Iqama and work permit costs for investors

What a manager's residence permit requires

For a general manager, the guide is specific about the order of events: work permit, medical report and health insurance. The work permit comes first. Founders who try to start with the Iqama discover this at the counter, usually after their commercial registration has already been issued and the clock on their investment certificate has been running.

If the general manager is named on the commercial registration, a copy of that registration showing the name is part of the file. So is the unified passport form, verified at a one-stop service centre.

The two amounts that are published

Both are penalties rather than fees, which tells you something about what the ministry considers worth printing. An exit and re-entry visa that goes unused for more than three months carries SAR 1,000 on cancellation, payable through an ATM. And where an investor or manager leaves the Kingdom and does not return, the cancellation of their residence permit requires SAR 1,000.

The second one catches people out. A founder who splits time between Riyadh and a home market, lets a return visa lapse and mislays the Iqama card itself can trigger both amounts on the same file.

The expat levy, honestly

The monthly charge per foreign worker is the figure every cost article quotes and the one we could not source from an official page. What the labour ministry does publish is an initiative list: its Financial Sustainability Program page has Financial Equivalent for Expatriates listed as a completed initiative, with no amount attached.

On the consultancy side, a Saudi setup firm says work permit and labour platform fees varies by nationality, headcount and Saudization. That is a fair description of how the charge behaves, and it is not a number you can budget from. Until an official schedule is published where we can read it, this site will not print one.

How to budget anyway

Ask your consultant, or your own Qiwa establishment account, for the current per-worker figure in writing, with the date. Then hold it as a per-head line in your model rather than folding it into a single setup number, because it scales with headcount and the published government setup fees do not.

For a four-person office in Jeddah, that means three numbers you can defend at a board meeting: the fixed Ministry of Commerce fees, the MISA line still to be set on approval, and a per-head staffing line that names its own source.

What not to assume

• Do not assume the medical report and health insurance certificate are included in a consultant's Iqama line. Ask.
• Do not assume dependants are priced the same as employees. The guide handles them as separate services.
• Do not assume a figure from a 2023 article still applies. This is the fastest-moving part of the cost base.