UAE hiring pares back its 2Q losses on a September surge, but trouble in Saudi Arabia clouds 4Q

UAE hiring has recovered everything it lost in the spring, and nearly all of the recovery came in September. Cooper Fitch’s 3Q 2026 Gulf Employment Index, seen by EnterpriseAM, puts UAE hiring activity up 4% q-o-q, reversing the 4% contraction we reported in 2Q. GCC hiring rose 2% after falling 3% in the previous quarter.

“The reason it dropped was the regional conflict. So the reason it’s returned is because of the regional conflict,” Cooper Fitch CEO Trefor Murphy tells EnterpriseAM, referring to the calmer months of the third quarter. “If we didn't have the conflict, we’d probably have seen job growth of around 4-5% this year across the Gulf — now we’re looking at either flat growth or contraction,” he explains.

The first six weeks of the quarter brought none of the usual 3Q pickup, he says, though there was a gradual recovery over the summer months. The strong growth came in the last five weeks, especially September, he adds.

The recovery came alongside a rebound in demand and confidence, Murphy says. UAE firms’ new export orders were growing at their fastest pace in almost two years in September, according to S&P Global’s PMI.

Crucially: The index measures how willing firms are to hire, not how many jobs were filled. Murphy says part of the 3Q rebound was 2Q searches that had stalled at the final stage coming back, and part was new searches. The index doesn’t separate the two.

Hospitality is recovering more slowly: Murphy calls March to May “tragic” for hotels and June to August “bad.” This time, he says, the big hotel groups kept their staff, moving up annual leave or using unpaid leave instead of laying people off — a lesson they learned from Covid, when they cut too deep and took too long to rebuild. They will be cautious about hiring again, though, he says.

The rest of the Gulf

Hiring outside the UAE was split — up in Saudi Arabia (1.5%) and Oman (0.5%) and down in Kuwait (2%), Bahrain (2%) and Qatar (1%). Murphy says Kuwait and Bahrain were still directly affected by the conflict in 3Q, unlike the UAE, and puts 60-80% of their weakness down to it. Across sectors, energy hiring rose 7% on Saudi and UAE gas contracts, while banking hiring fell 4% and investment management hires fell 5%, down sharply from 6% growth the previous quarter.

That’s because 1Q and 2Q were two “very busy quarters” for investment management, who had “gotten ahead of their hiring plans,” Murphy says. The lack of IPOs also removed a large part of this sector’s work. As they did after Covid, the sovereigns kept buying abroad through the uncertainty, so hiring continued “just in different areas.”

Strategy hiring rose 6%, the first increase in roughly 10 or 11 quarters, Murphy says. The base is low, and the roles are mostly concentrated in in-house strategy teams, not consultancies. He expects consulting hiring to start recovering in 1Q 2027, back to roughly 2018-2019 levels but not the 2021-2023 peak.

The outlook ahead is cloudy, though

Murphy expects Saudi hiring to contract in 4Q “for sure” as the escalation of Houthi attacks continues — and for it to cast a “shadow” on the rest of the region, including the UAE. “It causes an overhang in confidence for the rest of the GCC,” he explains.

Several large employers have already asked Cooper Fitch to slow down or pause searches, and he says that will show up in the October to December numbers. He expects Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain to shrink for a third straight quarter and Oman to stay flat. For the UAE, he expects 4Q to be flat or slightly up.