Blog · 12 October 2026
What a nanny actually costs in the UAE, beyond the salary
The salary is the part everybody budgets for. The rest is the part that surprises people, and a good deal of what is written about it online is out of date or was never right. Every number below is followed by the government page it came from, and where no government page publishes one, this says so rather than guessing.
Three things most guides get wrong
Nobody can tell you the gratuity, including us
The 14 days per year of service that every site quotes came from Article 26 of Federal Law No. 10 of 2017. Article 31 of Federal Decree-Law No. 9 of 2022 repealed that law. Article 22 of the new one says only that the Cabinet shall adopt the rules for calculating end of service gratuity for domestic workers, and no such decision appears to have been published. MoHRE's own 2025 guide for employers of domestic workers covers wages, leave, tickets and insurance, and does not mention gratuity at all. Treat any calculator that gives you a figure with suspicion, and budget for something rather than nothing, because the entitlement is clearly still contemplated: the government's own wage protection insurance lists end of service benefits among what it covers.
The ticket home is every two years, not every year
Article 10(4): if she wishes to spend her annual leave in her home country, the employer pays for the return ticket once every two years. Not annually, and the trigger is her taking leave at home rather than the calendar. It sits alongside the two year contract term in Article 7(3).
There are two insurances, not one
Health cover is one obligation. A separate policy protecting her unpaid wages and dues is another, and it is cheap: AED 105 for a domestic worker, covering up to AED 20,000. Guides that quote a single insurance figure have merged the two or missed the second.
The fees that are published
The residence permit
The federal authority, ICP, publishes AED 100 to apply, AED 100 per year of residence to issue, AED 100 in smart services, AED 20 for the security deposit fee, and AED 500 if her status is adjusted inside the country rather than on a fresh entry. It also lists a guarantee for the recruitment of domestic workers of AED 5,000 per year for an expatriate sponsor. ICP calls that a guarantee and does not publish whether or when it is returned, so neither will we. Fees page updated 11 December 2024. Dubai is administered by GDRFA rather than ICP and publishes no equivalent schedule for domestic workers.
The Emirates ID
AED 100 per year of residence plus AED 100 in smart services, with an optional AED 150 if you need it urgently. So a two year permit is AED 200 plus AED 100, not the flat AED 270 you will see quoted. Same ICP page, updated 11 December 2024.
The medical fitness test, in Dubai
The DHA catalogue lists AED 300 for the household domestic servant package at 24 working hours, plus AED 50 for the pregnancy test that category requires, and says typing fees are not included. The express version is AED 750. That catalogue carries no visible version date and is several years old, DHA reserves the right to change the prices, and the current dubai.ae page tells you to attend a centre without stating a figure. Outside Dubai we could not find an official price at all.
Health insurance
The federal basic scheme is AED 320 a year, paid by the employer, in force since 1 January 2025, with co-payments of 20 per cent on inpatient care and 25 per cent on outpatient visits, and pregnancy and dental excluded. In Dubai the Essential Benefits Plan is priced by circular at AED 550 to 750 per member per year plus VAT, give or take AED 25, also from 1 January 2025. Dubai Health Authority's employer pack is explicit that the sponsor arranges and pays, and that it is not permissible to deduct the premium from her salary or to reduce the salary to cover it.
The insurance on her wages
AED 105 per domestic worker, covering up to AED 20,000 for unpaid wages, end of service benefits, repatriation and work injury costs. The alternative the government names is a bank guarantee of at least AED 3,000. Worth knowing that u.ae presents it as a choice while MoHRE's employer guide calls the policy a prerequisite for issuing the work permit; we are reporting both rather than deciding between them.
What the law entitles her to
All of this is Federal Decree-Law No. 9 of 2022, as amended by Federal Decree-Law No. 21 of 2023, and all of it costs money that belongs in the budget rather than in a surprise. Thirty days of paid annual leave a year, paid in full before she travels, or two days a month for service between six and twelve months. Thirty days of sick leave, the first fifteen at full pay and the next fifteen at half. One paid rest day a week, and if she works it, another day off or cash instead. Twelve hours of daily rest, at least eight of them unbroken. Unused leave paid out when the contract ends. Appropriate accommodation, and for a full time worker, meals and work clothing. Repatriation at the end, unless she leaves without legitimate cause or moves to another employer.
Her wages go through the Wage Protection System for domestic workers, which is mandatory for the nanny and housemaid professions rather than optional, and must be paid in dirhams within ten days of falling due.
MoHRE publishes the English text of the decree-law as a third party translation and says it is not responsible for discrepancies with the Arabic original. Where the exact wording matters to you, the Arabic is the law.
Through a Tadbeer centre instead
Tadbeer is MoHRE's network of licensed domestic worker service centres, and a centre handles the recruitment and the paperwork as one package. What it costs is a fair question with no public answer: MoHRE sets price ceilings for the packages and does not publish the ceilings, so the figure is per centre and per nationality and you have to ask. The AED 12,000 that circulates online traces back to an arithmetic example inside a government document about refunds, not to a tariff.
The refund rules, by contrast, are published and worth knowing before you sign. A full refund within the first month. A full refund plus government fees if she is found medically unfit during the six month probation. After the first month, a proportion: the total cost divided by the contract months, multiplied by the months remaining. The money is due within fourteen days. MoHRE enforces this, and has suspended centres for breaching the price ceilings and sanctioned agencies for failing to refund.
The cheapest version of all of this
A nanny who already holds her own residency, through her husband or her family, needs no sponsorship from you. That removes the permit, the guarantee, the medical and the Emirates ID from your side of the arrangement in one go, which is the largest single saving available and the reason nannies with their own visa are worth looking at first. Every profile states her visa status, and states plainly that she told us herself and nobody has checked it, so ask to see the document before you agree anything.
There is no legal minimum wage for domestic workers in the UAE. The decree-law governs how and when wages are paid, not how much. Some source countries set their own floors for their citizens, and the Philippine figure in particular is in dispute between USD 400 and USD 500 for the Gulf as we write, so treat any single number you see for it with care.
For what nannies here actually ask to be paid, the salary report is counted from live profiles rather than quoted from a price list, and where to find a nanny compares the four routes a family here actually has.