What would a basic income cost in Kuwait?
Pick a country, who gets it and how much a month. Everything is calculated on this device; nothing is sent anywhere.
Total cost per year
993 million Kuwaiti dinars
about 3.24 billion US dollars
4.87 million people × 17 Kuwaiti dinars a month × 12 months
Compared with
- GDP (nominal) (2025)2.1%
Kuwait in numbers
Kuwait has a population of 4.87 million (2025) and a GDP of 48.2 billion Kuwaiti dinars (about 157 billion US dollars) in 2025.
Paying everyone 17 Kuwaiti dinars a month would cost 993 million Kuwaiti dinars a year (about 3.24 billion US dollars), or 2.1% of GDP. The World Bank has no recent central government expense or tax figures for Kuwait, so only GDP is compared.
Children only (under 18: 1.08 million) would cost 221 million Kuwaiti dinars a year (0.46% of GDP); adults only (18 and over: 3.78 million), 771 million Kuwaiti dinars (1.6%).
Default amount: 17 Kuwaiti dinars a month is the World Bank's international poverty line of $3.00 a day (2021 PPP), converted into Kuwaiti dinars with the World Bank's PPP conversion factor for household consumption (2025) and rounded to two significant figures. It is a reference point, not a policy proposal; change it above.
How to read this
This is the gross cost: the total paid out. The real net cost depends on which taxes fund it, which benefits or tax breaks it replaces and whether the payment is taxed. The population, budget and GDP figures are not all from the same year (see the sources).
Sources for the figures
- Population
- World Bank: population, total (SP.POP.TOTL), and population by single year of age 0 to 17 (SP.POP.AG00.FE.IN … SP.POP.AG17.MA.IN), 2025
- SP.POP.AG00.FE.IN … SP.POP.AG17.MA.IN
- Default amount
- World Bank: international poverty line of $3.00 a day (2021 PPP), June 2025 update
- World Bank: PPP conversion factor, household final consumption (PA.NUS.PRVT.PP), 2025
- Retrieved from the World Bank API on November 9, 2026 (CC BY 4.0). Government figures are central government, as a share of GDP in their own year, applied to the latest GDP.