Social insurance in UAE payroll: GPSSA, GCC schemes and ILOE

What you will be able to do when you finish: place any Emirati employee in the correct GPSSA cohort and explain why one date decides it, set the two employee fields that most often carry a wrong value for years without anyone noticing, read the employer's 15% and 12.5% as one figure rather than two contradictory ones, compute a GCC national's contribution at their home country's rates with your own share correctly capped, maintain dated rate lines so last year's payslips remain explicable, and configure ILOE knowing precisely whose legal obligation it is.

Who this is for. You run payroll for a UAE employer that has Emirati or GCC-national staff on the books, or is about to hire its first. This is an Intermediate course. It assumes you can create a payslip and open an employee record, and it does not assume you have read either pension law.

How to follow along. Everything here lives in the Odoone UAE Payroll module: the employee form's HR Settings tab, the UAE Payroll & Social Security group inside it, and Payroll › Configuration › GCC Social Rates. Company-level switches sit in Settings › Payroll, in the UAE section. The same module also carries the statutory salary structure, the overtime uplifts and the sick and maternity pay tiers — that is the other half of the module and it is course 4.1, not this one. Two honest caveats before you start: this course covers federal GPSSA only, because the module covers federal GPSSA only and neither Abu Dhabi's ADPF nor Sharjah's SSF, and every figure below is dated because Lesson 7 shows you a public page that still publishes the older ones.

This content is general information for UAE businesses, not tax, legal, or financial advice. Rules change and cases differ — speak to a qualified advisor about your situation.