Are you getting enough Salary?

Recently I read an interesting story on salary levels in the GCC region starting from a CEO all the way to the executive secretary. Saudi Arabia tops the list in terms of salary offer followed by Qatar. Kuwait and UAE rank in the middle while Oman and Bahrain rank lower.

Preferred work destinations for expat based on salary

Asian Expat	Arab Expat	Western Expat
Saudi Arabia	Saudi Arabia	Saudi Arabia
Qatar	Qatar	UAE
Kuwait	UAE	Qatar
UAE	Kuwait	Kuwait
Oman	Bahrain	Bahrain
Bahrain	Oman	Oman

The distribution of salaries across expat groups is interesting. Overall, Arab expats receive 25% more salary than Asian expats while Western expat receive 33% more than Asian expat and 7.5% more than Arab expat. However, sharp differences are noticed in individual job category. For eg., in Construction Project manager category, a Western expat will cost 65% more than Asian!

Asian Expat experienced pay increase in Bahrain while their salaries dropped in UAE. However, relative to Arab and Western expats, they experienced considerably lower increases across the board. For the Arab Expat, Qatar was superb with 30% salary increase in 2011 while UAE was flat

Western expats experienced the best gains especially in Qatar (27%) and Saudi Arabia (24%). The Arab spring must have increased the "risk premium" which seems more for expats than for Asians!

Interesting statistics to benchmark!