How we get our numbers

How we collect data

• Official sources for visas, fees, tax and schools: the UAE government portal, ICP, GDRFA, MOHRE and KHDA, plus GOV.UK and India's Income Tax Department for home-country rules.
• Salaries from recruiter salary guides and the pay shown in real job ads, mapped to a role and a level. A figure needs at least two sources or twenty observations; otherwise we don't publish it. Each guide counts once, and how pay rises from one level to the next is measured inside each guide, so a guide that pays more overall doesn't bend the ladder. Guides don't all count pay the same way (some quote basic pay, most the fixed monthly package); the sources list says which.
• Costs: rents are the medians of new rent contracts registered with the Dubai Land Department in the last 13 weeks, by area and size (the data gives flats' floor area, not bedrooms, so we tell the size from the floor area); bills, transport, phone plans and fees come from official tariffs and published prices. Groceries, eating out, the gym, the cinema and clothes come from Numbeo's crowd-sourced prices, the same items in Dubai, Bengaluru and Manchester, so the comparisons are like for like. A family's car is a monthly plan from a Dubai car-subscription firm (service and insurance included), with petrol at the official monthly price and Salik tolls. Air fares are the typical return fares on KAYAK. They are turned into budgets for one person, a couple and families of three and four.
• What a household uses is our assumption, the same in every city: electricity from 450 kWh a month for a studio to 1500 for a 3-bed; 5 m³ of water a person; a month's core shop per adult (milk, bread, rice, eggs, cheese, chicken, meat, fruit and vegetables) times 2 for everything else, a child counting as 60% of an adult; 4 cheap meals, 2 fast-food meals and 8 coffees out a month per adult, and half of a dinner for two; a gym and 2 cinema tickets per adult; and for a family's car 1,500 km a month at 7 litres per 100 km with 40 toll crossings.
• Visa, attestation and tax facts are read by hand from the official pages (the UAE portal, GDRFA, MOHRE, MOFA, GOV.UK, India's Income Tax Department and the attestation offices), each with a short quote and a date; the pages we can read automatically are re-checked every week.
• “Dubai right now” summarises dated news reports (The National, Gulf News, Khaleej Times and others) and quotes a few residents' posts, each linked; we re-check it every month and take it down when it's out of date.
• Recruiters are agencies with a Dubai office that hire for tech roles, each checked on its own website and LinkedIn page. The labour ministry doesn't publish a list of licensed agencies, so ask an agency for its licence number before you send documents.
• Jobs from the public job boards and careers pages of the companies we track (and job aggregators when we have access), de-duplicated by company, title and place, and classified by role, level, who can apply and relocation. We keep the facts and a short summary in our own words, and link to the ad.

How we check it

• We compare sources with each other and keep the raw pages we collected, dated.
• A median that moves by more than 20% between updates is held for a person to review before it's published.
• When an official page changes, the pages that rely on it are flagged for review.
• Visa, tax and legal information is guidance, not advice. Always check the official source and your employer.

Visas, “UAE residents only” and “relocation”

In the UAE every employer must apply and pay for its employees' work permit and residence visa: that is the law, so every job we list comes with a visa and we don't label jobs “visa-sponsored”. What matters when you are still abroad is whether the employer will hire you from there. So on our site:

• A job is open to candidates abroad unless its ad says otherwise. Most ads don't mention the visa at all, because every employer arranges it.
• A job is marked UAE residents only when the ad asks for people who already live in the UAE or hold a UAE visa, or says it doesn't sponsor visas. Roles for UAE nationals (Emiratisation) are left out of our lists.
• Relocation means the employer pays for some of the move: flights to Dubai, temporary housing, shipping or a relocation allowance. “Willing to relocate” (asked of you), a move at your own cost and the yearly flight home most UAE contracts include don't count.

How we check: we read every ad with a set of rules for this wording first. An AI model then reads the whole ad, writes our short summary and decides the ads the rules can't, but only when it can quote the ad's own words. When the rules and the model disagree, or the model is unsure, a person checks the ad. Sentences about visas for other countries (a Qatar or US visa in a global ad) are ignored. Jobs that come down from the source are removed within a week.

Money and dates

Amounts are in AED first, then in your currency (₹ in lakh, £, € or $) at the latest exchange rate, rounded and marked “≈”. Dates are the day the data was collected or last checked.

Your currency follows the country you're moving from. On your first visit we guess it from your IP address with the free IP Geolocation by DB-IP country database (licensed under CC BY 4.0), and for Cloudflare WARP and iCloud Private Relay exits the locations their operators publish; the address isn't stored, and you can change the country at any time from the header.

Sources

• IT recruitment agencies, checked by hand on their own websites and LinkedIn pagesChecked by hand on 27 September 2026: 17 agencies with a Dubai office that recruit for tech roles.Our research · 13 October 2026
• Ashby public job boardsJob ads on the Ashby boards of the companies in our directory: Dubai IT jobs, each linked to the company's own ad.Job ads · 14 October 2026
• Greenhouse public job boardsJob ads on the Greenhouse boards of the companies in our directory: Dubai IT jobs, each linked to the company's own ad.Job ads · 14 October 2026
• Lever public job boardsJob ads on the Lever boards of the companies in our directory: Dubai IT jobs, each linked to the company's own ad.Job ads · 14 October 2026
• Recruitee public job boardsJob ads on the Recruitee boards of the companies in our directory: Dubai IT jobs, each linked to the company's own ad.Job ads · 14 October 2026
• Workable public job boardsJob ads on the Workable boards of the companies in our directory: Dubai IT jobs, each linked to the company's own ad.Job ads · 14 October 2026
• Careerjet publisher API Dubai IT job ads found by Careerjet, linked to Careerjet's ad page.Job ads · 14 October 2026
• Company careers pages without a job-board API (Firecrawl)Dubai IT jobs listed on the careers pages of employers whose job system has no public API, linked to the company's own page.Job ads · 13 October 2026
• Commute estimates: road routes we compute with OSRM on OpenStreetMap, at Dubai's rush-hour speed (TomTom Traffic Index 2025) Road distance from each area's centre to Internet City, DIFC and Silicon Oasis (our own OSRM run on OpenStreetMap data), timed at 32.1 km/h, the average morning rush-hour speed in TomTom Traffic Index 2025, Dubai, rounded to 5 minutes. An estimate for comparing areas.Our research · 11 October 2026
• DIRCO (South Africa): legalisation Checked weekly for changes; a change flags our pages for a re-read.Official · 13 October 2026
• Dubai Land Department: registered rent contracts (Ejari), open data New residential rent contracts registered with Ejari in the last 13 weeks; monthly rent is the annual amount over 12. Flats' bedrooms are estimated from floor area (studio under 55 m², 1-bed to 95, 2-bed to 145, 3-bed to 220). Discovery Gardens stands for DLD's Jabal Ali First (with Al Furjan).Official · 12 October 2026
• Air fares to Dubai (KAYAK route pages) Typical return fares to Dubai from Bengaluru, London, Karachi, New York, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Dublin, from KAYAK's route pages.Listings · 12 October 2026
• European Central Bank reference rates (via Frankfurter) ECB rates for euros, pounds and rupees against the US dollar; the dirham is pegged to the dollar by the Central Bank of the UAE.Exchange rates · 14 October 2026
• GDRFA Dubai: residency services Checked weekly for changes; a change flags our pages for a re-read.Official · 13 October 2026
• GOV.UK: residence, National Insurance abroad, pensions, legalisation, tax rates Checked weekly for changes; a change flags our pages for a re-read.Official · 13 October 2026
• Charterhouse UAE Salary Guide 2026: IT and Technology Charterhouse, published 9 January 2026; read by hand on 27 September 2026. Monthly gross pay: basic, housing and transport.Recruiter guide · 11 October 2026
• Cooper Fitch UAE Salary Guide 2025 (Technology) Cooper Fitch, published 16 December 2024; read by hand on 27 September 2026. Monthly pay including basic and all fixed allowances, without bonus; separate tables for industry and start-ups.Recruiter guide · 11 October 2026
• First Point Group UAE Salary Guide (2025 figures, shown with the 2026 guide) First Point Group, published 27 October 2025; read by hand on 27 September 2026. Average monthly pay by years of experience (2–4, 5–8, 9+); package or basic not stated.Recruiter guide · 11 October 2026
• Robert Walters Middle East Salary Survey 2026 (Technology and Digital, UAE) Robert Walters, published 18 November 2025; read by hand on 27 September 2026. Basic monthly salary, without benefits or bonuses (the survey's own note).Recruiter guide · 11 October 2026
• Guides: listings, operators' rates, official rules and hiring studies, read by hand (Property Finder, Savills, u.ae, GDRFA, Resume.io, Ashby, Reddit, LinkedIn)First-stay prices from 553 monthly listings, and hiring figures and job-hunt stories, read on 2026-09-29.Our research · 13 October 2026
• Higher Education Commission (Pakistan): degree attestation Checked weekly for changes; a change flags our pages for a re-read.Official · 6 October 2026
• Manual figures for the home comparisons: India IT pay (Randstad Salary Trends 2025–26) and Manchester council tax (MHCLG 2026–27)Read by hand on 27 September 2026: India pay by level from Randstad's Salary Trends Report 2025–26 (India-wide IT figures), and Manchester council tax from MHCLG's 2026–27 levels.Our research · 11 October 2026
• Jooble publisher API Dubai IT job ads found by Jooble, linked to Jooble's ad page.Job ads · 14 October 2026
• Ministry of External Affairs (India): attestation Checked weekly for changes; a change flags our pages for a re-read.Official · 27 September 2026
• UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs: attestation and the missions' digital attestation Checked weekly for changes; a change flags our pages for a re-read.Official · 13 October 2026
• UAE Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research: degree recognition Checked weekly for changes; a change flags our pages for a re-read.Official · 13 October 2026
• Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation (MOHRE): employment contracts Checked weekly for changes; a change flags our pages for a re-read.Official · 27 September 2026
• Numbeo (crowd-sourced prices: Dubai, Bengaluru, Manchester) Crowd-sourced prices from Numbeo, the same items in Dubai, Bengaluru and Manchester: groceries, eating out, the gym and the cinema.Survey · 12 October 2026
• Official pages read by hand (ICP, the UAE labour law, the Income Tax Department, embassies and attestation offices, ONS, Met Office)Read by hand on 27 September 2026: visa routes and thresholds, degree attestation steps and fees, UK and Indian tax rules, travel times and the move checklist.Official · 13 October 2026
• News reports and residents' accounts, read by hand (The National, Gulf News, Khaleej Times, Zawya, Reddit)"Dubai right now" for September 2026: safety, flights, prices, rents and tech hiring, from dated news reports and residents' posts.Our research · 13 October 2026
• Official tariffs and fees, phone plans and prices, read by hand (DEWA, DLD, GDRFA, DHA, du, e&)Read by hand on 27 September 2026: DEWA electricity and water tariffs and deposits, the 5% housing fee, Ejari, GDRFA visa fees, DHA medical test, Emirates ID, basic health insurance (EBP) premiums, du and e& plans, nursery fees and staple food prices (Ministry of Economy).Official · 12 October 2026
• CV and offer review rules, read by hand (UAE labour law, DIFC law, recruiters, ATS vendors, job boards, Reddit)Researched on 9 October 2026: 106 rules (global cv 33, country:AE cv 9, city:dubai cv 8, from:IN cv 6, from:GB cv 6, country:AE offer 32, jurisdiction:difc offer 12).Our research · 13 October 2026
• RTA Dubai: Nol card fares and travel passes Metro, bus and tram fares on the standard (Silver) Nol card and its travel passes, from RTA's fares page.Official · 12 October 2026
• UAE government portal (u.ae): visa pages Checked weekly for changes; a change flags our pages for a re-read.Official · 13 October 2026
• KHDA open data: Dubai private schools (list, rating, curriculum, fees) Dubai's private schools as the KHDA lists them: curriculum, latest inspection rating and yearly fees by grade (AED), for the latest academic year in the file.Official · 2 October 2026
• OpenStreetMap (Overpass API): area outlines and centres Area outlines and centres © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).Official · 4 October 2026
• Review rules research: CV and offer advice found by search and read with Firecrawl (suggestions for the admin)Finds and reads recruiters', official and press pages about CVs and job offers for each city; every suggestion goes to the admin's review queue.Recruiter guide · 10 October 2026
• ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE): pay by occupation, UK and North West Full-time annual gross pay by occupation: the North West median for the role, and the UK percentiles for the spread by level.Official · 6 October 2026
• ONS Price Index of Private Rents: Manchester average rents by bedrooms Average monthly private rent in Manchester (local authority), by bedrooms, for the latest month.Official · 6 October 2026
• Company careers pages and public job boards (ATS detection)Real employers with a tech team in Dubai, from our research, each checked against its careers page and public job board: jobs in Dubai, and ads that mention relocation or visa sponsorship.Listings · 3 October 2026