Free tool
Egypt salary raise planner
The other pay tools on this site price a hire you have not made yet. This one prices the person already on your team, and it answers a question that has no single correct answer in Egypt: what raise keeps them whole. Restoring what their salary buys and restoring what you originally agreed it was worth are two different numbers, they have been a long way apart since 2022, and choosing between them without seeing both is how good people leave over a raise their employer thought was generous.
Raise to restore local purchasing power
+123.3%
Costs EGP 55,492 more a month, or $13,252 a year at your rate.
Raise to restore the original dollar deal
+162.3%
That is $2,349 a month, the same dollar figure you committed to in 2022.
What your cost has done
-61.9%
$2,349 a month then, $896 a month now, on the same unchanged salary.
What their pay has done
-55.2%
Prices rose by a factor of 2.23 over 4 years, and the pound moved by a factor of 2.62.
Read this gap before you set the number. Restoring local purchasing power costs you EGP 55,492 a month. Restoring the dollar value of the deal you originally struck costs EGP 73,017. The distance between those two benchmarks is +17%, and it is not an accounting curiosity. It is the room a competing employer paying in dollars has to make an offer that looks like a step change to your employee while costing that employer no more than you yourself agreed to pay in 2022. A raise that clears local inflation and nothing else is defensible on a cost-of-living basis and still loses the person.
| Measure | In 2022 | Today | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| What they receive, in pounds | EGP 45,000 | EGP 45,000 | 0% |
| What it costs you, in dollars | $2,349 | $896 | -62% |
| What it buys, against 2022 prices | EGP 45,000 | EGP 20,151 | -55% |
| Official rate used | 19.16 EGP per USD | 50.25 EGP per USD | +162% |
| Salary set in | Rate that year | Prices since, factor | Real value left to the employee | Dollar cost left to the employer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 10.03 | 4.55x | 22% | 20% |
| 2017 | 17.78 | 3.51x | 28% | 35% |
| 2018 | 17.77 | 3.07x | 33% | 35% |
| 2019 | 16.77 | 2.81x | 36% | 33% |
| 2020 | 15.76 | 2.68x | 37% | 31% |
| 2021 | 15.64 | 2.54x | 39% | 31% |
| 2022 | 19.16 | 2.23x | 45% | 38% |
| 2023 | 30.63 | 1.67x | 60% | 61% |
| 2024 | 45.30 | 1.30x | 77% | 90% |
| 2025 | 49.23 | 1.14x | 88% | 98% |
Read the last two columns together. A pound salary set in 2021 and never touched retains about 39% of its purchasing power and costs its employer about 31% of what they originally agreed to spend. Nobody decided that. It is what happens when a salary is fixed in a currency that moves and the annual review keeps returning no change.
If this planner tells you the market has moved further than your budget can follow, the next question is what a correctly priced Egyptian hire costs today rather than what yours cost in 2022. Send Hire Nile the role and you get current, vetted candidates with real rates attached, so the benchmark you are arguing against is a live one.
Historical exchange rates and inflation come from the World Bank indicators PA.NUS.FCRF and FP.CPI.TOTL.ZG for Egypt, which end at 2025. Exchange rates are annual period averages of the official rate, so a salary agreed at a particular moment inside a year will not match its row exactly, and the parallel market rate is not modelled at all. The 2026 inflation figure and the current rate are your inputs, not published statistics, and the current-year figure is applied once in full: if you set the salary part way through 2026, reduce it to the share of the year that has actually passed. Every result is arithmetic on the numbers above. Nothing here is a benchmark for Egyptian salaries, a forecast for the pound, or a statement about what any employer owes anyone. This tool is informational and is not payroll, accounting, legal, or tax advice.
Why an Egyptian salary needs a currency decision, not just a percentage
Two things happened at once between 2021 and 2025, and most annual review processes only measure one of them.
Start with the two published series this tool runs on. According to World Bank data on the official exchange rate for Egypt, which are annual period averages sourced from IMF International Financial Statistics, the pound averaged 15.64 to the dollar in 2021, 19.16 in 2022, 30.63 in 2023, 45.30 in 2024 and 49.23 in 2025. Over the same span, consumer price inflation ran 5.21 percent, 13.90 percent, 33.88 percent, 28.27 percent and 14.07 percent. Both series were last updated by the World Bank on 2026-07-13.
Put those two side by side and the arithmetic is uncomfortable. Prices roughly doubled. The pound roughly tripled against the dollar. They moved together in direction and by very different amounts in size, and that difference is not a rounding error in someone else's economy. It is the entire compensation problem for anyone employing people in Egypt across that period, and it shows up in a specific and easily missed way: the employer who changed nothing made a large decision.
If the salary was fixed in pounds, that employer cut the employee's real pay by more than half and cut their own dollar cost by roughly two thirds. Neither of those appeared in a budget line, a review conversation, or an approval. They happened in the gap between one annual cycle and the next, to a number nobody touched. If the salary was fixed in dollars, the reverse happened: the employee received a substantial local pay rise every year without asking, the employer's cost in dollars stayed flat, and the employer's cost measured against local market rates rose sharply, which is its own kind of problem when the next hire is benchmarked against the last one.
The largest single step in that sequence has a date. On 6 March 2024 the Central Bank of Egypt allowed the pound to float and raised policy rates sharply. Three weeks later, on 29 March 2024, the IMF Executive Board completed the first and second reviews of Egypt's Extended Fund Facility and approved an augmentation to about 8 billion dollars, citing the unification of the exchange rate and the clearance of the foreign exchange demand backlog among the measures taken. Annual averages flatten that step into a smooth line between 2023 and 2024. Real salaries did not experience it smoothly. A pound salary agreed in January 2024 and the same pound salary agreed in December 2024 were, in practice, two very different offers.
Three definitions of the same pay, and why they stopped agreeing
Every raise decision is implicitly choosing one of these. Most of them choose by accident.
Local parity. The pound figure that buys today what the original salary bought in the year it was set. This is the cost-of-living standard, it is the one most annual review processes are built around, and it is the cheapest of the three. It is also entirely defensible on its own terms: the employee can buy the same basket they could before, and no more.
Dollar parity. The pound figure that is worth today what the original salary was worth in dollars in the year it was set. Nobody signs a contract saying this is the standard, which is exactly why it is dangerous to ignore. It is the number the employee themselves will reach for the moment they compare their pay against a role advertised by a remote employer in Berlin, Dubai, or Toronto, and it is the number a recruiter is implicitly quoting when they open a conversation.
Market parity. What the same person would be paid if you hired them today, from scratch, in the current market. This tool does not calculate it, because it cannot be derived from macro data and inventing it would be worse than leaving it out. It is the standard that actually governs whether someone stays, and it moves with the supply of Egyptian talent and the demand from foreign employers rather than with the consumer price index. The offshore salary calculator is the right starting point for it, and a live candidate slate is a better one.
In a currency that moves by two or three percent a year, these three definitions converge and the distinction is academic. In Egypt over the last four years they have diverged by amounts larger than most raise budgets. An employer who funds local parity has done nothing wrong by the standard they set. They have also, without noticing, left a gap that a competing employer paying in hard currency can walk into at no extra cost to themselves, because the offer that clears your locally fair salary by a wide margin in the employee's eyes may still be less than the dollar figure you yourself committed to three years ago.
That gap is the number this tool exists to surface. It has a practical shape: it is largest for your longest-serving people, because the base year is furthest back and the currency has had the most time to move. Retention risk in Egypt is therefore concentrated in exactly the population an employer least wants to lose, and it is invisible to a review process that starts from last year's number and adds a percentage.
How to use the two benchmarks without overcommitting
The point is not that every employer should fund dollar parity. It is that the choice should be a choice.
Funding full dollar parity for a whole team, retrospectively, is not realistic for most businesses and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. What is realistic is the following sequence, in roughly this order.
Price the gap before you price the raise. Run each person through the planner using the year their pay was last genuinely changed, not the year they joined. You will usually find the team splits into two groups: recent hires, where the two benchmarks are close together and any reasonable raise satisfies both, and long-tenured people, where the gap is large. The budget conversation is only about the second group.
Decide the standard once, and apply it to everyone. The worst outcome is a team where the people who asked got dollar parity and the people who did not ask got local parity, because that arrangement survives exactly until two colleagues compare numbers. Pick a standard you can afford across the group and state it.
Say which standard you picked. An employee who is told that pay is indexed to Egyptian consumer price inflation and reviewed each January knows where they stand and can plan. An employee given the same raise with no framing assumes you tried to keep them whole and failed, or did not try. The number is identical. The retention outcome is not.
Consider changing the currency rather than the amount. For roles where losing the person is genuinely expensive, moving the contract to a dollar-denominated figure paid in pounds at the prevailing rate removes the recurring problem instead of re-solving it every year. It moves the currency risk onto your budget, which is the honest place for it if you are the party better able to carry it, and it takes the single strongest argument out of a competing recruiter's hands. It also makes your cost predictable in your own reporting currency, which finance teams generally prefer to a cost that drifts downward in ways nobody planned.
Check the raise against what a new hire would cost. If restoring dollar parity for a three-year veteran costs more than hiring their replacement at market, that is worth knowing before the conversation, not after. It is also frequently the reverse, which is the more useful discovery: the cost of the raise is smaller than the cost of the search, the ramp, and the knowledge that walks out. The cost of vacancy calculator puts a number on that second half.
If you pay in dollars, the problem runs the other way
A dollar-denominated salary in Egypt solves the retention problem and creates a benchmarking one.
Set the currency selector to dollars and the outputs invert. The dollar parity raise is zero by construction, because a dollar salary that has not changed is still worth exactly what it was worth. The interesting line becomes the real one: what has happened to the local purchasing power of that unchanged dollar figure. Across 2023 and 2024 the pound fell faster than Egyptian prices rose, so a dollar salary held flat delivered a real local pay increase without any decision being taken. In 2025 the pound was comparatively stable while inflation continued at 14.07 percent, so the same flat dollar salary lost real value that year.
That is a much better problem to have, and it comes with two consequences worth planning for. The first is internal: a dollar-paid team member and a pound-paid team member doing the same job will drift apart in local terms, sometimes dramatically, without anyone changing either salary. If you have both arrangements in one team, you have a fairness question waiting to be discovered. The second is that your cost base does not fall when the pound does, so the savings your finance team may have grown used to seeing simply will not appear, and a budget built on the assumption that Egyptian headcount gets cheaper each year in dollar terms will be wrong.
Neither consequence is an argument against paying in dollars. Both are arguments for knowing which arrangement each person is on before the review cycle starts rather than during it.
What this planner deliberately does not do
The limits are as important as the outputs, and a tool that hides them is not worth using.
It does not know what Egyptian salaries are. Every figure it produces is derived from the number you entered and from published macro series. It never asserts what a developer, a support lead, or an operations manager should earn, because that depends on the role, the seniority, and the market you are competing in rather than on the exchange rate. For that question the salary calculator and the net salary calculator are the right tools, and a slate of real candidates with real expectations is better than both.
It does not forecast. There is no projection of the pound and no assumption about where inflation goes next. The only forward-looking input is your own assumption for the current year, and it sits in an editable field where you can see it.
It uses annual averages, which are the resolution the published data comes in. A salary agreed on a particular day inside a volatile year was struck at a rate the annual average does not represent, and 2024 is the extreme case. Where you know the actual rate, substitute it.
It models the official rate only. During the periods when a parallel market traded well away from the official one, the official series overstates what a pound salary was worth to the person holding it. No calculation can recover that after the fact, and pretending otherwise would be worse than saying so.
It is not legal, tax, or payroll advice, and it takes no view on any employment contract or on what any employer is obliged to pay. Contractual currency clauses, indexation terms, notice, withholding, and social insurance are matters for your own counsel and for the payroll rules that apply to you.
Frequently asked questions
Currency, inflation, and the mechanics behind the two benchmarks.
How much of a raise does an Egyptian employee need to stay level?
There is no single answer, because two reasonable definitions of staying level have not agreed with each other in Egypt for several years. Restoring local purchasing power means raising the pound salary by cumulative consumer price inflation since the salary was set. Restoring the value of the original agreement means raising it by the movement in the exchange rate over the same period. On World Bank data, prices in Egypt roughly doubled between 2021 and 2025 while the pound went from about 15.6 to the dollar to about 49.2, so the second number has been much larger than the first. The planner on this page reports both, because funding only the first is what quietly turns a retained employee into a candidate.
Should I pay an Egyptian hire in Egyptian pounds or in US dollars?
The choice moves the currency risk between the two of you rather than removing it. A salary fixed in pounds means the employee absorbs devaluation and your dollar cost falls every time the pound moves; that is comfortable until the person notices, and in a market where competitors pay in dollars they do notice. A salary fixed in dollars means you absorb the risk, your cost is predictable in your own reporting currency, and the employee gets a pay rise in local terms whenever the pound weakens. Fixing in dollars is the more common arrangement for remote work sold into Europe, the Gulf, and North America, and it is the easier one to defend at review time. The practical questions that follow are how the money is actually delivered and who carries the conversion cost, which belong in the contract rather than in a calculator.
How much has the Egyptian pound fallen against the dollar?
Using World Bank official exchange rate data, which are annual period averages, the pound averaged 15.64 to the dollar in 2021, 19.16 in 2022, 30.63 in 2023, 45.30 in 2024 and 49.23 in 2025. The single largest move came on 6 March 2024, when the Central Bank of Egypt let the currency float as part of the arrangement that the IMF Executive Board formalised on 29 March 2024 by completing the first and second reviews of Egypt's Extended Fund Facility and augmenting it to about 8 billion dollars. Annual averages smooth that step, so a salary agreed in the first weeks of 2024 was struck at a very different rate from one agreed in the last weeks of the same year.
What has inflation in Egypt been?
World Bank consumer price inflation for Egypt was 5.21 percent in 2021, 13.90 percent in 2022, 33.88 percent in 2023, 28.27 percent in 2024 and 14.07 percent in 2025. Compounded, that means a basket costing 100 pounds on 2021 average prices cost roughly 220 pounds on 2025 average prices. Inflation figures are annual averages against the previous annual average, which is why the planner multiplies the years after the year a salary was set rather than including that year itself.
Why does my dollar cost fall when I do nothing?
Because a salary fixed in pounds is a fixed local number, not a fixed price to you. When the pound weakens against the dollar, the same monthly pound figure converts into fewer dollars, so your cost falls without anybody proposing a cut. On the historical series, a pound salary set in 2021 and never changed costs its employer under a third of the dollars originally committed. That saving is real and it is also the exact size of the pay cut the employee received. Seeing both halves of it in the same place is the reason this tool exists.
Is a cost-of-living raise enough to retain an Egyptian engineer?
Often it is not, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of generosity. Experienced Egyptian engineers and senior operators are recruited by employers who price in dollars or euros. Those employers do not have to beat a locally fair salary by very much in local terms to beat it enormously, because the exchange rate does the work. The planner reports the distance between the local parity number and the dollar parity number as an explicit figure so you can see how much room a competing offer has before it costs that competitor more than you originally agreed to spend.
Does this planner use the official rate or the parallel market rate?
The historical series is the official rate published through the World Bank, sourced from IMF International Financial Statistics. The current rate is whatever you type into the tool. During the periods when a parallel market traded well away from the official rate, the official series understates what a pound salary was really worth to the person receiving it, and no calculator can repair that after the fact. If you know the rate a particular salary was actually agreed at, the honest approach is to treat the tool as a structure and substitute your own figures.
Is this legal, tax, or payroll advice?
No. It is a planning aid that does arithmetic on published macroeconomic data and on the numbers you enter. Employment terms, notice, contractual currency clauses, payroll withholding, social insurance, and cross-border payment rules are specific to your situation and your counsel, not to a web page. For the payroll and employer cost side of an Egyptian salary, the net salary calculator on this site is a better starting point, and for either one the answer still has to be checked against the actual contract.
Hiring in Egypt rather than repricing in Egypt
If the planner tells you the market has moved past your budget, the next number you need is a live one.
The uncomfortable version of this tool's output is an employer discovering that keeping a long-serving hire whole costs more than the role is budgeted for. That is a real result and it deserves a real answer rather than a smaller raise. Sometimes the answer is that the person is worth the correction and the budget moves. Sometimes it is that the role has changed and should be repriced against what it is now. Occasionally it is that the team needs another person more than it needs a correction, and the honest comparison is between the two.
Hire Nile places Egyptian talent directly and runs managed teams for founders and operations, product, engineering, and support leaders in Europe, the Gulf, and distributed North American companies. If you want the current market number rather than an index, send us the role and you get vetted candidates with real rate expectations attached, which is a firmer benchmark than any series on this page. If you want to talk through how to structure pay for an Egyptian team before you set it, that is a conversation worth having once rather than a spreadsheet worth maintaining forever.