GOSI rates in 2026: why two employees on the same salary cost different amounts

Saudi Arabia now runs two parallel GOSI systems, split by when an employee first registered. Here are the current rates for both, the July increases running to 2028, and what it means for payroll.

Since July 2024, Saudi Arabia has operated two GOSI contribution systems at the same time. Which one applies to an employee depends on a single fact: whether their first ever GOSI registration was before or after 3 July 2024. Two Saudi nationals doing the same job on the same salary can therefore cost the employer different amounts, permanently.

This catches out payroll processes that store a single contribution rate as a company setting. The rate is not a property of the company. It is a property of the employee.

The two systems side by side

The rates above apply to Saudi nationals except in the final row. For non-Saudi employees the employer pays 2 percent for occupational hazards and the employee contributes nothing, which is unchanged by the reform.

The rate moves every July

The new system is not a fixed rate. Pension contributions increase by 0.5 percent on both the employer and employee sides each July, and published guidance indicates the employee pension component reaches 11 percent by July 2028. A payroll configuration set once and left alone will be wrong within a year.

For workforce planning this has a compounding effect that is easy to underestimate. Every new Saudi hire from here on joins the escalating system, so the average contribution rate across your Saudi headcount rises over time even if you never give anyone a raise.

The wage ceiling

Contributions are calculated on basic salary plus housing allowance, subject to a ceiling of SAR 45,000 per month. Earnings above that ceiling do not attract additional contributions. Other allowances fall outside the contributory base entirely.

The ceiling matters most at senior levels, where a large proportion of the package sits above it and the marginal contribution cost of a raise falls to zero. It also means that a simple percentage of gross salary is the wrong way to estimate employer cost for senior staff.

What payroll has to get right

1. Store each employee's first GOSI registration date, not just their start date with you, and treat it as the key that selects the rate.
2. Apply the correct contributory base: basic plus housing only, capped at SAR 45,000 per month.
3. Separate Saudi and non-Saudi treatment, since the non-Saudi rate is employer only.
4. Schedule a configuration review before each July, because the new system rate changes on a fixed annual cadence.
5. Keep the rate applied to each run with the run itself, so a historical payslip can be explained against the rules in force at the time.

Planning for a rate that moves

A dual system with an annual escalator is a poor fit for a spreadsheet. The logic depends on a per employee date, a contributory base that differs from gross pay, a ceiling, and a rate table that changes on a known schedule. Each of those is simple in isolation, and the combination is where errors accumulate quietly across a year.

A contribution rate stored as a company setting was a reasonable simplification until July 2024. It is now a source of systematic error.

If you employ Saudi nationals, the useful diagnostic is whether your system can tell you, per employee, which GOSI system applies and why. If that answer lives in someone's knowledge rather than in a field, the July uplift is going to be a manual project every year.

Keep reading