How we work — and why you can trust the numbers
Gratuity calculators in this niche still apply rules the UAE repealed in 2022; we quote and date two of them on gratuity after dismissal. A figure published without the article it comes from cannot be checked. We do the opposite: transparent maths, a named source for every number, and an honest list of what we can and can't tell you.
Can I trust PayslipIQ UAE's numbers? Treat them as careful estimates, never as a binding quote. Every rate is traced to a named public source, listed one by one in the source table, and re-tested by an automated gate of 886 checks before each deploy. Fourteen corrections are published with dates in the corrections log, including the ones that made us look bad. The site earns nothing, so no commercial interest touches a figure. For a number you will act on, confirm it with a qualified adviser first.
What we CAN do
- Estimate your tax-free UAE take-home from your package.
- Calculate gratuity under the mainland UAE Labour Law.
- Apply real UK 2026/27 income tax & NI for comparisons.
- Show the cost-of-living gap between the UK and the UAE.
- Explain the P85, split-year and residence basics.
- Name the exact source behind every rate we use.
What we CANNOT do
- Guarantee the gratuity your employer will actually pay you.
- Replace a qualified tax adviser or solicitor.
- Confirm bespoke free-zone scheme rules without your contract.
- Predict exchange rates or future tax changes.
- Promise you'll be "better off" — that depends on your life.
- Bind your employer, HMRC, MoHRE or the Federal Tax Authority to anything.
Who PayslipIQ UAE is — and who it's for
PayslipIQ UAE is a set of free, privacy-first calculators and plain-English guides for British people moving to, working in, or leaving the United Arab Emirates. We exist for one reason: a UK salary and a UAE package are not the same thing, and the gap between the headline number and the money that actually reaches your account is where most people get caught out. A "tax-free" offer still has to be weighed against rent, schooling, the loss of your UK personal allowance, your end-of-service entitlement, and what you give up by leaving home. We do that arithmetic in the open.
We are part of the wider PayslipIQ family. Its sister sites are payslipiq.co.uk for the UK, payslipiq.com for the United States, payslip-australia.vercel.app for Australia, and payslip-canada.vercel.app for Canada. All four were live when we last checked them on 27 August 2026, and you can check them yourself; we name them rather than asking you to take the claim on trust. The UAE site is the British-expat corner of that family: written in UK English, framed around the questions a UK leaver actually asks, and grounded in both UAE and UK rules so the comparison is fair in both directions.
We are built for the person comparing a Dubai or Abu Dhabi offer against their current UK job; the expat already here who wants to sanity-check their gratuity before they hand in their notice; and the family trying to work out whether the move adds up once the villa, the school fees and the flights home are counted. If you want a number you can understand and a clear list of what still needs professional sign-off, you are in the right place. We are not a walk-in service, a payroll bureau, or a regulated adviser — and we will never pretend to be.
Our methodology
Every calculator on this site uses published rules and figures, not guesses. Below is exactly what we apply and where it comes from. If a number on the page ever disagrees with what your employer, HMRC or the UAE authorities tell you, treat their figure as correct and ask us to explain the difference — we'd rather fix our maths than defend it.
UAE end-of-service gratuity
We follow the UAE Labour Law (Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021) and the UAE Government's published end-of-service rules. One formula applies to every private-sector contract, and gratuity is calculated on your basic salary only — housing, transport and other allowances are excluded, which is the single most common reason a do-it-yourself estimate comes out too high. The entitlement is 21 days of basic pay for each of the first five years of service and 30 days of basic pay for each year thereafter, with the total capped at two years' wage. You must complete at least one full year of continuous service to qualify, and the law requires the settlement to be paid within 14 days of the end of employment. Daily basic pay is taken as monthly basic ÷ 30. The take-home & gratuity calculator applies these rules so you can see your figure broken down year by year.
UAE tax
The UAE levies 0% personal income tax on employment income — that is the headline that makes packages here so attractive, and it is real. Two other taxes exist but rarely touch an employee's payslip: VAT at 5% on most goods and services, which affects your cost of living rather than your salary; and corporate tax at 9% on business profits above AED 375,000, which is relevant to business owners and some self-employed freelancers, not to people on a normal employment contract. If you work in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), note that the DIFC operates the DEWS (DIFC Employee Workplace Savings) scheme in place of the standard gratuity arrangement, so your end-of-service benefit is handled differently — we flag this rather than guessing at scheme-specific figures.
UK comparison
To compare an offer fairly against staying in the UK, we apply HMRC 2026/27 figures (rates and thresholds unchanged from 2025/26): a £12,570 personal allowance (tapered away between £100,000 and £125,140 of income), 20% basic, 40% higher and 45% additional income-tax rates, plus employee National Insurance at 8% between £12,570 and £50,270 and 2% above. Currency conversions use an indicative rate of £1 ≈ AED 4.95 (August 2026). We deliberately call this indicative: it is a snapshot for orientation, not a dealing rate, and you should mentally adjust it as the market moves. The UK-vs-UAE relocation calculator and the decode-my-offer tool both use these figures.
UK residence and the rules that follow you
Leaving the UK does not switch off the UK tax system overnight, so our guides explain the parts that catch expats out: the Statutory Residence Test (SRT) that decides whether you're UK-resident in a given year; split-year treatment, which can divide a year into UK and overseas parts; the P85 form that tells HMRC you've left; voluntary National Insurance (Class 2 and Class 3) to protect your State Pension while abroad; the Non-Resident Landlord Scheme if you let out a UK property; ISAs and how they behave once you're non-resident; pensions and QROPS considerations; and non-resident Capital Gains Tax with its 60-day reporting deadline on UK property disposals. We explain what these are and when they bite — see Moving from the UK and Already Working Here — but the specifics of your own position are exactly the kind of thing to confirm with a UK-qualified accountant.
How are the numbers on this site checked?
Each figure is traced to a named public source by hand, then re-tested by an automated gate of 886 checks that runs before every deploy. A failed check stops the release.
The gate is three scripts kept in the site's own repository. They are development tools and are never served to readers.
| Script | What it proves | Scale |
|---|---|---|
tools/verify.js | One h1 and no heading-level skips on every page. Zero axe-core accessibility violations across all fourteen pages at desktop and mobile. Zero Content-Security-Policy violations. Crawler-versus-user parity on the forty-two result values the four calculators print into the static HTML, so the number a search engine indexes is the number the tool returns. UK income tax and National Insurance against HMRC 2026/27 at eight salaries from £30,000 to £200,000. UAE gratuity against Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 at four service lengths, and identical to the dirham across six timezones. Footer, author and company identity on every page. Titles, meta descriptions, canonicals and JSON-LD. | 866 checks |
tools/test-api.js | The one server-side endpoint on the site: malformed addresses rejected, bot submissions absorbed, rate limit enforced, never cached, and the download still returned when the mail provider is unset. | 20 checks — 20 passed, 0 failed on 28 August 2026 |
tools/check-csp-hashes.mjs | Every inline script's SHA-256 hash matches the Content-Security-Policy, so nothing unhashed can execute in your browser. | Every inline script on every page |
Counts read by running each script on 28 August 2026. The parity check is not theoretical: it caught the homepage publishing a gratuity figure a quarter below the calculator's own answer. That entry is in the corrections log below.
Which source does each figure come from?
Every rate on this site traces to one named public source. The table lists the figure, the value we use, and the authority behind it, so you can check any single number without asking us.
| Figure used on this site | Value | Named primary source |
|---|---|---|
| 21 days' basic pay for each of the first five years of service | Statutory | Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021, Article 51 — uaelegislation.gov.ae |
| 30 days' basic pay for each year after the fifth | Statutory | Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021, Article 51 — uaelegislation.gov.ae |
| Total gratuity capped at two years' wage | Statutory | Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021, Article 51 |
| Minimum one year of continuous service to qualify | Statutory | Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021, Article 51 |
| Final settlement due within 14 days of the end of employment | Statutory | Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 — end-of-service benefits, u.ae |
| Daily basic pay taken as monthly basic salary ÷ 30 | Our convention | Not a statutory figure. It is the divisor this site applies to every gratuity calculation, and we state it rather than hide it. Your employer may use a different one; ask. |
| Personal income tax on employment income | 0% | UAE Federal Tax Authority; u.ae |
| VAT on most goods and services | 5% | UAE Federal Tax Authority |
| Corporate tax on business profits above AED 375,000 | 9% | UAE Federal Tax Authority |
| DEWS replaces standard gratuity inside the DIFC | Scheme | difc.com — DIFC Employee Workplace Savings |
| UK personal allowance, tapered £1 for every £2 of income above £100,000 | £12,570 | HMRC / GOV.UK 2026/27, cross-checked against the House of Commons Library summary of direct tax rates |
| UK basic rate on the first £37,700 of taxable income | 20% | HMRC / GOV.UK 2026/27 |
| UK higher rate above that, additional rate above £125,140 | 40% / 45% | HMRC / GOV.UK 2026/27 |
| Employee National Insurance, £12,570 to £50,270, then above | 8% / 2% | HMRC / GOV.UK 2026/27 |
| Sterling to dirham conversion | £1 ≈ AED 4.95 | Indicative only, August 2026. Not a dealing rate, not sourced from a market feed, and it will drift. |
All sources read on 27 August 2026. Where a source and this site disagree, the source is right, and we want to hear about it.
How often is this site reviewed?
Reviewed in full on 29 August 2026. The next scheduled review is 6 April 2027, the start of the UK tax year. UAE and Federal Tax Authority changes are applied when they are published, not held back to a review date.
| What is reviewed | How often | Next due |
|---|---|---|
| UK income tax, National Insurance, allowances and thresholds | Every UK tax year, cross-checked against the House of Commons Library summary | 6 April 2027 |
| UAE gratuity rules under Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 | On publication of any change, and again at each annual review | 6 April 2027 |
| UAE VAT and corporate tax rates and thresholds | On publication of any change, and again at each annual review | 6 April 2027 |
| Indicative sterling to dirham rate | Quarterly | 27 November 2026 |
| A figure a reader reports as wrong | On report, against the primary source | Continuous |
Every guide also carries its own last-reviewed date at the top of the page. If that date is old, treat the page as old.
What does PayslipIQ UAE guarantee?
No number. Every figure here is an estimate. What we guarantee is the process: a named source for every rate, the formula shown in the open, an automated check before publication, and a dated public correction when we are wrong.
What we do guarantee
- Every rate on this site is traceable to a named public source. They are listed figure by figure in the table above.
- The method is published, not hidden. You can follow the working from the source to the number on your screen.
- No advertiser, employer, recruiter, bank or adviser has ever paid to change a figure here, because nobody pays us at all.
- When a figure is wrong we correct it and record it below, with the date, the page and what changed.
- Nothing you type into a calculator leaves your browser.
What we do not guarantee
- The gratuity you will actually be paid. It depends on the basic-salary figure in your contract, your exact continuous service and your employer's final settlement. We cannot see any of the three.
- Your UK income tax or National Insurance liability. HMRC decides that, on facts we do not hold.
- Your UK residence position. The Statutory Residence Test turns on day counts and ties that only you can evidence.
- Any exchange rate. Ours is indicative, dated August 2026, and is not a dealing rate.
- Free-zone or DIFC outcomes. DIFC employees fall under DEWS, not the mainland formula.
- That you will be better off. That depends on your salary, your family and your housing, and we will not pretend otherwise.
Nothing on this site is a quotation, an offer or a binding calculation. No figure here binds your employer, HMRC, MoHRE or the UAE Federal Tax Authority, and none of it is regulated advice.
How do mistakes get corrected?
Send the page and the figure on WhatsApp or by email. It is checked against the primary source, corrected if we are wrong, and published in the log below with the date, the page and what changed. We do not edit quietly.
- Report it to +44 7944 014111 on WhatsApp, or to hello@payslipiq.co.uk. Name the page and the figure.
- The figure is checked against the primary source it came from, not against another website.
- If we are wrong, the calculator logic is corrected first, then every page that repeats the old figure, then the review date.
- The correction is added to the log below. Where the error would have changed the answer a reader was given, we say so rather than editing silently.
- If we are not wrong, we send you the working so you can see why the number is what it is.
- If your employer, HMRC or a UAE authority tells you something different from this site, treat their figure as correct and tell us.
Corrections log
Fourteen corrections have been published since the site launched. Every one is listed, including the ones that made us look bad.
| Date | Page | What was wrong | What we did |
|---|---|---|---|
| 29 August 2026 | /disclaimer, /terms, /working-in-uae and /moving-from-uk | The entry dated 28 August 2026 below reports that the incomplete vetted-professionals sweep had been corrected, and names only the homepage. The offer to introduce readers to independent professionals was still live on four further pages, worded differently each time so a search for the original phrase missed it: once on /disclaimer, twice on /terms, twice on /working-in-uae and once on /moving-from-uk. There is still no adviser panel, no vetting process and no referral arrangement, so the claim was untrue everywhere it appeared. This is the second time a sweep of this claim has been reported as complete while it was not. | Removed from all of those pages. Neither the 27 August nor the 28 August entry below has been amended: both are left exactly as published, because a corrections log that quietly edits its own past entries is worth nothing. The lesson recorded here is that the first two sweeps searched for a phrase rather than for the promise, which is why re-worded copies of it survived twice. |
| 29 August 2026 | Homepage | The sample offer panel on the homepage mirrors /decode-job-offer at that tool’s own default inputs, and tagged the end-of-service gratuity row green. Running the decoder’s own compute() at those inputs returns amber: the gratuity of AED 23,520 is 0.84 months of the AED 28,000 package, and the decoder’s rule tags anything under one month amber. The homepage was therefore publishing a calmer verdict than the tool it was previewing. The generation comment beside the panel also mis-stated the housing rule as red above a AED 3,000 shortfall, where the code uses a coverage ratio below 0.6. The entry dated 13 August 2026 below says the crawler-versus-user parity check was added to the deploy gate “so it cannot recur silently”; that check compares result elements by id on the calculator pages, and the homepage panel is hand-written static markup with no ids, so it was never in scope and the contradiction did recur silently. | The row is now tagged amber, matching the tool. The generation comment now states the real thresholds — gratuity measured in months of total package, housing as a coverage ratio — so the next regeneration is not misled, and records that the figures were produced by executing compute() rather than by hand. |
| 28 August 2026 | Homepage | The entry dated 27 August 2026 below records that the vetted-professionals introduction claim was removed. It was removed from this page and from /about only. The homepage still told readers we could point them to vetted advisers on WhatsApp, both in the visible FAQ answer and in the FAQPage structured data behind it. There is no adviser panel and no vetting process, so the claim was untrue and the correction that reported it fixed was itself incomplete. | Removed from the homepage FAQ answer and from the matching FAQPage JSON-LD. The 27 August entry below is left exactly as it was published rather than quietly amended, because a corrections log that edits itself is worth nothing. |
| 28 August 2026 | Every page | The entry dated 27 August 2026 below left the registration number in the footer of every page, qualified only by the words “data protection registration”. A registration number in a company footer still reads as the company’s own, and ZC214216 is held by an individual rather than by GoldPaid Ltd. | The sentence was removed from the footer of every page. The full explanation of who holds the registration, and of who is responsible for this site, stays on the privacy notice and the terms page, where there is room to state it properly. |
| 27 August 2026 | Every page | The footer and every JSON-LD graph gave the registered office as “Unit 217, Bristol Business Centre, 179 Whiteladies Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 2AG”. The Companies House register for company 17382540 records no unit number. | Corrected sitewide to the register's own wording: 179 Whiteladies Road, Clifton, Bristol, England, BS8 2AG. |
| 27 August 2026 | Every page | The footer read “ICO registration ZC214216”, which reads as though GoldPaid Ltd holds the registration. It is held in the name of a natural person, not the company. | Now reads “Data protection registration ZC214216, Information Commissioner's Office”, which claims only what is true. |
| 27 August 2026 | /trust and /about | This page said we may introduce readers to independent vetted professionals. The about page said the site earns nothing. Both could not be true, and there is no adviser panel, referral arrangement or commercial link anywhere on the site. | The introduction claim was removed. Both pages now say the same thing: the site earns nothing today, and will disclose it before that changes. |
| 15 August 2026 | Every page | One person carried two job titles at the same time. The Person schema said Founder and Editor; seventeen places of visible text still used older wording that named him a director instead. | Standardised to Founder and Editor in prose and in the Person schema. The deploy gate now fails on any other title. |
| 14 August 2026 | /salary-tax-calculator | The gratuity figure depended on the reader's timezone. On a five-year calculation at AED 22,500 basic it overstated the answer by AED 3 in London, AED 10 in Dubai, AED 31 in Auckland and AED 51 in New York — always overstating, on the page that tells someone what they are owed. | Dates are now parsed and formatted in local time throughout. The gate asserts an identical gratuity across six timezones. |
| 13 August 2026 | /salary-tax-calculator | The page repeated the widespread claim that dismissal forfeits gratuity. That rule was Articles 120(e) and 139(1) of Federal Law No. 8 of 1980, repealed in 2022. Under the 2021 law, dismissal under Article 44 does not forfeit the entitlement. | Corrected, with the current position set out against the repealed one. |
| 13 August 2026 | Site-wide | Twenty-three result values written into the static HTML disagreed with what the calculators compute from their own defaults. The gratuity a search engine indexed was AED 23,520 where the tool returns AED 31,500. The relocation page told crawlers “£14,200 better off” where the tool says £6,773. | All twenty-three corrected, and the crawler-versus-user parity check was added to the deploy gate so it cannot recur silently. |
| 13 August 2026 | /decode-job-offer | The offer decoder ignored the package field entirely. AED 5,000 and AED 200,000 both scored 52 out of 100. | The package is now scored on rent to income, and an empty package returns no verdict at all. |
| 13 August 2026 | UK comparison tools | The UK higher-rate band was too narrow, overstating UK tax by up to £628.50 — which flattered every “better off in the UAE” answer. | Band width corrected and now tested at eight boundary salaries from £30,000 to £200,000 before every deploy. |
| 13 August 2026 | /trust | This page named payslipiq.ca as a live sister site. The domain was unregistered. | The false claim was removed. The four sister sites named on this page were re-tested on 27 August 2026 and all four responded. |
The log starts at the site's first published version. Corrections made before a page was ever public are not listed, because nobody was misled by them.
What we will not do
Trust is mostly a list of things you refuse to do, so here is ours.
- No fake reviews or invented numbers. We don't publish star ratings we haven't earned, testimonials we didn't receive, or user counts we can't stand behind.
- No guaranteed figures, ever. We do not issue a "final" gratuity, tax or settlement figure, and nothing on this site binds your employer, HMRC, MoHRE or the UAE Federal Tax Authority. The real number depends on your contract, your exact continuous service and your employer's settlement, none of which we can see.
- No "we beat everyone" claims. We won't tell you that moving will make you better off, or that one path always wins. That depends on your salary, your family, your housing and your plans, and we say so.
- No regulated advice. We are an educational publisher. Nothing here is financial, tax, legal or immigration advice, and we don't hold ourselves out as authorised to give it.
- No selling your data. We don't sell, rent or trade the figures or details you enter. See the privacy section below.
Privacy and your data
The calculators on this site run entirely in your browser. The salary, package and personal figures you type in are processed on your own device to produce your result — they are not stored on our servers, not sold, and not shared. When you close the tab, that data is gone. We may record anonymous, aggregate usage events (for example, "a calculator was used") to understand which tools help people and where to improve, but those events do not contain the numbers you entered or anything that identifies you. If you contact us on WhatsApp, that conversation is of course visible to us so we can answer you — but you control what you choose to share there.
How does PayslipIQ UAE make money?
It does not. There is no advertising, no sponsorship, no affiliate link, no referral fee and no charge for any tool. The site has no payment page and no commercial outbound link on any of its fourteen pages.
You can test that claim rather than believe it. Read the links on any page here. You will find UAE and UK government sources, the four sister sites in the PayslipIQ network, and a WhatsApp number. Nothing else. Nobody pays us to change a figure because nobody pays us at all.
We do not run a panel of advisers and we take no introduction fee. If you ask us who to speak to, we will tell you what kind of professional your question needs and leave the choice to you.
We intend to earn from this site eventually. The honest position is that we have not started. When income does arrive it will be one of two things: a paid product we build ourselves, or a disclosed commercial arrangement. Either way we will say so here and on the about page before it begins, name the other party, and disclose it on every page it touches. We will not start earning quietly, and no arrangement will change a number.
Checked 28 August 2026 against the source of all fourteen pages: no payment provider, no affiliate parameter, no sponsored link, no advertising code.
The limits of our estimates
Please read our figures as well-sourced estimates, not promises. Gratuity depends on whether your pay is correctly split into basic and allowances, on your exact continuous service, and on your employer's final settlement. Take-home depends on your real package structure, any benefits in kind, and your personal circumstances. The UK comparison depends on rates and thresholds that change with each Budget, and the exchange rate we use is indicative and will drift. Free-zone and DIFC arrangements (such as DEWS) can differ from the mainland rules our calculators assume. We can't predict future tax changes, currency moves, or how your specific employer interprets a clause in your contract. Where the answer turns on those details, the honest position is that you need it checked against your own paperwork.
How do I get an answer I can act on?
Take our estimate to someone accountable for the advice. UK tax and residence questions go to a UK-qualified accountant. UAE employment, gratuity and contract questions go to a qualified UAE legal or tax adviser.
For gratuity there is a free step first. Ask your employer, in writing, for the exact basic-salary figure it will use in your final settlement, and check it against the basic figure in your contract. That single number drives the whole calculation. If the employer will not give it, or the settlement is wrong or late, MoHRE runs a labour complaint service for private-sector employees.
We do not appoint, recommend or refer advisers, and we receive nothing if you engage one. Ask us on WhatsApp what kind of professional your question needs and we will tell you. The advice, and the responsibility for it, sits with whoever you appoint.
Disclaimer
Everything on PayslipIQ UAE is provided for general education and information only. It is not financial, tax, legal or immigration advice, and must not be relied upon as such. Tax rules, exchange rates and employer practices change. Figures are estimates and may differ from your actual entitlement or liability. Before making decisions, obtain advice from a suitably qualified UK accountant, UAE legal or tax adviser, or regulated financial adviser. PayslipIQ UAE accepts no liability for actions taken based on this content.
Privacy: our calculators run entirely in your browser. We don't store the salary or package figures you enter, and we don't share them. Anonymous, aggregate usage events (e.g. "a calculator was used") may be recorded to improve the tools.
Questions about how we work
Is PayslipIQ UAE an official government tool?
Are you authorised to give financial, tax or legal advice?
Where do your figures actually come from?
What do you do with the salary figures I enter?
How do you make money if the tools are free?
Can I rely on your gratuity figure for my final settlement?
Questions about how we got a number?
Ask us directly. We'll show our working — that's the whole point.
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