1,574 Kuwaiti Dinars... Average Monthly Salary for Kuwaitis
At first glance, the figure appears reassuring: 1,574 Kuwaiti dinars, the average monthly salary for Kuwaitis in the public and private sectors by the end of the third quarter of 2025. However, it takes on a completely different meaning when weighed against the cost of daily living.
A salary does not exist in isolation within a bank account; behind it are a home, children, a car, food, bills, education, and social obligations. Above all, there is a simple human desire: for the citizen to live, rather than to spend the month chasing the last dinar.
While the average Kuwaiti income may be decent compared to many countries, the true comparison is not between our salaries and those of others, but between what enters and what leaves the citizen’s pocket. A hundred dinars today are not necessarily the same as the hundred dinars known by the previous generation, and a family with three children does not live the same life as a single individual.
True prosperity is not about owning a luxury car or traveling every year; it is about being able to face an emergency without borrowing, to save, to plan for buying a home, to marry off one’s children, and to look at the end of the month without feeling that the salary has passed through the account like a transient visitor.
More alarming is that the decline in purchasing power is not reflected only in numbers; it seeps into the psyche and society: a young man postpones marriage, a family recalculates before having children, a father delays a project, and an employee works for years while feeling that his income moves slowly while the cost of living moves faster.
Here, it is incorrect to place all responsibility on the government, just as it is wrong to shift it entirely onto the citizen.
The government faces a difficult equation. The Kuwaiti budget for the fiscal year 2026/2027 estimates expenditures at approximately 26.1 billion dinars, with an expected deficit of 9.8 billion dinars, while salaries and subsidies account for about 76 percent of total expenditures.
Therefore, arbitrarily raising salaries might relieve citizens today, but it could add pressure to public finances tomorrow. Worse still, if increased liquidity is not matched by increased production, it may partially translate into higher prices, giving the citizen an extra dinar only for the market to take it back from his pocket in another way.
The solution may lie in periodic salary reviews linked to cost-of-living indicators, greater support for families with higher burdens, reducing the cost of housing, education, and essential services, encouraging competition to curb price hikes, and simultaneously creating real opportunities to increase citizen income through production, the private sector, and new projects.
