.5% — 10.5% / 10.5%; 1 July 2028 — +0.5% — 11% / 11%, the terminal rate matching Art. 15(1). All-in new-system totals therefore become 11.25% employee / 13.25% employer from 1 July 2027 and 11.75% employee / 14.25% employer from 1 July 2028. Re-verify by 30 June 2027. The legacy 9%+9% scheme has NO scheduled change and does not step up. SANED has no scheduled change, but Art. 44(2) permits variation between 0.5% and 2% by Council of Ministers resolution on a Board proposal, always split equally, so it can move without primary legislation — as it did on 1 January 2022 when it fell from 2% to 1.5%. The SAR 45,000 ceiling has no scheduled uprating; Art. 8(3) requires a Council of Ministers resolution based on a review of wage levels and actuarial studies, and Art. 13(1) mandates an actuarial study of each branch at least every three years, which is the trigger to watch. The occupational-hazards 2% likewise changes only by Council of Ministers resolution (Art. 29(2)). Separately, Clause Third(4) defers the commencement of the occupational-hazards branch for public-sector civil employees to a future Council of Ministers resolution not identified as issued at the time of research; this does not affect private-sector workers. Watch also Art. 5, the standing power to extend mandatory branches to self-employed Saudis and to non-Saudis beyond occupational hazards. SOURCING CAVEATS: Every rate, split, ceiling, floor and step-up date in this record now rests on either the promulgated statute and its two enacting instruments (read verbatim from the official Bureau of Experts English translation compilation) or on GOSI's own published pages. The three soft spots are stated in refused: the Executive Regulation was read on a legal-publisher mirror rather than a gazette; the legacy 1421H law's article numbers are not cited because the Bureau of Experts site refuses connection; and the two non-GOSI employer obligations (MHRSD expatriate levy, CHI health insurance) could not be reached on any government host and are returned with null rates. Saudi government domains other than gosi.gov.sa and misa.gov.sa were systematically unreachable from this session (HTTP 403 or ECONNREFUSED), which is a network condition, not evidence that the material does not exist. Researched against primary instruments, then attacked by an independent adversarial verification pass which REFUTED the first version on a value. The corrections that pass proved from the instruments have been applied (2026-08-08). Employee and employer shares are stated separately: the employee figure is what leaves the payslip, the employer figure is cost of employment and is not a deduction.

Get it programmatically

curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/sa/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/sa/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://asiaref.dev/provenance/sa/social-contributions

Other Saudi Arabia series: SAMA Repo Rate · Value Added Tax (standard rate) · Minimum wage for Saudi nationals (Saudization / Nitaqat) · Public holidays · Consumer Price Index inflation (year-on-year) · Corporate income tax rate · Personal income tax