If your salary is 300 KD and transfers 25 KD or more that salary, you will be checked..

If you earn KD 300 or less a month in Kuwait’s private sector, the way you withdraw or transfer your own salary is about to change a little. Nothing about your pay itself changes. But your bank will start watching your account more closely, and some transactions will need an extra step before they go through.

The Central Bank of Kuwait (CBK) has told local banks to tighten monitoring on salary accounts belonging to lower-paid private-sector employees. The goal is simple: stop employers from faking salary payments, or quietly pressuring workers to hand back money that was just deposited into their accounts. This builds on the Kuwait Wage Payment System launched on 28 September, which already checks that salaries actually reach the right person.

Who exactly does this affect?

This applies to private-sector employees whose latest recorded monthly salary is KD 300 or less. That covers a large share of Kuwait’s expat workforce, especially those in retail, cleaning, construction, security and other lower-wage jobs. Your bank decides whether you’re covered based on your actual salary on record, not your account balance and not the size of any single transfer. If your salary changes – say you get a raise above KD 300 – your bank must update your classification.

Kuwaiti employees on similar salaries are covered too. This isn’t about nationality, it’s about income level and employment sector.

What changes when you use your own money?

Once your salary lands in your account, nothing extra happens at that moment. But any withdrawal, transfer or payment of KD 25 or more – whether at an ATM, through a banking app, a linked payment method, or another banking channel – will need two-factor authentication. That means two separate checks confirming it’s really you, not just logging into the app once.

Banks must use two different verification employees from different categories to confirm your identity and consent for each transaction. Before approving anything, the bank has to show you the transaction type, the amount, and who the money is going to. CBK was clear that simply authenticating your login session into the banking app isn’t enough on its own.

Banks must also directly verify your contact details themselves, rather than just trusting whatever your employer submitted. And if you don’t own a smartphone or can’t use a banking app, your bank still has to give you a secure alternative way to confirm transactions.

Why is CBK doing this?

The instructions are designed to catch two specific problems: employers recording salary payments that never really happen, and employers forcing staff to return money after it’s deposited, to make it look like wages were paid when they weren’t. This follows other recent steps to protect wages here, including the wage protection system and the recent move to flag companies over late payments, like the 8,849 firms flagged for salary violations in October. CBK has also been pushing banks to watch for unlicensed financial activity more broadly, as covered in our piece on the unlicensed money transfer warnings.

How do banks decide something is suspicious?

CBK’s instructions list indicators that may point to fictitious salary payments or pressure on workers, and classify cases by risk level. High-risk cases need strong evidence. Medium-risk cases involve repeated suspicious behaviour backed by extra signs. Low-risk cases involve just one suspicious indicator on its own.

When something trips these flags, the bank must look back at six months of the employee’s transaction history, compare it against the person’s usual financial habits, and check for any links to the employer or related parties. Everything found has to be documented properly, not just noted informally.

What happens after a bank flags something?

There’s a tight timeline. Banks must complete an initial review within two days of spotting a concern. If there’s enough ground for suspicion, they must report it by the end of that same day. A further three-day window is allowed to finish a more detailed investigation, though genuinely urgent cases must be reported immediately, with no delay.

Importantly, CBK stressed that banks cannot hold back your salary deposit or block you from using your own money purely because something looks suspicious – unless there’s an actual legal basis to do so. Suspicion alone isn’t grounds to freeze a worker’s access to their wages.

Monitoring employer violations more broadly, and protecting workers’ rights overall, still falls under the Public Authority for Manpower and other relevant authorities, not the banks themselves.

Two things CBK wanted to make very clear: salary deposits themselves don’t need extra authentication, and taking out your whole salary in cash is not, on its own, evidence of a fake salary scheme. The point of these rules is to catch patterns that suggest manipulation, not to stop ordinary workers from spending or saving their own wages normally.

What this means for expats and citizens in Kuwait

For most lower-paid workers, daily banking will feel a bit slower once this starts. Expect an extra confirmation step for transfers, bill payments or cash withdrawals of KD 25 or more, similar in spirit to recent changes around internal bank transfer rules. It’s worth keeping your phone number and contact details updated with your bank, since CBK now requires banks to verify these directly rather than relying only on employer-supplied information.

Workers who suspect their employer is pressuring them to return salary money, or recording payments that never actually reach them, now have a system specifically built to catch that pattern over a six-month window. If your pay situation looks wrong, it may be worth keeping your own simple record of deposits and withdrawals, just in case a review ever needs to compare your usual habits.

For more on how these wage protections fit together, our local news coverage has tracked the Kuwait Wage Payment System since it launched, along with the salary deduction caps introduced in October, covered in our report on Kuwait’s salary deduction limits.

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