The Story Behind UAE Expat Kit

I moved to the UAE in September 2024 to work in finance. The job part was straightforward. Everything else — not so much.

The first real headache came when I started the process of bringing my spouse over. I'd heard it was "just paperwork" but nobody warned me about the Amer Centre queues, the documents that needed to be typed in a specific format, or the difference between a status change and an entry permit. I spent two full days going back and forth, getting documents rejected for reasons that were never clearly explained. At one point I was told to come back with a document I had already submitted — just printed differently.

And that was just the visa side. Before I even got to that, I had spent hours trying to understand my employment contract — specifically what "unlimited contract" meant for my gratuity if I decided to leave within the first two years. The answers I found online were either outdated, contradicted each other, or were buried in dense legal language that assumed you already knew what you were reading.

I work in finance. Reading numbers and regulations is literally my job. And I still found this confusing. I kept thinking — what about everyone else?

That's what pushed me to build UAE Expat Kit. Not as a business idea, but out of genuine frustration. I wanted one place where you could get a straight answer — about gratuity, visa fines, notice periods, labour rights — without having to cross-reference three different forums and hope the information wasn't from 2019.

Everything on this site is based on current UAE law. The calculators use the actual formulas from the Federal Decree-Law. The guides are written to answer the real questions — the ones you type into Google at 11pm when you're stressed about something your employer just told you.

I keep my name off the site intentionally — I'm still an employee here, and I prefer to keep the two separate. But this is a real project, built by a real person going through the same UAE expat experience as you.