Kuwait minimum wage
Kuwait's statutory monthly minimum wage for workers in the private and oil sectors, set by ministerial order under Article 63 of the Private Sector Labour Law No. 6 of 2010, which empowers the competent minister to fix a minimum wage by sector and occupation on the recommendation of the advisory committee and to review it at least every five years. Administration of private-sector labour now sits with the Public Authority for Manpower (PAM). Domestic workers fall OUTSIDE this instrument and have their own, lower floor under the domestic-labour law.
| Current value | 75 KWD per month |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2017-06-11 |
| Official source | Ministerial Order No. 14 of 2017 setting the monthly minimum wage for workers in the private and oil sectors at KD 75 — ILO NATLEX official record KWT-2017-R-107351, adopted and entered into force 11 June 2017, made under Article 63 of Private Sector Labour Law No. 6 of 2010 |
| Last verified | 2026-07-24 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
KWD 75 per month is the statutory floor for private- and oil-sector workers, set by Ministerial Order No. 14 of 2017, adopted and in force from 11 June 2017, and UNCHANGED at confirmation — nine years without an uplift. It applies to new and renewed work permits and contracts. HISTORY: Kuwait had no private-sector minimum wage at all until the mid-2010s. The first floor was KD 60/month, announced by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour (Minister Mohammad Al-Afasi) and applied to private-sector employment and government contracts; Ministerial Decision No. 417 of 2015 is the instrument usually cited for it. The 2017 order raised it to KD 75. DOMESTIC WORKERS ARE SEPARATE AND LOWER: they are excluded from Labour Law No. 6 of 2010 and governed by Law No. 68 of 2015 on Employment of Domestic Workers, under which the Minister of Interior set a minimum monthly wage of KD 60 (Ministerial Decision No. 2194 of 2016). Proposals to lift the domestic-worker floor (to KD 75, and later to KD 120) have been reported repeatedly since 2022 and pushed by source-country embassies, but NO enacted increase was found — DO NOT SERVE KD 75 AS THE DOMESTIC-WORKER FIGURE; commercial payroll/EOR aggregators are split between 60 and 75 and are unreliable here. TRAP: at least one widely-mirrored secondary source asserts that the Article 63 power 'has never been exercised for the general private-sector workforce' and that KD 75 applies only to domestic workers under Law 68/2015. That is wrong on both limbs — ILO NATLEX records Ministerial Order No. 14 of 2017 as a private-and-oil-sector instrument, and the domestic-worker floor is a separate Ministry of Interior decision. Article 63 requires review at least every five years; the 2022 review produced no change, and a PAM reform package floated in Aug 2025 (inflation-indexed five-yearly review; a separate National Assembly proposal for a KD 800/month floor for Kuwaiti nationals in the private sector) remained at proposal/committee stage at confirmation — DO NOT SERVE AS FACT. ACCESS PROBLEM: the Public Authority for Manpower's own copy of the labour law (https://www.manpower.gov.kw/docs/LaborLaw/Labor_Law_Eng.pdf) refused TCP connections (ECONNREFUSED on 91.140.151.100) and the ILO NATLEX HTML record returns HTTP 403 to direct fetches (indexable via search only) — both are the right watch targets but neither is reliably fetchable from this location.
Earlier values
| From | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2016-01-01 | 60 | Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour decision setting Kuwai |
Get it programmatically
curl https://mearef.dev/v1/kw/minimum-wage
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://mearef.dev/v1/kw/minimum-wage/history?from=2020-01-01
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