What the 2026 GCC Salary Guide Tells Us About Hiring in the Gulf

Every January, Hays Middle East publishes one of the most closely watched benchmarks in regional recruitment — its GCC Salary Guide. This year's edition, released in January 2026, draws on responses from more than 1,600 employers and professionals across the Gulf and covers salary data for close to 400 roles spanning 11 sectors. Taken together, it offers one of the clearest pictures available of where the region's labour market actually stands heading into the new year — and the story it tells is one of a market growing faster than its own talent pipeline can keep up with.

Hiring intent remains strong

The headline figure is hiring intent: 66% of employers across the GCC say they plan to grow their headcount in 2026. Oliver Kowalski, Managing Director at Hays Middle East, framed this as a reflection of the region's broader economic direction — pointing to continued diversification away from oil, sustained fiscal reform, and rising investment in non-oil sectors as the forces keeping Gulf hiring resilient even as parts of the global economy slow down. For a recruitment platform built around GCC opportunity, that's a meaningful signal: the demand side of the market is not just holding steady, it's expanding.

Pay is rising, but satisfaction isn't keeping pace

Strong hiring intent doesn't automatically translate into a satisfied workforce, and the report is candid about that gap. Pay itself is trending upward — 58% of professionals received a salary increase in 2025, up from 51% the year before. Yet 60% of respondents still feel their compensation doesn't reflect the level of responsibility they carry. That disconnect matters for employers thinking about retention: a market where people are getting raises but still feeling underpaid is a market where competitors offering slightly better packages, or clearer growth paths, can pull talent away quickly.

The skills gap is the real bottleneck

Underneath both of those figures sits what may be the report's most consequential finding: 90% of organisations across the GCC say they're currently facing skills gaps. That's not a niche problem confined to a few technical fields — it's close to universal, and it reframes what "hiring" actually means in this market right now. Rather than a simple matter of posting a role and filling a seat, employers are increasingly having to invest directly in training, internal mobility, and career progression just to keep the roles they do fill. Hays' own reading is that companies willing to build genuine skills development and employee experience into their offer, not just their pay scale, are the ones best positioned to compete for scarce talent through 2026.

Nationalisation continues to accelerate

Nationalisation policy continues to be a defining force shaping how that competition plays out. In the UAE, Emiratisation targets for skilled positions have risen to 10%, and 42% of companies say they intend to grow their Emirati headcount this year. Saudi Arabia's numbers are further along still — 93% of employers already employ Saudi nationals, with 75% planning to increase that share further in 2026. What's notable in the report is the tone shift: this is increasingly described not as compliance with a quota, but as a genuine retention and career-development priority, which suggests the trend has staying power well beyond any single policy cycle.

AI fluency is now a baseline expectation

The final thread running through the guide is technology. Two-thirds of professionals in the region — 66% — now say they use AI regularly in their day-to-day work, citing gains in productivity, creativity, and communication as the main benefits. Coming from a report focused primarily on pay and hiring trends, this figure stands out: it suggests that AI fluency has moved past the "emerging skill" stage and is becoming an ordinary expectation of the modern GCC workplace, in much the same way basic digital literacy did a decade ago.

What this means for jobseekers and employers

Read together, these findings sketch a market defined less by scarcity of jobs and more by scarcity of the right people to fill them. For jobseekers, that's a reason for cautious confidence — demand is real, and employers are actively competing for talent rather than the other way around. For employers, it's a reminder that salary alone is no longer the whole conversation; skills investment, career pathing, and nationalisation strategy are now sitting alongside compensation as the levers that actually determine whether an offer gets accepted.

You can explore live GCC vacancies across banking, technology, construction and more on Uplift GCC's vacancies page, or use our CV tools to make sure your profile reflects where the market is actually headed.

Source: Hays Middle East, GCC Salary Guide 2026