Many think of Qatar as a rich country and everyone who comes here will be rich. But is this actually the case?

Well, Qatar is a rich country and it has one of the highest GDPs per capita. With around 3 million population, Qatar had a nominal GDP of $237 billion in 2022.  That's $63,783 per capita according to worldometres.info. But it's not the actual representative of average income in the country. 

Out of 3 million population, less than 0.5 million are Qatari citizens and the rest are migrants. These Qataris are the ones who benefit most from the very high GDP. 

Depending which country you are from, what position you work for, the salaries vary. Blue collar migrant workers, such as security, facilities management workers, construction workers, sales people in the shops which are the majority of the migrant workers, can make $400-800 a month. But typically their food and accommodation is covered.

Most of the fresh graduates from Education City start their career with $3,000-3,500 a month salary on average. Assuming the cost of living in Qatar, this salary is relatively low. But if you are Qatari, you will make at least triple of that money or if you have European or American passport, you will earn more than the colleague who doesn't have this passport. So, in the local companies salaries are segregated based on your passport and can be relatively lower if you don’t have a strong passport.

The best place to start your career in Qatar is to get a job in large international companies, like UBS, MBB consulting firms, etc. But these companies are super hard to get into, because every university student wants to go there and it makes competition high. Job market in Qatar is a whole different story and I will make a post on that as well, but in general getting a good job in Qatar is not as easy as it is in the US or Europe. These international companies offer very competitive packages to their employees (usually $5k+ for fresh grads), which are way above the average salaries. Btw, you don't pay income tax in Qatar.

I don't have any source for the salary information I mentioned, but they mostly come from people I talked to and some common gossip among students. So you can basically assume the source is "trust me bro😅"