GOSI Deduction Rate 2026: Is It 9.75% or 10.75%?

Two employees at the same company, same job title, both on a basic salary of SAR 12,000 with a SAR 3,000 housing allowance. On the August 2026 payroll, one had SAR 1,462.50 deducted and the other SAR 1,612.50. That is SAR 150 a month apart, both are Saudi nationals, and there is no payroll error.

This is not an edge case. It has been the normal state of affairs in Saudi Arabia since 3 July 2024, because the GOSI deduction rate stopped being a single number belonging to the employer and became an attribute of each individual employee. That is also the source of the contradiction you have probably noticed: every salary calculator online gives a different figure, because most of them ask for your salary and never ask for the one date that actually determines your rate.

The single rule that sets your rate

Which scheme you fall under is decided by the date you were first ever registered with GOSI — not your current contract date, not your employer, and not a company-level setting.

• The existing scheme — anyone with prior contribution periods before 3 July 2024, whether under the Social Insurance Law or the Civil Pension Law. Its rates are frozen and do not change.
• The new scheme — anyone first registered on or after 3 July 2024 with no prior contribution periods. Its rates step up every 1 July until 2028.

Three consequences follow, and spreadsheets get all three wrong:

1. Scheme membership is permanent. Someone who left the workforce and came back two years later keeps their original scheme. Joining a new employer moves nobody onto the new scheme.
2. The rate belongs to the employee, not the establishment. A single August 2026 payroll can legitimately carry three different rate profiles at once.
3. The rate follows the month being calculated, not today's date. Recomputing the March 2026 payroll in November must use March's rate. Any system that reads "the current rate" is wrong the first time it processes a retroactive adjustment.

The actual 2026 rate tables

The moving part is the annuities (pension) branch alone. Occupational hazards (2%, employer only) and SANED unemployment insurance (0.75% each side) have not changed under either scheme.

Existing scheme — unchanged:

New scheme — the step-up to 2028:

Non-Saudi employees are a third, entirely separate case: 2% occupational hazards, employer only. No employee deduction, no annuities, no SANED.

Why every calculator gives you a different number

Search for the deduction rate today and you will find four figures in circulation. Each is "correct" in some context and wrong in yours:

• 9% or 18% — what many explainer pages say. That is the annuities branch alone (9% each side, 18% combined) before SANED is added. It is not what appears on your payslip.
• 9.75% — entirely correct, but only for the existing scheme. Many calculators froze on this number because it was the only one before July 2024.
• 10.75% — correct for the new scheme from 1 July 2026, but it is widely republished described as "the annuities contribution rate". That is a conflation: the annuities rate in this period is 10%, and 10.75% is the employee's total deduction once SANED is added.
• 11% — the level the annuities branch reaches on 1 July 2028. It is nobody's deduction rate today.

The working rule: a rate published without an effective date and without naming the scheme is incomplete information, whatever the source.

The expensive mistake is not the rate — it is the wage you multiply it by

This is the error we see most often in real payrolls. The contributory wage is basic salary plus housing allowance, and nothing else.

Excluded: transport allowance, phone allowance, commissions, bonuses, hardship allowances and overtime. The contributory wage is capped at SAR 45,000 per month; anything above that attracts no contribution at all.

What the transport allowance alone does:

At 9.75%, the correct deduction is SAR 1,462.50 and the wrong one is SAR 1,540.50. The gap is SAR 78 per employee per month — SAR 936 a year per person, and SAR 37,440 a year across a forty-person establishment, wrongly withheld from employees' pay and wrongly loaded onto the employer's share.

The error runs the other way too. A basic of 40,000 plus 10,000 housing gives a 50,000 base, but the calculation stops at 45,000. The existing-scheme deduction is SAR 4,387.50, not SAR 4,875.

Three profiles on one payroll

Same role, same contributory wage of SAR 15,000, August 2026 payroll:

The employer-side gap between the first two is SAR 150 a month, or SAR 1,800 a year for every employee on the new scheme. Every 1 July through 2028 widens it by another half a percentage point. An establishment that hires heavily from recent graduates will be paying 13.75% on a large share of its workforce in 2028 while still paying 11.75% on long-tenured staff — a cost line that belongs in your budget now, not in July.

One number, three systems: Qiwa, Mudad and GOSI

The wage is not a figure you keep to yourself. You declare it in three places, and they get compared against each other:

• The wage registered with GOSI — the basis contributions are calculated on. Changes must be filed through the GOSI portal by the end of the month following the effective date.
• The wage in the employee's Qiwa contract.
• The amount actually transferred through the Wage Protection System.

Mudad compares these sources automatically, and a mismatch is read as a violation rather than a clerical slip. We covered how that comparison engine works and where rejected records are actually born in WPS violations and payroll data reconciliation, and how to wire payroll into the platform in the Mudad integration guide. Before you upload this month's file, run it through the free WPS file validator — it takes seconds and runs entirely in your browser.

If you are building the calculation into your own system rather than maintaining a manual table, we worked through modelling rates as effective-dated data, prorating a mid-month joiner and reconciling payroll against the monthly GOSI statement in Build a GOSI contribution and reconciliation engine in TypeScript.

Frequently asked questions

Does my rate change if I move to a new employer? No. The scheme follows your first registration date and travels with you.

I returned to work after a three-year break — am I on the new scheme? No, as long as you had contribution periods before 3 July 2024.

Is anything deducted from a non-Saudi employee? No. Their cover is the 2% occupational hazards branch, borne entirely by the employer.

My salary is SAR 60,000 — is the whole amount contributory? No, the calculation stops at the SAR 45,000 ceiling.

Do commissions or overtime count towards the base? No. The base is basic salary plus housing allowance only.

What to check next month

Three things cover essentially every error we have seen in this area: that each employee's scheme is stored at employee level rather than company level, that the base is basic plus housing only and capped at 45,000, and that the month's rate is read by that month's date rather than today's. To review the other entitlements built on the same wage definition, the labour rights calculator brings end-of-service, leave and overtime together on one page, and we explained it in the Saudi labour rights calculator guide.

Is the GOSI rate on your payroll calculated per employee, or as one number for the whole establishment? Send us one month of your GOSI statement and your payroll register and we will return them reconciled line by line, with every difference traced to its source. Free diagnostic session, no commitment, via the contact page.