GOSI, the General Organization for Social Insurance, is Saudi Arabia's social security authority. Every private employer must register its employees with GOSI and pay monthly contributions covering pensions, unemployment insurance, and occupational hazards. What you owe depends on who you employ: coverage for Saudi nationals is far broader than for expats.
For Saudi employees, contributions fund the pension scheme and the SANED unemployment program. The pension component runs at 9% of wage from the employer and 9% from the employee, with the smaller SANED percentage shared on top. For expat employees, the employer pays only occupational hazards cover, 2% of wage, and the employee pays nothing.
Contributions are calculated on the registered wage, meaning basic salary plus housing, and the wage subject to contributions is capped at SAR 45,000 a month. A reform that took effect in July 2024 also created updated rules for Saudis newly entering the workforce, with contribution rates and retirement ages that adjust gradually over the coming years, so the exact percentage for a new Saudi hire now depends on when their coverage began.
New employees must be registered in the month they join, and contributions fall due monthly, with late payment attracting fines calculated on the amount owed. Deregistering leavers matters just as much: keep a departed employee on your file and you keep paying for them.
GOSI is not a silo. The wage you register there is cross-checked against your Wage Protection System files and your Qiwa contracts, and mismatches surface automatically. Registering a lower wage to save a few hundred riyals in contributions is one of the fastest ways to earn an inspection.
The registered wage also feeds Nitaqat: a Saudi employee counts fully toward your Saudization score only if their GOSI-registered wage is at least SAR 4,000 a month. Underreport and you lose the very point you hired for.
Running Saudi payroll from abroad? Masdar files GOSI, WPS, and Qiwa as one job.
For a foreign company running its first Saudi payroll, GOSI is usually the second system it meets after the bank account, and the first one it gets wrong. In an EOR arrangement, registration, monthly filings, and the wage-consistency checks across GOSI, WPS, and Qiwa are the provider's routine work.
No. Expats are covered for occupational hazards only, at the employer's cost. Their retirement provision is the end-of-service gratuity instead, which is one reason gratuity disputes carry such weight in the region.
Basic salary plus housing allowance, as registered with GOSI, up to the SAR 45,000 monthly cap. Other allowances sit outside the contributory wage.
Saudi Arabia's unemployment insurance program for nationals, funded by a small contribution split between employer and employee, and paid out to eligible Saudis who lose their jobs. It has its own entry: SANED.
Yes, routinely. Qiwa contract data, WPS salary files, and GOSI wages are matched against each other. Consistency across all three is the compliance test, not any one filing alone.